“They probably destroyed it,” Lee said with dismay. “Maybe that’s what they’re hiding, that they’re impotent to fight back.”
The hallways leading to the council were dark as night; again the humans were spirited up into the arms of the tall ones. No thoughts were broadcast by their carriers, only sparing emotional outbursts of worry and apprehension.
They came to a door outlined by the emergence of light glowing around the frame. Once opened, light showed the door was made of petrified wood, painted white and gleaming with the reflections of mirror basins inside the atrium it secured. Inside the atrium sat the elder council, resting long legs on something hidden behind ornate silver and gold robes. They appeared to hover in place at varying heights.
The open and voluminous architecture in lower gravity allowed wide vaulted ceilings dwarfing the achievements of Rome’s engineers. Mirrors placed around the room between, under, and over the floating delegates of the council reflected light pouring from a mirror aperture above, similar to the greenhouse. Several tall plants that adorned the walls curved inward toward the skylight, growing vines covering part of a carved historical diorama.
Jill wondered if the censorship the vines afforded the carving related to the facts the mind-tongues withheld.
“You wish to know?” asked one of the aged beings floating before them, mind to mind.
“As scientists, that is our only occupation, sir,” Kam replied. “To discover knowledge.”
“Besides,” Jill added, “our lives are now in your hands. It is up to your best judgment to share with us what you’d entrust one who you may let still live after our meeting.”
The elder ones nodded at each other, surely talking amongst themselves.
Kam and Jill realized they were deaf to the chattering of the judges deciding their fate. As before, the beings reached in and took hold of this thought.
“You may have much to fear, it is true,” a very old one whispered. She motioned to one of her peers. The elder one closest to the carvings stepped to the floor and stretched up high to pull a swath of vine off of the covered image.
Horror gripped the two humans as they studied the revealed stone rendering. In high relief it looked at first like any ancient culture’s celebratory dedications, a great feast, but the food on the table included something peculiar. Smaller skulls, with close-set eyes on a bilateral face with a wide jaw, sprouted from charred flesh hanging off their bodies. The artisans who carved the magnificent picture made permanent what looked remarkably like a meal of primates. Of humans!
“No, not humans, not from your ‘Earth,’” an elder corrected the thought. “Closer to our genes than yours. We were barbarous once, like you, eating those close to our own flesh. We pray the Age of Gray Heavens will never come again.”
“You were cannibals?” Jill asked, horrified.
“Not so,” another elder corrected, angry that the shameful depiction had been uncovered. “We know you eat whale and dolphin, two animals closer in intellect to yourselves than these—” the images of the Neanderthal-looking primates flashed, the tall ones having no word for them anymore “—were to us.”
Jill frowned. “Some among us do not understand the sorrow they reap among the creatures of our planet. Please allow us the opportunity to correct our mistakes, as you have.”
The tall ones silently conferred.
“We have received news of the ‘bearantulas’ searching the ruins above, though there are not many.”
Kam and Jill thought then of the battle in the Mojave, and the great many furry aliens that lay dying or dead in the sand.
This temporarily delighted and excited the elder ones.
“You can bring death?”
“We have, but at great expense,” Kam answered. “We, like you, are generations behind in technology.”
The elder ones silently argued again.
“You will not fight them?” the eldest asked.
“We are but a few,” Jill answered. “We need your help.”
“We have none to give,” the eldest said, holding up a gaunt, slender hand.
“So like those on the freighter, you are pacifists?” Jill asked.
“War is what is brought upon us, not what we bring upon ourselves,” an elder answered.
“It is this way that was connected to our blighted and broken history,” another added.
“That way is murder, pain, suffering, and early death,” still another stated.
“Is there nothing you will do?” Kam shouted.
The elders had a lengthy muted argument again. When resolved, the eldest looked at the two humans. “You must leave.”
He motioned for the tall ones standing outside the tall doors to join the atrium. They grabbed the humans again to walk into the dark.
“Wait!” Jill shouted. “At least tell us how you prevented them from coming back. All this time they never returned, unable to until our planet appeared. Why?”
The elders looked at her, their silence indicating either anger or another discussion.
“It is the source of our second greatest shame,” one confirmed.
Images followed, often too fast for the two frail human minds to follow. Great oratories delivered without speech echoed in the halls of the elders long ago. Fantastic debates took place in the underground safe houses all across the planet. The tall ones had the same question as Jill, not just how to stop future attacks, but whether they should. Any solution, even outright interplanetary genocide, would safeguard their planet, but doom their friends and family who were abducted.
Since learning how to communicate in the mind-tongue and rebroadcast via satellite, the tall ones had never been cut off from their own. First, they were separated by forest and ocean when their technology failed, now they were separated by the gulf of space between planets.
Though Earth did not sit in the gap, the bearantulas spent months harvesting water to fill it with orbits of manufactured comets.
It was decided, with great pain, that the best recourse involved severing the ties, not killing. All planetary resources were pooled and devoted to a single rocket launch. The rocket carried smaller drones, specifically engineered to unbalance approaching asteroids.
The race against time succeeded, knocking nearly all of the closer ice balls into a final descent toward the Sun. The bearantulas were cut off, having already exhausted their own water for the push to get to the tall ones’ world, and unable to access all they’d stolen from it.
Though ostensibly marooning from their kin, the tall ones could still point observatories at Tau’Goagh. Over the ensuing centuries the bearantulas fought great battles, presumably over their dwindling resources. The returning slaves verified these observations with their own memories, transferred forward over time. Billions of bearantulas died of thirst or died in battle, such was the choice they were offered by their regional lords. Through it all, the tall ones tended their wounds and buried the dead, receiving only enough sustenance to keep from teetering into the graves themselves. In fact, many lines of tall ones were bred specifically for food as traditional crops struggled to root and even greenhouses ached for a Sun covered in smog.
Then a blue ball appeared in their telescopes, and the bearantulas, like the tall ones, and now the humans too, united for one purpose: stay alive. At that, the story ended.
“As you saw, we left our own to die at the hands of those beasts,” an elder admitted painfully. “If we had done more, they could not have reached your own planet. For that we are also sorry, as it will be our own undoing as well.”
Jill stammered, “So you are resolved then: you will do nothing.”
The elders either wished not to respond or failed to understand the nature of rhetorical questions. The eldest moved her hand again, and the younger ones picked up the human scientists and whisked them back through the great doors, which slammed shut with finality behind them.
Chapter 4
Lee, the consummate hard-ass, finally let do
wn her guard. Her tears felt more alien than their strange surroundings. She didn’t cry when her bubbas perished, but Allan’s death was wholly unacceptable; he died attempting to rescue her. The other two scientists never told her on the ship, and the soldiers didn’t either, until they were alone in the alien atrium.
“I suppose it’s best that our smartest do the negotiating,” Lee admitted, eager to start a conversation to distract herself from the sorrowful news.
“I suspect the goal is an alliance, not a trade,” Amanda said.
“What do we have to offer such a culture?”
“Let the PhDs figure that out, I just wanna go home.”
Five tall ones burst through the door with Jill and Kam in their arms.
“You must leave,” the mind-tongue demanded.
“Are we not to stay here?” Amanda asked.
“Your fate is your own. The council has decided.”
“Fuck the council!” Lee screamed. “Those little furry bastards up there aren’t coming for us, they’re coming for you!
“Our council is upholding a generations-old vow of what you would call pacifism. You must accept your fate as it comes. So shall we. This is the way of the universe.”
“Where are we to go?” asked Amanda.
“We will provide you with as much knowledge of our world as we can.”
“You’re hiding something again,” Jill noticed.
“And you’re not any more accepting of this fate than we are,” Kam noted. “You’re afraid!”
“We will provide you with more,” one of them said, holding up a long-fingered hand. “You must be patient. As you would say, ‘the walls have ears.’”
“Do we have a choice?” Lee asked rhetorically.
The tall one turned suddenly and stooped down, putting her large black eyes inches from Lee’s.
“Yes. Though you seem not to appreciate it.”
Lee quieted for a moment, sharing some private thought with the tall one. Then she shivered in disgust.
“Okay, okay. We will do as you ask.”
“What did you see?” Amanda asked. “What did you show her?” she demanded of the tall one.
“What cannot be unseen,” Lee responded. “What I needed to see. She is right, we must leave this place.”
“Or she hypnotized you,” Amanda said.
“She had no need,” Lee answered, looking in awe at the tall one. “She reached into my mind, saw—felt—what it was like on that ship. I was alone for days. Not even her own people knew that, they had the comfort of each other. She knew I could handle what her elders foresaw upon the second coming.”
“The second coming?” Jill quipped. “It wasn’t the devil that was supposed to come back.”
“Depends who’s writing your Bible,” Lee said.
The other tall one knelt before the humans and sprawled her large hands on the floor.
“Come, we must go.”
“You are our envoys back to the surface?” Kam asked.
“Your official envoys will be here soon,” the tall one answered.
“So we must go now,” the other added.
They crawled up the ropey arms and clung to the ornamentation around the tall ones’ necks. The tall ones did their best to cover the humans with their robes, but they were more worried about mental questioning than visual observation.
“How can you hide your minds from them?” Jill whispered.
“You still do not understand our ways. In an open society, there are no secrets. They will know soon that we are not your escorts, they have only to think of it or think of us. We will stay a step ahead, though there is one way they can stop us.”
“Stop all of us,” the other noted.
The humans winced, feeling a mix of pure fear and pain from the tall ones for the first time. None wanted to imagine what agonies telekinetic beings could unleash on each other. Nobody asked the question the tall ones could read on all their minds. Instead, on the way through the dark labyrinthine tunnels under the pyramid, they sent images to their riders.
The darkness lit with descriptive visions of hundreds of plants and animals. The information arrived in chunks, too large for the human brain to process, but the tall ones hoped the brain would encode it as memory instead of a misremembered rush of visual stimuli. Passages through the forest opened before them. They were looking through those big eyes, hundreds of years passing in moments.
Then painful memories of their new shared enemy arose. The bearantulas carried a fear of heights from their home world, where they evolved to skitter through dark tunnels. The humans needed to make it to the high cliffs, ten miles east. Many thousands of years ago the tall ones sacrificed to long-forgotten gods, throwing bodies deep into a ravine that ran a hundred miles in each direction. Only the “lucky” sacrifices got to touch the bottom, making it a sacred place. The humans would be safe there.
“That was before the changing of Suns,” added the mind-tongue.
Kam saw a great silo in the ground, a bunker full of metal. The memory was intended only for him, something carried forward from the last tall ones to leave this world. Something stricken from thought among those living here now. A secret younger than the shame unveiled in the elder chamber, yet somehow more dangerous. The tall one insinuated that not even the elders knew this, and therefore had doubts of its existence at all. It would be up to the small band of humans to find what was hidden for so long in the sacred place.
“How have you kept this from the others?” Kam asked.
“In captivity we learned to hide our minds, fearing the Bearantulas could read us as well.”
“You five were also on the ship?”
“Yes, we were not prepared to learn that our ancestors have deliberately obscured our past. The past is the only thing that may save us in the present.”
“What do you mean?”
“Your kind must do this. The elders will understand we’ve hidden this soon enough. I fear what they will do. You only wish to go home, and so we have given you the power.”
“The power to do what?”
“I cannot share more, it is best you do not know, for you may turn back.”
“You intend to leave us?”
“We cannot follow where you must tread.”
“But you’re already disobeying, surely—”
“I see in the minds of the soldiers’ robots that enter debris to find bodies or bombs, going places you would not risk.”
“You’re sending us as canaries into some old coal mine?”
“Sort of, though the canary lives more often than not.”
“What’s in the mine?”
“I am not sure.”
“What!”
“When we learned how to hide our minds, we lost much. What we now send you to find was only known to few in the days before we came to live under a new Sun and the invaders came. Sadly, it was lost when the original memories perished. We only knew of it as a place or a thing. A rumor, a myth.”
The tall one paused, searching for something.
“Your culture has this as well. This is our . . . spear of destiny.”
“Great, religious artifacts, that’ll do us a lot of good. If yours work anything like ours, they’re usually cursed too.”
“You are one of the smartest humans, yet your limited lifespan makes for such crass generalizations. The universe has secrets your kind can’t fathom. Incredible tales to tell, if you know how to listen. I’m afraid I can impart no more, we are here.”
A cavernous, vaulted temple room spanned a thousand feet to either side. Columns with a swirling blue tendril held the roof aloft and presented a de facto barrier to the forest that the old ones hinted they could not cross.
“We wish you peace, for yourselves and for all of us,” they spoke as one in the mind-tongue.
“Thank you,” the humans uttered in their own way.
The tall ones crept back into the darkness and the hope that had comforted the human minds the last
few minutes receded. In its place came dread and futility.
“Did we all receive separate instructions?” Kam asked.
“Who knows how to get to the river?” Jill asked.
Lee raised her hand. “It’s that way.” She pointed to the left of the edge of the temple complex. “Less than a mile from here.”
“What’s at the river, what did they tell you?” Amanda asked.
“I don’t know for sure,” Jill said.
“Something they think will help us,” Kam answered.
“I guess we won’t starve once we get there,” Amanda said. “They only showed me some plants to eat,” Amanda said.
“Best get going,” Lee said. “Follow me.”
As before, they bounced through the landscape in lower gravity. None of them could shake the dreamlike feeling, leaping through the ferns like Peter Pan. Then the ferns in front of them fell off their stems, but by an invisible sickle. A search party of bearantulas had found them.
“Make for the river!” Amanda commanded.
Trees fell in their path and plants cracked underfoot as they leapt. With their springier, larger legs and shock-absorbing spines the humans outpaced the stocky pursuers, but the river eluded them. When the forest stopped falling about them Amanda ordered a full stop.
“Where’s the river?” Amanda asked.
“We must have run five miles already,” Lee said. “I thought we’d be there by now.”
“Did they just tell you to turn left at the temple?” Amanda asked.
Lee tried to remember the implanted memory; the tall ones had regular night markets along the riverside by the temple. Lee realized her vision included a setting Sun and shadows falling. Assuming the river ran roughly straight through the jungle, she need only recalibrate by the growing shadows. She began to leap through the brush again.
“Hey!” Amanda shouted.
“You got a better idea?” Kam said, leaping ahead.
A half hour of leaping brought them to a rushing river. The trees parted and a wide gully opened before them. The chasm ran from one edge of the horizon to the next with a few bends and dips here and there. The ravine looked more like a valley between two nearly vertical flat-topped mountains. It sunk so far that the light changed at the bottom, in that there was precious little of it when the Sun wasn’t at apex above.
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