Closer Than Earth

by LD Marr

  Now all three of their melodious voices echoed around in my head. I felt confused and off balance, but I walked toward the house, and they followed behind me.

  It’s not like I have any choice, right? I thought.

  Along with the unnatural calm feeling, I now felt a deep sense of unreality. Like I wasn’t really here but somewhere else far away. Like I was dreaming.

  Oh! This must be a dream! I told myself.

  In this mental haze, I climbed the steep stairs and passed through two columns to stand on the porch of the enormous house.

  Chapter 3

  The three much-taller people strode quickly up the stairs and caught up with me at the doorway. I looked in at a high-ceilinged front room with open double doors behind it. It was cooler inside but still comfortable, as if a gentle breeze was blowing through. Taller than normal chairs placed lined the front of the room and faced floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out at the porch and beyond.

  “Right this way,” said the dark, tall woman Ereen.

  She walked toward the doors. I and the others followed her through them into an enormous living room. Everything in the room was over-sized and colored in the palest pastels. Thick cream-colored woven rugs were scattered across pale hardwood floors. More floor-to-ceiling windows framed by opaque drapes filled one wall.

  A view of pastoral farmland showed through the tall windows. Fields of grain, vegetables, and fruit trees seemed to stretch for miles in the distance. The end of the farmland wasn’t visible. From this view, it looked as if the house was on an actual planet instead of floating out in space.

  I stared out the window, trying to ground myself in my current reality but not succeeding. The three people beside me were silent, but strange whispering noises echoed in my mind.

  Then a deep male voice resonated and echoed from across the room. “So glad you made it. Won’t you come over and introduce yourself?”

  I turned away from the window and looked to the far side of the large room at three more strangely dressed strange people. Another gigantic brown-haired man sat on an enormous couch.

  When I looked at him, I was jolted by a strange sense of recognition.

  Well that’s ridiculous, I told myself. I’ve never seen that man before or any of these strange people.

  Another man, slight and small, sat on a stool near the couch. And a tall pale woman stood nearby. Golden hair, lit by a shaft of sunlight coming through the roof, flowed past her waist.

  Where is that light coming from? I wondered.

  I tipped my head back and looked up at massive exposed wood beams that held up an impossibly high ceiling. Between many of the beams, there was only empty space. What looked like sunshine shone brightly through the spaces.

  That can’t be Earth’s sun, I thought. Can it?

  The three people who’d invited me in walked toward the other side of the room, and I followed them.

  “Please sit,” said the large man seated on the couch when I reached it. “Rest. Relax. You are safe now.”

  Gratefully, I sat down on the other side of the couch several feet away from him. The stress and strangeness of the situation was starting to become overwhelming. I felt tired and dizzy. I sat back and looked from one to another of the unusual-looking people, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.

  No one spoke for a moment, but I heard more whispering sounds in my mind.

  “Food and drink?” those two words were distinguishable from a blur of noise.

  Then Ereen and Muurg turned and walked away. They went out one of the tall doors that lined the room’s walls.

  “I am Vohn,” the man on the couch next to me spoke up. “And this is Dorg.”

  He waved a large hand to indicate the slight man seated on a stool on my other side. “And Humm and Frawah,” he indicated the pale blonde woman and the darker man standing nearby.

  I had to lean back to look up at those two, so unnaturally tall in my vision.

  “They tell me your name is Claire,” said Vohn.

  I hadn’t heard anyone telling him that, but I answered, “yes, that’s right.”

  I sat forward and turned to look at the large man. Up close, the sculpted features of his face were un-humanly perfect. Even at rest, powerful muscles showed beneath his strange, white garment. Sculpted but not bulky like Joey and his friends from the gym.

  Vohn spoke again. “As you might have realized, the natives of your planet are about to destroy themselves and most other life forms with a nuclear war. But we were able to get you out just in time.”

  “What!” I said.

  That news jolted me part of the way out of my strange unnatural calm state.

  “War!” said the slight man Dorg on my other side.

  I turned to look at him, but his face was turned away from me. All I could see was a small part of his pointy-featured face beneath thick curly hair.

  He sat on a round stool to one side of the large stone table in front of the couch. Dorg pronounced the word ‘war’ with an accent I didn’t recognize, and he shuddered as he spoke it.

  “War!” I repeated what he’d just said in a more hysterical voice. “What are you talking about? I didn’t know about that!”

  “I’m sorry,” said Vohn. “But it’s true. Your planet has been in a state of dangerous unrest for many decades. Ever since you developed the technology to destroy yourselves.”

  “Destroy ourselves?” I asked in a numb voice.

  This news was too much for me. I felt my mind and body going numb. My awareness slipping away.

  This cannot be real! I thought.

  I leaned back on the couch and stared at Vohn as he continued talking. I stared, but I didn’t really hear or understand what he was saying.

  Not real, not real, I kept telling myself over and over.

  “Yes, it really happened,” said Vohn as if reading my mind. “The development of nuclear power is an uncertain growth stage that all evolving species must go through to achieve travel to other solar systems. Unfortunately, many species don’t make it through this period. They use their new-found power to destroy themselves instead of advancing enough to travel at sub-light speeds.”

  Meanwhile, Ereen and Muurg had returned carrying trays with food and drinks. They set the trays down on the table in front of me.

  “Will you have food and beverage with us?” Muurg asked me.

  “Yes, thank you,” I said.

  I was suddenly very thirsty, and I reached for a glass filled with pale liquid. I lifted the glass to my lips and took a sip. It was slightly sweet and minty--refreshing. I took a bigger sip.

  Vohn continued his explanation.

  “We and other space-faring species have kept a close eye on the situation here on Earth. That’s how we knew your apocalypse was imminent. Of course, we’re not allowed to interfere in any way with the evolution of a young, developing species. But in cases like these, the death of a planet, we’re permitted to rescue some of you. It’s always just a few. Only those who are telepathic can make it across the road you just drove over.”

  “You said a war?” I asked again.

  In other circumstances, I would have felt stupid, but in my almost total confusion, I was beyond caring about that now.

  “Yes, the wars!” Dorg answered my question. “War is what happened to me as well. I didn’t make it out fast enough.”

  When Dorg spoke, I heard the same strange echoing as with the others, but it was much fainter. I turned and looked at him again. Hidden under longish curly brown hair, his face had been sideways to me. But now, he turned it directly toward me.

  In my stunned state, I didn’t react to what she saw, but it registered in my mind as disturbing. A pale-skinned face, except where there was no skin. The half of the face that had been turned away from me looked as if it had been cut away--and replaced with metal. A mechanical glass eye looked out at me from within the metal that flowed down from Dorg’s forehead to his neck and part of his shoulder.
On the other side of his face, a green human eye stared at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  There was nothing else I could say.

  Dorg looked at me without speaking for a moment.

  Then he said, “yes, you are sorry. I’m sorry about your planet too.”

  Through my mental fuzziness, something finally clicked in my mind.

  “You said there’s a nuclear war on Earth? That the Earth is about to be destroyed!” I asked, looking around at the entire group.

  “We’re sorry,” said Muurg. “That’s exactly what is happening right now. Your planet’s rival governments are destroying each other with nuclear weapons and at the same time destroying most life on the planet.”

  “What! But why?” I asked in stunned disbelief.

  My head was beginning to spin. I knew that things had been bad lately, but everyone said it was just a phase. It would pass, and then things would be back to normal. Everyone said there could never be a war inside the United States. Impossible!

  “Fear, greed, hatred, a belief in separateness, and other delusions. That’s why,” said Vohn.

  “No, no, no. That can’t be happening!” I said. “My family is there!”

  In that moment, I didn’t think about Joey. Instead, my family members, who I didn’t get along with and barely spoke to, were the most important people in the world. And now they were gone if what these people told me was true.

  I dropped my face into my hands and began sobbing uncontrollably.

  The pale blonde woman, Humm, sat down on the large couch between me and Vohn. She put an arm around my shoulder. Then she reached her other long arm out to the coffee table and picked up the beverage glass I’d been drinking from.

  “Drink more of this, Claire,” she said. “It will calm you. It contains a mild sedative. It’s helpful for people who experience shocks like what you’re going through.”

  I looked at the glass. Unlike many of my friends, I never drank alcohol. And I didn’t take drugs. It was one thing I had in common with Joey.

  Maybe the only thing, I thought now.

  A deep despair filled me. Despair for Joey, my family, all the people on Earth, all its animals, and all its life forms. A painful, unbearable despair. I took the drink from Humm and began gulping it down.

  “We’re moving away to a safe distance from Earth now. Would you like to see it?” asked Ereen.

  I looked up at the tall darker woman.

  “Moving away?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Ereen. “The land we’re on is our spaceship. And we’ll leave this solar system tomorrow. There’s nothing more we can do here. We can take you outside where you can get a last view of the Earth. But I’ll warn you, it might be painful. You’ll see it covered in the dark clouds of the bombs that are destroying it.”

  Despite feeling the calming effects of the tranquilizer, my hand shook. I put the glass back on the table.

  “You don’t have to see that if you don’t want to,” said Vohn. “But some people want to have that last sight of their planet. Some people need to see it in order for it to be real to them.”

  The strange echoing noises like people whispering was still mixed in with these people’s voices, but I’d gotten used to that now. Or maybe the effects of what was in my drink made everything seem more normal, even those echoes.

  “You’re right. I need to see that, even though I don’t want to. If it will make this seem real. Because none of this seems real,” I said.

  “Very well. We’ll all go. We’ll take the horses,” said Vohn.

  Chapter 4

  I walked with the group of much taller people and Dorg, who was several inches shorter than me. Again, I seemed to heard whispering sounds in my head. And then louder sounds like someone yelling from far away. The tall aliens--so they claimed to be--kept an eye on me, as if expecting me to fall down. I was exhausted and kind of fuzzy from the beverage they’d given me, but I made it to the grassy area where four horses grazed.

  Like the people they lived with, the horses were much larger than the Earth-sized version of the same species. I noticed that there was no fence to keep them in. As we approached, three more horses came running from out of the forest in the distance. Two large ones and two much smaller.

  Alien ponies, I guessed.

  The humming noises continued. It seemed to come from the direction of the horses as well as the people. And it grew louder when the new horses joined us.

  “Do you know how to ride?” Humm asked me. “And are you up to riding on your own right now?”

  “No,” I answered.

  I’d seen horses on Earth, but I’d never rode one. Only the wealthy could afford to keep them.

  “She can ride with me,” Vohn spoke up. “Will that be alright for you?” he turned and asked me.

  I looked up at the gigantic horse next to him. It towered above him, even though he was six and a half feet tall. The pale horse had a pinkish-orange cast, darker on its mane and tail. It gazed down at me with huge purple eyes. A loud humming buzzed again in my head.

  Vohn laughed. I didn’t know at what.

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “Good. Wait here for just a minute,” he said.

  I waited while all of the others walked away and into the open door of a tall wooden building nearby. I looked up to see the horse still staring down at me, so I reached up a hand to rub across its side. I’d had a strange feeling that was what the horse wanted me to do. The horse felt sleek and soft under my hand.

  Then the people came out carrying enormous saddles. All except for Dorg, who carried one that looked normal size to me.

  The saddle Vohn carried was twice the size of the other large ones. He hefted it easily on top of the horse. I looked up and saw that the saddle had two seats built into it.

  I stood there and questioned how I could possibly get up there.

  Will he throw me up too? I wondered.

  But Vohn unhooked a rope ladder from the seat in the back.

  “Can you climb this?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  These people must think I’m helpless, I thought as I started climbing up.

  It wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it would be. I wavered when I neared the top. But Vohn reached up to grasp me around the waist and steady me. Then I grabbed onto a padded bar between the two seats and swung myself up.

  I’d heard that horseback riding could be an uncomfortable experience if you weren’t used to it. But the cushioned seat was surprisingly comfortable.

  Vohn climbed onto the seat in front of me without using a ladder. He twisted around to face me.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

  “Yes. Let’s go,” I answered.

  Up close, I noticed the almost artistic perfection of his features. And his body was like a sculptor’s work too. A regret that we sat in two divided seats instead of one surprised me.

  I can’t believe I’m thinking about a man’s body at a time like this! I admonished myself.

  Vohn smiled at me and turned back around. He leaned forward on the horse and seemed to whisper in its ear, but I didn’t hear any sound, only that same humming noise in my mind.

  The horse started walking. Slow and steady, it led the way with the others following. Without Vohn giving it any apparent guidance, it went around the driveway and headed to the road I’d just drove on.

  When all the horses were on the road, they started moving faster. Vohn turned back to me again.

  “We’re going to speed up now,” he said. “OK?”

  “Sure,” I said, wondering why he didn’t think I could handle it.

  Do these people think I’m some kind of wimp? I thought. These horses are running fast, but not as fast as a car. Maybe they don’t know much about the latest automotive technology on Earth, I decided.

  We turned the corner of the road, and then the horse sped up even faster. Much faster than any car I’d ever rode in. I gripped the bar
in front of me tighter. The trees on either side of the road passed by in a blur. I looked over at the other running horses, and their legs were a blur too. And the abrupt edge of the land we were racing across was coming up fast. With nothing but empty space beyond it.

  I felt dizzier and lightheaded.

  Maybe I can’t handle this after all, I thought, just as the horses began to slow down again.

  They stopped about twenty feet from the end of the land. Relieved but suddenly worn out, I closed my eyes. I thought about the sight that was waiting for me over the nearby ledge.

  Maybe I don’t want to see this after all, I thought as I sat there. Maybe I can just pretend that none of this is real. None of this is happening.

  Around me, no one spoke. But again, I heard a lot of humming whispering noises. Now I thought I heard words within the humming.

  “Not ready,” I thought I heard. And “needs more time.” And “there is no more time.”

  The strange words, whether imaginary or real, broke me out of my silent funk.

  It’s true. I have to see this now, I psyched myself up and opened my eyes.

  Vohn turned around looked at me again. Concern was clear on his stunningly handsome face.

  “I’m ready to see it now,” I said. “Show me.”

  He didn’t say anything, but he faced forward again and leaned down on the horse’s neck. The side of his face rested against the back of the horse’s head.

  “Show us,” I thought I heard the words in my head.

  I must be going crazy, I thought. The stress of all this. I don’t know what’s real and what’s not real anymore. But I still need to see this, no matter what.

  Vohn straightened back up and turned toward me again. He reached a long arm all the way around me.

  “In case you get dizzy, I will hold you,” he said.

  I didn’t argue. Again, I was mad at myself for noticing how good it felt to have his arm around me.

  The horse walked right up to the edge of the land, and I forgot my self-blame. I looked down and saw the burning globe that was Earth. The bright sun far off from it at an angle lit one side, while another side was in darkness. But the dark clouds surrounding the entire planet made it clear that no one would survive this war. There would be no winner.