A Memory of Mankind: (This Alien Earth Book 2)

by Paul Antony Jones

  Amelia allowed the Brimstone to hover in place.

  I estimated we were a little over two miles from the collector now, its faceted walls taking up the entirety of our view. Chou used a small joystick to point the spotlights at the very edge of the circle of dead ground, about half a mile away.

  “Look at the trees around the edge of the circle,” she said. “They’re all dead or dying.”

  Chou was right. Where the dead-land met the forest, the trees closest to it looked sickly, burnt, or charred, dead or dying. But only the first couple of rows. Everything beyond that looked just as healthy as the rest of the Everwood.

  “Radiation?” I asked.

  “Perhaps,” said Chou. “But until Silas is awake, we have no way to gauge whether that’s true or not. I think a more probable answer is the aurora.”

  I checked the clock on the airship’s instrument panel. It was after midnight. The aurora was due soon.

  Chou continued, “I think, perhaps the prudent thing to do would be to put some distance between us and the collector until after the aurora. In the morning we can—“

  A pulse of light spread out from the tower across the tops of the Everwood.

  “Crap!” I said. “Better get us out of here.”

  The pulses grew stronger and more frequent with every passing moment, each of the collector’s facets throbbing with a quickly-growing intensity. Amelia fired up the engines to max and began to swivel the Brimstone in the opposite direction of the collector, but the thing was so huge, it was going to take a minute or more to swing us around.

  “Come on, come on,” Freuchen whispered, egging the Brimstone to move faster.

  A roar, deep and thunderous, like the approach of an enormous freight train rattled the Brimstone. I swear I felt the vibration right down to my bones. I saw rocks tumbling from the side of the mountains. I almost laughed out loud when I saw the hair on Chou’s head begin to rise, even as I felt the sudden buildup of static electricity coursing over my own skin.

  The Brimstone reverberated suddenly as a deafening boom ripped the silence of the night apart, louder than any thunderclap, stunning me.

  “Oh, sh—“ I began, but the words froze in my mouth as I was thrown backward, colliding hard with the fuselage. For a thousandth of a second, reality was replaced by a furious wall of color bursting from the collector as it unleashed the power of the aurora into the world. An excruciating bolt of pain lanced inside my head as the raw, primal energy crashed over us, blindingly bright.

  The Brimstone’s superstructure shook violently with every wave of energy that passed over it.

  “Faster!” I said as the aurora’s light spread across the land, filling the cockpit with a blinding flash, the pixie dust lost in the brilliance.

  Amelia continued her slow turn, blocking more of the light as she repositioned us, so the nose was facing away from the collector.

  And then it was done. The light faded, allowing darkness to claim the land again, and for a few moments, we all just stood there, catching our breath.

  “Ve need to find a place to land,” Freuchen said.

  We all agreed.

  Chou flipped a couple of switches and turned on the Brimstone’s powerful searchlights, then quickly began moving them over the ground below us.

  “There!” Albert said after a few minutes of searching. He was pointing to a plot of open ground about a quarter-mile away from the edge of the dead-land surrounding the collector. “We can land there.”

  My stomach lurched as Amelia turned the airship in its direction and dropped us rapidly toward it.

  We landed and quickly tied off the Brimstone.

  Just within the range of our landing lights, a dead redwood lay moldering on the forest floor. Not for the first time, I wondered at the amazing biodiversity of the Everwood. While the redwood had crashed to the forest floor many years before we set foot here, in death, it had become a kind of coral reef of the forest, allowing new life to flourish. Lichen covered the thick, armor-like bark and here and there I saw the ghostly white shape of mushrooms and toadstools. Birds had built nests in some of the remaining branches and squawked low warnings to their neighbors at the approach of these strange visitors.

  In time, all would pass and return to the ground, passing on the life-giving nutrients to new plants. This endless cycle had stretched on for billions of years and would likely continue to do so until the sun became a red dwarf and swallowed the planet whole. A sad end to all of our memories, I supposed.

  My eyes rose to the clear night sky and the shattered moon, looming huge and bright. The moon was full tonight—or as full as it could get, at least—its tail of broken rock trailing behind it like a comet moving across the sky. And in the distance, visible even through the forest that separated us from it, the collector glowed dimly, like a beacon… or a warning, perhaps.

  In a strange spell of introspection, I wondered what had happened to the version of me that had existed in this reality. Had it been me, perhaps? Is this what became of my version of the world? Or had this planet belonged to some better version of me? Had my alternate-reality-sister led a happy, productive life? Maybe she’d gone on to be some great lawyer. I’d never know.

  Somewhere out there, buried deep in the fertile soil, if I dug deep enough, would I find the fossilized bones of that other me? Had I even existed here? No way to tell. And that was okay. But I hoped that I… they had. Hoped that their life had been long and blissfully happy; I would have chosen that for myself if I could have.

  The one thing this place had gifted to us was more questions than I suspected any of us could ever have answered in tens of lifetimes.

  Come one, come all, it’s time to take the adventure of more lifetimes than you could possibly know what to do with.

  I laughed, drawing Freuchen’s attention.

  “Vat is so funny?” he asked, his voice lowered to a respectful whisper.

  “Oh, nothing really,” I said. “I think this world is bringing out even more of the poet in me.”

  My eyes drifted back up to the moon. Its tail consisted of several large chunks that must have been tens of miles wide, numerous smaller ones that also must have been a mile or more in diameter, and tail of debris that followed behind it like baby ducklings.

  I’d watched the moon travel across the sky on other nights when it had been difficult to sleep, but none of those nights had been as clear as this one, and none had given me such a crystal clear view of the Earth’s damaged sibling in such glory.

  A new thought struck me.

  “Hey, Freuchen,” I whispered, stepping closer to him and nodding at the moon. “Doesn’t the debris field of the moon seem like there’s more than there should be? I mean, I’ve been doing a jigsaw puzzle in my head for the last few minutes, and I just can’t seem to fit all of those pieces back into the space it came from.” In my mind, there was at least thirty or forty percent too much debris left in the moon’s tail once I had pieced it all together again.

  Freuchen looked skyward. “I had not given it any thought,” he said. His eyebrows furrowed, and his head cocked back in a child-like manner of interesting surprise. “But now that you have mentioned it; yes, there does appear to be more debris than vould seem to fit that.

  “Weird,” I said, unable to come up with any solution.

  “Perhaps there is more destruction that ve cannot see,” he said.

  “On the dark side of the moon?” I said.

  “Perhaps. That vould account for it.”

  “You’re too damn smart for your own good,” I said, smiling at him.

  Freuchen blushed, a rare enough event that it elicited a bigger smile from me.

  “So many questions,” I said quietly, still unable to lay to rest the idea that I was missing something with the moon.

  “At least it isn’t raining,” Freuchen said as we made our way back to the crew quarters where everyone else was already waiting for us. I lay down on one of the beds and looked at my fr
iends, both old and new.

  Nobody seemed to want to start the conversation off, so I jumped in.

  “Well, we’ve made it,” I said. “Now, what are we supposed to do?”

  “It would be a mistake to leave before sunrise,” Chou said, “but we are going to have to time our trek to the mountains very carefully. We do not want to get caught in the aurora.”

  “The dead-land,” I said.

  Chou nodded. “It would be a mistake to be caught within the confines of that area.”

  “Thank goodness it only happens once a day,” Albert said, sitting cross-legged on the bed next to mine.

  “Ve have to decide how ve are going to get across the dead-land. If ve valk, ve are going to eat up valuable time,” Freuchen said.

  “Yes,” I said, “but if we use the Brimstone, we risk it being caught in tonight’s aurora. Maybe we should use it as an Uber; take us there, drop us off, and then return here to wait for us.”

  “That sounds like the safest option,” Bartholomew said.

  “Vat is this... Uber?”

  I laughed, though I thought I might be the only one who truly knew what I was laughing at.

  “But that would also mean someone would have to stay behind to pilot the airship back to us,” I said.

  Freuchen leaned forward. “Ve vould also need someone else to act as security, just to be on the safe side.”

  It was obvious who those two people should be: Bartholomew and Amelia.

  “Are you agreeable to that?” Chou asked, looking at both of them.

  With some reluctance, they both nodded, but their disappointment was palpable.

  We slept. And when dawn arrived, we woke Silas and filled him in on what we intended to do.

  “That sounds like a good plan. Would you like me to stay behind with the Brimstone too?”

  “No,” Chou said, “we’re going to need you for this.”

  “Very well.”

  We’d already resupplied our backpacks with enough water and food for forty-eight hours. While Freuchen had been taking inventory of the airship’s supplies, he’d found a long length of rope, binoculars, and some cold-weather gear. We added it to the rations, and we were ready to go.

  “If ve have to climb those mountains, ve should be prepared.”

  Chou gave us all a silent once-over. “I believe we are ready,” she said.

  I agreed.

  “Then let’s begin.”

  Seventeen

  The Brimstone skirted slowly around the base of the mountains for almost an hour, looking for a visible entrance, but we found nothing.

  “We do not have any more time to waste,” Chou said eventually and directed Amelia to land the airship near the base of the craggy mountains. Before we disembarked, I handed Bartholomew a walkie talkie I’d taken from a rack in the crew’s quarters and showed him how to use.

  “We’ll signal you when we’re ready to be picked up,” I said.

  We said our goodbyes and good lucks then watched as the Brimstone took off again.

  “My God,” Freuchen said, eyes following the collector skyward, his voice hushed as though he’d stepped into a grand cathedral. “I could never have believed such a marvel of human imagination could exist unless I had seen with my own eyes.”

  I had to agree with him. Nothing mankind had ever built in any of our lifetimes had even come close to the sheer immensity of this. The view from the Brimstone last night had been something. But now, from where we stood, there was nothing between us and the collector except fifty feet of empty dead space and the occasional dust devil that danced and pirouetted across the dead-land.

  I felt a small hand take mine and looked down to see Albert, his eyes wide with either wonder or fear.

  “I don’t like it,” he said. “It scares me.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean, kid,” I whispered, squeezing his hand tightly. I was fighting an urge to simply turn and walk away, overwhelmed by the heart-stopping immensity of this structure dominating the world. It was a Titan, frozen forever.

  I allowed my eyes to roam up the faceted sides and instantly regretted it. I was overwhelmed by a sensation of imminent danger, like I was standing on the edge of a cliff, and at any moment, gravity would switch and I would fall upward, vanishing into the permanent halo of clouds that swirled slowly around the vanishing point a couple of miles or more into the crystal blue sky.

  “Are you feeling alright?” Chou asked me.

  “Huh? What?” I shook my head and turned to look at her, only then realizing that I had grabbed onto her arm with my free hand. I exhaled loudly, then sucked in a deep breath, smiled at my friend, and nodded. “It’s a bit of a sensory overload.”

  Chou, her eyes fixed squarely on mine, raised her eyebrows and deadpanned, “Meredith, in the time that I have known you, I have learned that you have a propensity for understatement. You have just outdone yourself.”

  I couldn’t help myself; I laughed loudly.

  “Silas,” Chou said, “you will lead us. We need to find an entrance to get inside the collector.”

  “Very well,” he said.

  We started out across the dead-land, our feet kicking up little puffs of the dust that, presumably, had been trees and plants and animals but which the aurora had destroyed.

  “How are we supposed to climb those?” I said when we reached the base of the mountains. The sheer immensity of the collector had created an illusion of scale, I realized. The mountains looked tiny in comparison, but this close, I realized we’d underestimated the mountains’ size. They had to be at least fifteen-thousand feet high.

  I hadn’t really given our situation enough thought. What had I expected? To show up and there be a door with a sign telling me that this is where Candidate 1 waited? Hardly. But I hadn’t expected this.

  “I have some experience mountaineering,” Freuchen said, “but even if ve had the correct equipment, I do not believe any of us are experienced enough to make it even halfvay up.”

  Chou summed up the growing sense of frustration I felt. “It does not make sense that we would be sent here for there not to be some way for us to gain access.”

  “Assuming this is the right place,” Freuchen said, a hint of pessimism creeping into his voice.

  I shook my head adamantly. “No, this has to be the place. Silas’ message was very explicit. This has to be it.”

  “I know. I know,” Freuchen said, “but ve do not even know if this is the right collector. There are three others that ve had to choose from.”

  “It has to be here,” I repeated, “we’re just not seeing it.”

  I tried to ignore the sense of doubt I felt nibbling at my confidence. It could be any of the other three collectors that had been visible from the mountain back on Avalon, but they just didn’t feel right.

  “We were all put on the island for a reason,” I said. “That’s where Silas was. That’s where the message was waiting for me. Why put us there in plain sight of the closest collector and not expect that this would be the logical one for us to choose. No, this is the right one. We just have to figure out how to get in.”

  Freuchen glanced skyward. “Vell, ve had better do it soon, because ve have less than fifteen hours before the aurora triggers again.”

  I took out the binoculars, raised them to my eyes, and began searching the craggy, inhospitable side of the mountain. Like I said, I wasn’t expecting there to be a sign saying ‘Candidate 1—this way,’ but maybe there was some hint that we were in the right place, a path or a building or… something. Ten minutes of searching turned up nothing.

  The mountains seemed to simply sprout out of the ground, clutching the sides of the collector so perfectly, rising so steeply skyward that there was no hilly area leading up to them, no gradually-rising escarpment. They just were.

  “It’s almost like they were formed specifically to anchor the collector,” I said. “Would that even be possible?” I asked Chou.

  She shrugged. “I think su
ch a feat of geo-forming would be only a minor project to any intelligence capable of creating such impressive engineering accomplishments as the Dyson Sphere surrounding this sun, the translocation of almost so many humans through time and space, or the collectors themselves.”

  I avoided allowing my eyes to travel up the outside of the collector. This close, the sense of panic I felt each time I happened to glance at it was magnified tenfold. I huffed a couple of times to clear the anxiety then said, “Well, I guess we have to decide which way we’re going to go.”

  “Meredith?” Silas said, his eye-bar following the mountains north.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I believe I am picking up some kind of low-frequency radio emission. It is coming from that direction.” He raised an arm and pointed north.”

  “What? You mean like a message? Someone’s trying to contact us?”

  Silas’ eye-bar rotated to look at me. “No, not a message, it does not appear to be modulated. It is more a series of pulses occurring every two seconds.”

  “Couldn’t it just be some spurious emission from the collector?” Chou asked.

  “I do not believe so. The signal is weak, but it comprises of a series of numbers.”

  “Vat numbers?” Freuchen said.

  “1 4 4 2 3 3 3 7 7 6 1 0 9 8 7…”

  “Okay,” I said, “I have no idea what any of that means.”

  Both Chou and Freuchen shook their heads. Albert, however, seemed to be deep in concentration. With his index finger, he’d traced the numbers in the dust at his feet.

  “What’re you thinking, kiddo,” I said, kneeling down until I was at his eye level.

  He ignored me for a few seconds, continuing to stare at the numbers instead, then began to add commas after some of them until it read 144, 233, 377, 610, 987.