Explorations: First Contact

by Isaac Hooke

  The farmer’s shovel bit into the dirt. Lafige jumped back like he’d just heart a snake’s rattle.

  “Greetings greetings most pleasant greetings,” the farmer said, his voice tinny. His head snapped toward me and I stared into his all-black eyes. “Codex application building. Peanut nostril happy clams.”

  “Is this one broken?” Lafige asked.

  The farmer touched his hands to opposite shoulders and bowed his head slightly. “I am Feyashan.”

  “Derek Jensen,” I said, “he’s Guy Lafige.”

  “Cross reference naming conventions…understood,” Feyashan said. “Your translation device is adequate, but ill designed. This ‘English’ of yours seems to be composed of several different languages of varied origins.”

  “Hey, that’s great and all,” Lafige said. “Look, we accidentally came through your airlock and if you’d open it back up we’d be happy to just leave.”

  Feyahsan looked to the village, then back to me. “You’re merchants? Traders? There are needs I lack. Come, she’ll return soon.”

  The android motioned toward the village.

  “You can’t just…tell us what you want?” Lafige said.

  “Codex terms incompatible. I need nineteen taal of vala’kitic’shoom. I will show you. If we are to trade, you must not upset her. Falsify your belief,” Feyashan said.

  “Falsify to what?” I asked. “Upset who?”

  The farmer nodded toward the village and bade us to follow. He clasped his hands behind his back and walked slowly.

  “This place is a memory for her. Here, the Fold Gate never destroyed our home as I warned it would. Every day is perfect. She is kind, happy. Do not disturb her state.”

  Dread crept into my mind. The android wanted me to a play a game where I didn’t know the rules…or the penalties. “If there’s some risk we might offend then maybe it’s best if we—”

  “You must see,” Feyashan said. “She’ll have your language engrams when she awakens. She will see you as visitors. Falsify your belief.”

  We walked around a building with adobe walls and a simple tile roof. A dozen more androids, male and female in peasant dress, stood frozen around the village, all stuck in mid step. A pair on a roof had stopped in the middle of repairing a broken tile. Another had a broom in hand on a sidewalk, stuck halfway through a sweep.

  Feyashan leveled a flat hand at my chest. “Caalora was destroyed.” He swung his hand toward Lafige. “You must not speak of this to her. Every day is perfect. Understood?”

  “I got it.” Lafige raised his hands in mock surrender.

  “Then what is this place?” I peered into a window and reeled back as an alien in my space suit leaned toward me through the glass. I touched my forehead, and the alien mirrored the gesture.

  “You’re still you,” Lafige said, “but your reflection is different.”

  “They are display screens, not mirrors,” Feyashan said. “She will see you as another Caalora. Do not break her belief.”

  Feyashan walked us to a large house in the center of the village and stopped next to a round window. He tapped a finger to the glass.

  “Look. I need vala’kitic’shoom. Wait outside.” He opened a wooden door and left us standing in the street.

  “This is way too weird for me,” Lafige whispered. “Let’s get the hell out of here before they turn us into a robot or we find out this girl’s favorite hobby is opening up aliens like us to see how we tick.”

  “You have any idea how to get out?” I asked.

  He opened his mouth to speak, then shut his mouth with a click of teeth.

  I cupped my hands around my eyes and leaned toward the glass.

  Inside was a hospital room with more equipment than a trauma ward back on Earth. A bank of humming computers filled a wall, a glass cylinder embedded in the center. There was a little girl inside, sleeping. She looked barely seven years old, with pink skin and short golden curls on her head. Thin tubes ran from the machinery around her into ports on her wrists, ankles and into the base of her skull. She had semi-opaque lenses embedded in her eye sockets.

  I looked closer. Her skin was wrinkled, nearly desiccated. She had hands almost as aged as the alien with the books.

  A panel slid down next to her cylinder, revealing a canister with a thin line of silver liquid.

  A Caalora with a six-sided bonnet and a food stained apron came over.

  “That is vala’kitic’shoom,” she said. “Do you carry any in your vessel?”

  “Hard to tell what is it is from here,” I said. “Who are you?”

  “Feyashan. Here, I am everyone but my little Sholaliah. I adopt different facets to keep every day perfect,” she said.

  “You’re the AI running the place,” Lafige said. “Not a real…whatever.”

  “There was no way to preserve more than one Caalora. Not when the elders accelerated the Fold Gate construction. They were certain it would open the galaxy to us. I argued that one malfunction would destroy all we were. I prayed I was wrong. The wise prepare. The fool hopes. I inscribed as much of myself onto this shade—you say AI—as I could.”

  A tiny bit of silver shot through a tube and sprayed into the little girl’s chamber as a mist.

  “You’re her…mother?” I asked.

  “Father. I could not carry her mother within the shade. No time. Creating this perfect day within Caalora’s surface was a miracle. My calculations were correct. The Fold Gate engineers…”

  “How long has she been here?” Lafige asked. There was a different tone to his voice, his fear was gone.

  The woman’s head cocked to the side.

  “By your time, nineteen thousand and three years. The vala’kitic’shoom will not last much longer,” she said.

  The girl’s eyelids fluttered. I felt a pinch in my heart, remembering the last time I watched my son Bryce wake up so long ago.

  “You saved her…she’s the very last of you?” I asked.

  “Likely,” she said. “The colony ship sent into the Fold Gate for its one and only activation might have survived. If it did, they will not return at sub-light speeds for many, many more years. You have no word for us. You do not know our language. You have not found Caalora before today.”

  “You’re waiting for your people to come back?” I asked.

  The alien’s eyes narrowed to dark slits. “I give her perfect days…until there are no more days to give. She wakes.”

  The girl’s eyes opened, a deep green instead of the black I’d seen in Feyashan’s androids. The glass on her chamber swung open and the tubes connected to her body retracted into the machine. She stretched her arms out and a smile came to her lips.

  “Daddy!” she jumped out of her sleeping chamber and into the arms of the farmer.

  He carried her out of the house and onto the road. All the androids were active. Each waved to the girl and called her name as she clapped in delight. The villagers broke into an alien song as the farmer hoisted her up onto a shoulder. Sholaliah sang the refrain in a high-pitched voice, ending in peals of laughter from the crowd.

  She pointed at us and patted the farmer’s head until he carried her over. He set her down a few feet away. She ran over and looked us up and down, skipped from side to side to better see our vac suits.

  “Are these visitors from Erivid? The storyteller says they dress most strangely,” Sholaliah said.

  Lafige acted like she was a rabid dog yapping at him, his hands held to his chest defensively.

  “We are from Erivid.” I leaned over and smiled at her. She touched my vac suit, running her fingers along the collar of my helmet ring. In the reflection from the lenses embedded over her eyes, I saw myself with a Caalora face. Her arm and hand looked perfectly healthy, the withered hands and tube ports gone. Feyashan made sure she couldn’t see her true self.

  “We don’t receive guests,” she said. “Why are you here?”

  The smell of cooking grew stronger in the air.

  “T
here’s a rumor that this village has the best breakfast on all of Caalora,” I looked up at the farmer. “Isn’t that right?”

  Sholaliah clasped her hands against her chest and looked to the woman in the apron. “Can they have -yuulish with us?”

  “Whatever you like, my darling,” she said.

  “And hagitani?” Sholaliah almost squealed in delight.

  “Two,” the woman said with a smile. She took Sholaliah by the hand and led her away. “The guests will join us once your father shows them the rest of the village.”

  Sholaliah gave us an emphatic wave and skipped alongside the woman.

  “Thank you,” the farmer said. “I’ve tried to condition her to outsiders before, but the results have been poor.”

  His last statement clicked in my head.

  “She doesn’t know, does she? Doesn’t know how long she’s been in here, or what’s happened in the outside world,” I said.

  “No. The vala’kitic’shoom prevents new long term memories from forming each time she sleeps. It slows her aging to almost nothing, but her body grows older. I will give her perfect days until I cannot.”

  “If we had that vala stuff do you think we’d ever risk our necks doing this?” Lafige asked.

  “I need a component.” The farmer looked at my suit where the girl had touched it. “Use the sensors you think are hidden from me.”

  I ran my glove scanners over my suit. Her skin should have left traces of cells somewhere, at least a hint of DNA…instead, there was a thin film of inorganic material. I took a micro-scanner off my belt and waved it over my helmet ring. A microscopic image appeared on my forearm screen. There were mechanical cells unlike anything in my suit’s database on my suit.

  “Nanites,” I said. “This tech is limited where we come from. Too much danger of it going rogue and wiping out everything.”

  “Show me the composition,” Feyashan said.

  I shrugged and pulled up a spectrographic report of the nanites. Feyashan pulled my arm in front of him and looked over the list of chemical components.

  “This.” He tapped a finger to the hologram.

  “Dysprosium?”

  “I need it to build more nanites. The surrounding regolith had the element until a collision broke away the vein. How much do you have?” Feyashan asked.

  “What have you got to trade?” Lafige looked at the equipment in the girl’s room and licked his lips.

  A leather ball bounced passed us. Sholaliah chased after it, giggling as a pair of children ran close behind her.

  “Shol!” The woman with the apron leaned out of a doorway and waved to the little girl. “Your yuulish will get cold!”

  Sholaliah skidded to a halt and ran backwards toward the beckoning woman.

  “Hurry,” she said to me, almost breathless. “Mother makes the best hagitani.” She grabbed me by the hand and led me away. Sholaliah examined my glove, jabbing her fingertips up and down the composite metal bands on the sleeves.

  “Does everyone on Erivid dress so strangely?” she asked.

  “It is…very cold there,” I said.

  “What do you eat for yuulish?”

  “Don’t pester our guests, Sholaliah.” Feyashan hurried her through the door and into a room with a long wooden table and benches. A simple kitchen at one end had steaming pots of food on a stove and a metal refrigerator built into the walls.

  The woman slid the metal door aside. Cold fog spilled out around cylinders with angled nozzles. The woman pressed an earthen bowl beneath each nozzle and bright colored liquid spilled out. She beat the mixture with a wooden spoon and poured it into a beat-up iron skillet.

  Lafige and I sat across from Sholaliah, who kicked her feet up under the table, her eyes still drinking in our odd attire.

  Feyashan ladled a white lumpy glop into three bowls and handed them out. It looked like congee rice porridge my mother used to make, but she didn’t add tiny black seeds or a shiny blue ribbon that wiggled away from my spoon.

  Sholaliah attacked her food and slurped down her own blue ribbon, which tried to escape from her lips.

  I ran my sensors over the bowl. It read as a plethora of amino acids and carbohydrates, all completely sterile.

  “It’s poisonous,” Lafige said. “Please tell me it’s poisonous.”

  “Safe to eat.” I took a sip that had the texture of mashed snails and a very earthy aftertaste. “It’s like menudo and a chest cold in a bowl.”

  “Aunt Gishiy told me stories about the dragons in Erivid,” Sholaliah said. “Did you bring any eggs with you?”

  “Our guests are just passing through, darling,” Feyashan said as the cook brought over a plate with steaming biscuits. “Your Uncle mentioned that the two udnara in the glade need to go on a long ride or they’ll eat all the flowers. Would you like to go help him?”

  Lafige picked up a biscuit and tore it open. He sniffed at the middle and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Like someone decided to add coriander to a brownie.” He took a bite and nodded. “Pretty good actually.”

  “I get two.” Sholaliah snatched a pair off the plate and gave Lafige a dirty look.

  “Would you like mine?” I asked.

  “Father needs one,” she said.

  “I already ate,” Feyashan waved a hand to the little girls and she stuffed half a biscuit into her mouth.

  “Can I go to my studio?” she asked through a full mouth. “I want to try drawing our guests.”

  “Of course,” Feyashan put a hand on the back of her neck. “Why don’t you go get your canvas and bring it here while I talk to them?”

  “OK!” She swung her legs over the bench and rushed out of the kitchen.

  “I’ll distract her,” Feyashan said. “Thank you for playing along. Now, the dysprosium.”

  “We might have some,” Lafige said, “but what have you got to trade?”

  “This place is a nearly perfect system. Nothing can leave,” the farmer said. “Nothing.”

  “Maybe our Bennington box didn’t tell you what ‘trade’ means,” Lafige pushed one of the bowls toward Feyashan. “You give something,” he pulled the bowl back and pushed another away. “We give something.”

  “What do you want?” Feyashan asked.

  “The set up you’ve got for the kid. Plenty of people back home would pay to stay young forever,” Lafige said.

  “The FCF would never—” My partner grabbed my forearm before I could finish.

  “That. All the blueprints you’ve got in that android head of yours—maybe not the gate-thing that killed everyone—and we’ve got a deal.”

  “The vala’kitic’shoom wasn’t my creation,” Feyashan said. “A fellow scientist made it for her. I know how it operates, not how to build a new one.”

  “Then we’ll take it with us,” Lafige said. “Her, all of you. We’ll set you up someplace nice where tourists can come and look at you through glass walls. Won’t be much of a difference than what you’ve got now.”

  “No. She will have perfect days here and nowhere else.”

  “What can you give us?” I asked.

  Lafige’s hands clenched and thumped against the table.

  “Information,” the farmer said. “Our entire history. Works of art, sagas. Technical knowledge was coveted, but I amassed enough to build this place.”

  I pointed to the refrigerator and the motionless cook.

  “The food recombiner is worth something. The synthetic environment too. You can give us that?” I asked.

  “All but the vala’kitic’shoom.”

  “All this is nothing,” Lafige said. “Spare change compared to the rig you’ve got set up in the other building. That’s what we want.” He grabbed my shoulder and turned me towards him. “Stop playing nice. I can have our drones cut through the rock and pack every blade of grass into the Moonshot’s hold. Let the big brains on Earth figure out the tech and we’ll be the richest men anyone’s ever even heard of.”

  The door bu
rst open and Sholaliah ran in, blank sheaves of paper and charcoal sticks clutched to her chest.

  “Don’t act like you’re doing her some kind of favor in here,” he said.

  “Lafige, not in front of—”

  “Piss off. This walking mummy’s got no future here. We take her back with us and Shiroyama can turn her into a circus act. ‘Come see the last wonder of a dead planet.’ Lines around the block.”

  “What’s he saying?” Sholaliah’s arms dropped to her side.

  “We speak differently in Erivid,” I got to my feet and put a heavy hand on Lafige’s shoulder. “My friend is just tired.”

  Lafige smacked my hand away and knocked the bench over as he stood.

  “I didn’t come all this way to go home with trinkets!” He pointed at the girl. “She can have all the happy days she wants, but it’ll be back on Earth,” he said to Feyashan. “You want the same set up as here? Fine. I’ll pay the bill myself. Pack your bags or you get nothing from us.”

  “Father…what does he mean? Earth?”

  “You’re upsetting her.” Feyashan backed toward the girl.

  “I tried to play nice,” Lafige slapped a bowl of mush into the air, “I’ve got no time or patience for any of this crap. You let me out. I’ll get a vac suit for that one and park her on our ship while you get this freak show ready to move.”

  Sholaliah began to cry.

  Feyashan turned to her and gently laid his hands on her shoulders.

  Lafige reached for his belt and unsnapped a small case the length of his palm.

  “Lafige, you need to back off before you—” His fist caught me in the stomach and knocked the air out of my lungs.

  A blade snapped out of the hilt in his hand.

  I couldn’t shout a warning as Lafige reversed the grip on the weapon and slammed it into Feyashan’s back. The android seized up. Lafige ripped the knife out and shoved the farmer to the ground.

  Sholaliah let out a screech and cowered in a corner. Lafige grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her onto her toes.

  He jabbed the knife at the cook on the other side of the room. “Anyone tries to stop us and she’ll suffer. Get me?”

  He looked at me, disgust across his face. “You go back to the ship. Come back with a suit for her and every drone we got so we can rip this place apart and head home. Thought you were here to make money, Derek.”