Europa Journal

by Jack Castle

  “You want to run that by me again?” Harry said.

  Mac did, and early the next morning, just before dawn, they left on foot for Joppa-Cal, without Harry.

  In the light of the rising sun, Captain Reed watched Mac, Tae, Leo, and Stein through his binoculars. He saw them hike toward Joppa-Cal on a worn out road and then eventually disappear from view. He was alone once more.

  He was moving back toward the campfire when a bright light suddenly rose up behind him. It was so bright that it illuminated the outline of his form on a nearby wall that the early morning light still had not reached.

  “Hello, Harry,” a disembodied voice said in greeting. Its tone was music to his ears.

  When he spun toward the light, he was surprised to see the same vibrantly colored cloud that he had seen Asha singing to by the river. “Who are you?”

  “You know me, Harry. I am the SongBird Goddess of whom Asha spoke.”

  “I thought you were…”

  “I know,” the cloud giggled, “fireflies or igniting gas. It is common for your kind to try and explain that which you do not understand.”

  Harry looked down at the ground.

  “Why do you despair?”

  “Oh, haven’t you heard? God seems to be nothing more than an alien astronaut. If that’s true, then my wife and daughter aren’t really waiting for me in the afterlife, are they? They’re nothing more than rotting corpses in the ground. Everything I’ve ever believed in is a lie.”

  “Why do you doubt your faith, now?” asked a less god-like voice behind him. The voice belonged to his radio operator, Dougie Johnson. He now appeared before Harry as a young man, not as the decrepit old man he had become on the spaceship. But it wasn’t really Dougie. Looking into his swirling multi-colored eyes, Harry realized that it was still the SongBird Goddess talking; she had just assumed Dougie’s form.

  “Shouldn’t I? The facts are pretty overwhelming.”

  “The one who killed Asha and her mighty Awumpai guardian — who do you think he was?”

  Harry shrugged his shoulders. “He told me he was God.”

  “And do you believe that?”

  “No, not God.” As he thought about this question more, his eyes widened.

  Dougie disappeared, and Ba-Tu now addressed him. “That’s right, Harry. He is the Fallen One.”

  “Khaos is—” Harry asked, but in his heart, he already knew the answer.

  When Harry looked up, Ba-Tu was gone. He now saw Brett standing by a low wall. The good ole country boy had his arms crossed and one foot propped up on the wall. Harry noticed that he had various Mook weapons sticking out of his bloody corpse and a swollen eye.

  “That’s right, Harry,” Brett said while walking toward him. “You must remember who Khaos is: he is the Father of Lies. If you knew the secret of all life, you would know this.”

  Harry backed away from Brett’s corpse and tripped over his own feet. When he looked up, he saw the crew member from the downed Hail Mary, the one who had committed suicide, standing over him. The crew member, who was no longer wounded, extended a hand to help Harry up.

  “What’s the secret?” Harry asked him. The pilot didn’t respond but rather put his hands on Harry’s shoulders and spun him around to face little Asha.

  “Hi, Harry,” she said.

  “Asha?”

  “Yes, Harry. I’m here with the SongBird Goddess, but I can’t stay very long.” She crossed over to a nearby fountain and hopped onto the ledge of its basin.

  “Why are you here?”

  Asha playfully dipped her toes in the water. “I came here to warn you.”

  “To warn me of what? What’s the point of this? What’s it all for?”

  She hopped down and looked up at him. “Harry, knowing the answer to that question risks the time you have left in your terrestrial body. In the history of existence, no mortal has ever been told the secret of human life. To know it while you are still in this terrestrial form is to risk almost certain death.”

  “Oh, haven’t you heard? I already know how I’m going to die, at least where my body is going to end up.”

  “That’s true,” Asha said. She turned her head to the side like a bird, the way she often did when she was alive. “You are a unique soul, Harry Reed, but again I must warn you: to know the secret in your present form is to risk your physical body and your immortal soul. Do you still wish to know?”

  Harry considered this for only a second. “Yes,” he answered. He was prepared to pay the price, whatever that price might be.

  “Okay,” Asha said. She stood on her toes and gave him a kiss on the cheek before backing away from him and fading away into hundreds of glowing fireflies.

  Harry looked around. No one was there.

  Looking skyward, he clenched his hands into fists. “I said I wanted to know!” he shouted, but his words only echoed on the walls of the slave quarter and died on the wind. Then he saw her. She sat by the fire with her back to him.

  “Julie?” he asked. No, SongBird Goddess, this is too much, Harry thought. Not Julie.

  “Then I shall tell you and try to speak in terms you can understand.” It was Julie’s voice, but Harry knew in his heart that the SongBird Goddess was speaking through Julie’s form. She stood up and faced him. He recognized her summer dress and sandals from his dreams.

  “What defines humanity is your faith,” she said as she walked toward him. “Angels cannot have faith, for they have been in God’s presence since their inception. They did not ask for this privilege. What Khaos says about your origin has some truth, but what he neglected to tell you is that what is inside those bodies was put there by his creator.”

  “You mean our souls?”

  “Precisely. You terrestrial beings have only your faith to guide you, and that is why the one true Father loves you most.”

  “Thank you, thank you for telling me this. But what must I do?”

  Julie disappeared, and a shimmering cloud took her place.

  “You will know when the time comes.”

  “Can you help me fight him?”

  “You already have what you need.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will. As you are well aware, you near your hour of death, Harry Reed. I’ve told you the secret to prepare for what you must do, but beware of telling others because to tell them is to risk their mortal lives as well.”

  “I will,” Harry said solemnly.

  “Oh, and Julie and your daughters wanted me to give you a message.”

  “They’re — they’re with you?” Harry choked back his tears.

  “Yes, in a way.”

  “What …. what’s the message?”

  “She misses you, and you will see each other soon. There’s just one more thing you have to do first. Most of all, she says … have faith.”

  The light of the SongBird Goddess faded away.

  Harry knew what he had to do. That thing that had killed Asha was not God, but the Father of Lies, and Mac and the others were headed straight for it, thinking they were just going to meet another alien.

  The captain grabbed his gear out of his plane, checked his pistols, and set out after them. Despite the overwhelming odds against him, he walked with determination.

  Harry had his faith back, and he was damned if he was going to lose it again.

  Chapter 25

  Prisoner of the Gods

  Mac awakened in complete darkness and felt as if she couldn’t open her eyes. Am I blind? she wondered. The only sound she heard was the clink, clink, clink of metal, and she felt something cold and hard encircling her wrists. It didn’t take her long to figure out what it was.

  There was a loud buzzing in her ears, and when it began to subside, she heard voices — familiar ones. Leo and Tae talked to one another, but Leo’s vo
ice sounded funny; he slurred his words like someone who was intoxicated.

  “All I’m saying,” Leo said with the volume of a drunk, “is that this proves that God was an alien astronaut who made humans by combining his own DNA with that of prehistoric monkeys. Everyone wonders what the missing link is. Bingo!” He paused to collect his thoughts. “It’s ’dis guy.”

  “For what purpose?” Tae asked in a straight and steady voice.

  At least one of them is sober, Mac thought.

  “What do you think? For slaves to mine Earth’s natural resources.” Leo snorted. “The ‘gods’ sure as heck weren’t going to get their hands dirty. Plus, let’s not forget good old-fashioned butt-kissing worship.”

  “If that’s the case, then where’s your proof that these guys even visited Earth?” Tae asked, not giving up without a fight.

  “Proof? You want proof?” Leo stalled, but then the answer hit his inebriated brain. “Sumerian pictographs reveal that mining metals was part of daily life, and there’s a great deal of evidence of prehistoric mines in South Africa, which even today is a major source of gold.”

  “You’re delusional,” Tae retorted, but Mac had to admit there was some merit to what Leo said, especially after everything they had seen since entering the palace of the gods.

  “Am I? Am I, Tae?” Leo said loudly, and then he subsided, seemingly having lost his train of thought.

  Open your eyes, damn you. No. It hurts too much. Don’t want to see anymore. Open your eyes. No. Too painful. Mac decided to listen for a little while longer instead.

  “Where was I? Oh yeah, what about the ‘Sumerian spike’? Huh? What about that?” Leo asked.

  “The what?” Tae clearly didn’t care, but there was little else to do.

  “The ancient Sumerians are going on, just like all the other unsophisticated cultures around them, like the nearby Semites, and then, bam! Within one generation, they’ve got the first written language, astrology, two-story buildings, mathematics, the wheel, and more. What about that, huh?”

  Mac hated to side with Leo, but her future son-in-law made a good point. Scientists agreed that the first civilization seemingly appeared overnight in Sumeria near the barren wastelands of the Eastern desert around 3800 B.C. The Sumerians’ crude language was the original script from which all other writing derived, and scholars considered the Sumerian wheel to be the greatest invention of all time. Tae still wasn’t willing to give up, though.

  “Maybe they had a savant — you know, like Da Vinci or Michelangelo? Did you ever think about that?”

  Leo fell silent for a moment. “Yes, yes, I did. But then we met the angels, and that changed everything.”

  “You mean the aliens,” Tae corrected.

  “Angels, aliens — what’s the difference? They’re both the same thing.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “The word extraterrestrial means ‘not of this earth,’ right? Well, all I’m saying, either way, is that whether they were little green men or fallen angels, the term extraterrestrial still applies.”

  Now it was Tae’s turn to be silent while he thought this over. Finally, he said, “Look, I’ll give you that the guys we saw today might be the same thing as the Greek mythological gods and might even be the same gods who visited ancient Greece and Egypt. But you’re trying to tell me that God and the angels are just greedy miners who spliced us together with prehistoric monkeys, so we could mine Earth’s precious metals?”

  “Well, according to Sumerian tablets, more specifically, it was a brother and sister named Enki and Ninharsag who combined their DNA with a Homo erectus to produce a suitable hybrid laborer to mine gold for the ancient astronauts, who needed to replenish their home planet’s dwindling resources.”

  Tae frowned. “Leo, where do you even get this stuff?”

  Leo didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Hey, look! Mac’s finally decided to wake up.”

  Mac opened her eyes and saw that they were imprisoned in some sort of jail cell, just as she had suspected. Her wrists were manacled in irons, and she was shackled to the wall behind her. Leo and Tae were shackled in a similar fashion. They were being held in a circular room that was shaped like a tower in a castle. Judging by the room’s dilapidated walls, they were no longer in the lavish, glittering palace suspended above Joppa-Cal.

  “Morning, Commander,” Tae said.

  “Hi, Mom! Wakey, wakey!” Leo said. “Hey, hey, hey, see that small window over there? That’s for the rats. After we die, the rats will come in through that window and pick our bones clean. It’s sort of like a medieval garbage disposal. Isn’t that cool?”

  “Lieutenant, have you been drinking?” Mac asked, although she already knew the answer.

  “No,” Leo lied. He tried to keep a steady face, but the attempt only lasted about a second, and then he burst into a fit of laughter. “Okay, okay, I admit it. I’m drunk, but don’t tell Emma. She’ll be really, really mad.”

  “Nectar of the Gods,” Tae explained. “Leo had a little too much to drink at the party with some guy named Bacchus.”

  “Nectar of the Gods,” Leo explained. “Leo had a little too mush to drank at the par-tay.” Leo thought about this for a second. “Par-Tay. Hey, that sounds just like your name, Tae. Par-Tae, get it? Maybe that’s where your name comes from?”

  Ignoring him, Mac focused on Tae, who seemed to be a little more coherent. “Aside from Prince Sumeria over there being drunk off his ass, are you two okay?”

  “Yeah, we’re okay. That fall nearly killed us.” Tae gestured to a trapdoor in the ceiling about twenty feet overhead. “But luckily we didn’t break anything. How about you? How’s your head? You smacked it pretty hard on Leo’s knee when we all came crashing down.”

  Mac gingerly touched the back of her head. Her scalp and hair were moist and sticky, but it felt as though the wound was clotting okay. “I’m okay. Where’s Stein?”

  Tae’s face answered before he could. “Didn’t you see it happen? Stein’s dead, Mac. They cut him in half.”

  Suddenly, it all came flooding back in a mass of jumbled memories: the splendor of the amazing palace, the throngs of worshipers, the endless parade of mythological beings, and the god known as Khaos.

  #

  AUDIENCE WITH A GOD

  Mac was never much for parties. For her, making small talk ranked among the top ten things she hated most, which was probably why she wasn’t good at it.

  Perhaps that was why she found herself standing alone on an expansive balcony with a goblet of nectar in her hand while everyone else enjoyed the festivities inside. The wind whipped by her ears and turned them red and numb with cold.

  She peered over the railing and saw the rooftops of Joppa-Cal hundreds of feet below. It was a long drop, at least five hundred feet, to Joppa-Cal’s highest rooftops.

  Moving between two immense red tapestries, Mac reentered the stately palace, which reminded her of the castles in Austria that she and Emma had once visited. The palace’s interior rooms, just like those in Austrian castles, were massive; the smallest of the rooms had ceilings at least two stories tall. In addition, nothing in the palace was unadorned. Elaborate woodwork and alabaster carvings appeared on every surface, and cream colored tapestries with intricate blue designs covered the walls.

  Unlike the Austrian castles, however, the palace she now entered had a swimming pool and an orchestra that floated near the ceiling. Mac found the experience of the alien palace overpowering, and the display of species in the palace’s audience chamber certainly contributed to this feeling.

  She entered the chamber and found herself amongst a sea of otherworldly beings that surpassed anything she had ever heard or read about. The crowd around her was composed predominantly of the hybrids and the tall royal citizens they had seen upon their arrival in town. Mook slaves weaved in and out of the crowd, serving food
, waiting tables, and performing other menial tasks, while three-legged Tripods stood guard at every doorway. Mac also saw several new beings, such as a humanoid engulfed in ice-blue flames and canine-like creatures that looked as though they belonged in ancient Egyptian drawings.

  Nearby, Mac did see something familiar, however: Stein loading his plate from a banquet table. The commando still wore a weapon on his tactical sling, but he had finally begun to relax over the last couple of hours. She had lost Tae and Leo about an hour ago when they had wandered off with Enoch.

  After downing her own food, she continued to split her time between the chamber and the balcony while she waited for Enoch to return and let them know when they could have an audience with the being called Khaos.

  Sometime later, Tae stepped up beside her. “Are you enjoying the feast, Commander?” he asked.

  “I’m fuller than a stuck pig,” she said, but she couldn’t pass up another delicious hors d’oeuvre from a passing platter. “Where have you been for the past three hours?”

  “Enoch set me up on a tour of the palace with one of the hybrid technicians. This place is amazing.”

  “So did you figure out what keeps it afloat?”

  “Yeah, and it’s definitely not magic.” Tae’s response led Mac to suspect that he and Leo had had a great debate over that exact subject.

  Knowing Leo, Mac thought, he was probably just pushing Tae’s buttons. Tae interrupted her train of thought by launching into an enthusiastic description of his palace tour. He sounded like a little kid describing his most recent visit to Disney World.

  “You should see the size of the anti-gravity generators holding this place up! They’ve got to be the size of small buildings. Oh, and their engineering complex is massive. They’ve got stuff that you wouldn’t believe. When we get back to Earth, I’m going to be the first to volunteer for the exchange program. It’s going to take years just to come up with a working interface. I’ve already started building a schematic of the main complex on my PC, but that’s only the beginning…”

  “Tae,” she said, interrupting the over-stimulated engineer, “Tae, where’s Leo?”