REGENESIS

by D. Scott Dickinson

  The leader cringes against the stony wall of the band’s retreat and warily awaits the return of light. When it finally chases away the shadow, he makes an unexpected find.

  The blood-spattered moonstones that have been their guide are gone. Worse, the band emerges into the place where they began their valley trek.

  Somehow, they have been led into an endless circle. The leader knows it is the work of the spiteful spirits that have so haunted his wakeful sleep.

  The moonstones have misled them, and the leader motions his band to follow the valley wall as a reliable guide to its far end. Disheartened, they once again commence the trek to find a way out of this cursed place.

  And once again, the darkness finds them only a short distance from where they started.

  This time, they find a larger recess at the base of the cliffs and retreat into its depth. Only, there is no back wall as the cave leads them into a rocky tunnel whose phosphorescence lights their every step upward.

  The climb is long and arduous and soon, fatigued by their valley trek and the steepness of the tunnel’s incline, the weary band stops to rest.

  One by one, they drift asleep.

  The tympanic beat of trickling water falling on stone greets the leader as he stirs awake. The rocky walls are bulging toward them as water begins spewing from a spreading, spidery lacework of widening cracks and fissures!

  His urgent cries roust the band, and they bolt upward as the section of tunnel behind them collapses in on itself in a gurgling gush of churning torrent.

  The race is on!

  As the band sprints farther upward, each receding section of the tunnel behind them implodes into an angry cauldron of swirling water. Glancing back, the leader sees a rising column of water erupting up the remaining cave after them.

  Sensing his panic, the band makes a mad dash to stay ahead of the threat licking at their rapidly retreating heels.

  Meantime, the walls of the cave ahead of them are beginning to bulge and crack, and the farther the band goes the narrower the tunnel becomes until, finally, it cannot be passed at all.

  Just as hope appears to abandon them, the band comes upon a narrow lateral opening in the remaining wall and, one-by-one, they squeeze through it into a large cavern whose dry, level ground slopes gently upward. As the last of the band emerges into the cavern, the wall behind him crashes down to seal their escape.

  The leader urges the band upward, over the rising slope. They spill out onto a dusty, open desert forming the roof of the valley. Fleeing from the mouth of the cavern, they immediately strike out in a direction away from the valley’s rim.

  The earth trembles beneath them and, reminded of the temblors in his glacial valley, the leader motions the band deeper into the high desert. As he does, the band hears a loud clap and, turning, watch in horror as the valley’s edge collapses and the earth opens into a yawning rift.

  Forever barring their return to the ensorcelled coomb and the spiteful spirits dwelling there. Awed by the mysterious tectonic shifting, collapsing and cracking of the earth, the leader knows now there is no going back.

  What the leader cannot know is the greater mystery unfolding far above him in the heavens suspended between two suns.

  Chapter 4. Marooned!

  After its long and patient wait, the telescope greets the arriving spacecraft it summoned those many months ago. Meantime, the Cosmos crew has carefully and thoroughly prepared for immediate deployment to the planet.

  First, though, a one-person orbiter scout-craft fires its thrusters and launches toward the tiny moon. The piloting earth science mission specialist will take the small satellite’s atmospheric readings while the Cosmos spacecraft makes its initial landing on the mother planet.

  The pilot sets the scout-craft’s course toward the hidden side of the moon, out of view from the exoplanet where his crewmates will land.

  Under the watchful eye of the telescope, the Cosmos spacecraft disappears into the giant planet’s violet-red-yellow clouds as the scout-craft vehicle drops into low orbit around its tiny moon. At that very moment . . .

  Disaster strikes!

  As the mission specialist clears the moon’s polar shroud, an urgent alarm cries out on his monitor.

  Cosmos is sending frantic distress signals, which grow fainter and then disappear altogether. Culminating in lethal wind, temperature and toxicity readings, the spacecraft transmissions come to an abrupt stop. They vanish from the scout vehicle’s monitor, and suddenly the mission specialist is . . .

  Alone!

  But before he can process the dire implications of the tragedy, the mission specialist is overwhelmed by the unfamiliar scene unfolding below.

  Clearing the polar cloud-bank, the orbiter flies over a teeming biosphere of vivid color.

  From its blue-green ocean to a great rift valley, the planetoid boasts a riot of life. And, as the mission specialist glances at his vehicle’s CCL monitor, he sees nothing but positive readings: pristine air quality, moderate temperatures and abundant sweet, brackish and salty waters.

  The solo pilot carefully takes stock of his situation.

  He knows, once landed, his craft will never rise again.

  He knows the Cosmos spacecraft is gone.

  He knows even were a rescue mission attempted, it would not reach this planetary system in his lifetime. Which, in any event, promises to be solitary and brief.

  Knowing these things, the mission specialist resolves to use every remaining advantage to his benefit.

  For him, the mission objective has changed from discovery of alien life to preservation of his own. And he realizes survival hinges on his knowledge of what lies below.

  His greatest immediate advantage is his ability to gather information on a global scale about the unknown world he is entering. Thus, he delays setting down on its surface and, instead, continues to orbit—gathering vital intelligence as he goes.

  His new world is dominated by a single supercontinent whose unbroken land mass stretches from pole to pole.

  The northern hemisphere appears to be divided into five distinct biomes:

  An arctic region defined by the boundary of the strato-clouds;

  A rugged and barren tundra between the polar ice mass and the actinic northern edge of a heliotrope necklace of forest;

  A high desert transected by a network of serpentine rivers and dry-bed valleys;

  Immense grasslands covering most of the land’s girth; and

  A much narrower belt of achingly bright-green tropical forest at its equator.

  All girdled by a vast ocean covering nearly half the moon’s surface and washing up on the great continent’s eastern and western shores.

  He is awed by the perfect symmetry of this binary world of earth and water.

  The geography of its southern hemisphere is a mirror image of the northern half of the globe. With two dramatic exceptions:

  A singular, bright-scarlet continental rift valley runs through the midst of the southern pampas, dominating the middle latitudes of that hemisphere; and

  The cloudbank enshrouding the southern polar region is pierced by great spires of crystal ice, refracting the rays of two suns into a shimmering aurora of spectral splendor.

  As his scout-craft flies in low lunar orbit from the equator to the southern polar region, he marvels at the vastness of the great blood-red valley, ripped across the hemisphere like an angry, gashing wound.

  He is struck by the familiarity of the remaining sub-polar landscape, a replica of the temperate and frozen zones he has charted between the equator and the northern pole.

  And he is dazzled by ribbons of green and red streaming from the peaks of ice above the polar clouds, as if heralding his arrival . . .

  Like the welcoming dawn of a new world.

  It is a global panorama that fires the curiosity and imagination of the mission specialist, who views it through the scientific lens of his university training and research as a geophysicist.

  As he c
atalogues the features of the great land mass below, the mission specialist is reminded of accounts he has read about the great unitary supercontinent of Pangaea that straddled earth’s late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. Before hidden plate-tectonic forces ripped it apart into the separate continents that ultimately came to divide the peoples and cultures of his world.

  Looking down on this new Eden, he wonders if it conceals creatures like himself and, if so, whether they are more unified from having to share the same continent among themselves.

  Fear abandons his thoughts as he learns more about the topography of this strange moon. While he grieves the tragic loss of his crewmates, he is thrilled with the mystery and promise of this richly populated new world he will call his own.

  The final leg of the global mapping mission takes him across the equator into the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Maintaining his course due north, he soon finds himself flying over open ocean as the continent’s eastern coast bends in a markedly westward direction.

  The only distinctive feature breaking the monotony of the vast and otherwise vacant surface of the sea is a single island. Even under a cloudless sky, he is too high to discern any movement or sign of life, save its green glow from the flora covering steep slopes and level bottomlands between the hair-width reflection of white sand beaches.

  He is intrigued by its singular topography—conical mountains that resemble the extinct volcanoes of his world, a reef-like corona encircling the island and winking back at him like a jeweled diadem—all surrounded by swirling eddies of ocean spinning away from the reef.

  Turning westward, he dismisses the curious island as too isolated and unsuitable for landing.

  Focused on his quest for personal survival, the man gives no further thought to the source of a more important quest that will help conceive the future of the new world he is entering.

  Leaving the mysterious island behind, he flies westward a great distance before encountering a curious smattering of green, gray and ecru specks. Except for their decidedly arc-like geometry, they remind him of a random splatter of ink across the blue-green vellum of ocean below. But as he flies farther westward, they assume a discernible pattern forming a shank-like line at the northern end of the arc which, at its other end, terminates in a large, slash-shaped island looking for all this world like a barb.

  He records them in his journal with the notation: Fishhook Archipelago.

  Like beads on a string, they sweep north-by-west into an immense bay opening into the eastern gut of the vast super-continent.

  While he is intrigued by the presence of the bay and the broad deltas of estuaries linking it to the many rivers draining through the wide marshes along its tidal flats, he does not linger.

  Hugging the eastern coast of the great continent, he flies directly over a long chain of barrier islands separating the bay from the sea.

  Leaving the bay and its barrier islands behind, he continues to the northern edge of the temperate latitudes, striking out due west for many leagues before locating a suitable landing site.

  Reassured by the smooth and open landscape, he prepares the orbiter for its dead-stick landing.

  Gimballing the small orbital maneuvering engines, he “backs” the scout-craft into a stern-first position so its speed brake and vertical stabilizer lead in the direction of flight. Then, he fires the hypergols and punches in the coordinates of a level plateau on the high desert next to a dry-bed river valley.

  The coomb extends southward from a broad mesa which, oddly, appears to be held aloft by a lacy breastwork of palisading vertical vines.

  Setting the spacecraft down across from a curious rift bordering the valley, he is heartened by the thrumming reassurance of nearby waterfalls.

  Stepping out onto the dry, solid surface, he celebrates his survival and welcomes the possibilities of this strange world.

  A world which, he suspects, holds more in store for him than he can ever imagine.

  Chapter 5. Alien Species

  The scout-craft’s arrival is unobserved. Its pilot is alone in this desert realm.

  Without hesitation, he sheds his helmet and breathes in the pure, oxygen-rich air. The rest of his flight suit quickly follows.

  Unencumbered, he re-enters the spent vehicle and collects every useful thing he can carry: backpack containing his spare lightweight flight suit, knife and hand-hatchet, miniaturized fire extinguisher, ceramic water bottle, 24 MRE meal packets. And, most important, the rough sketch he made of the different zones and terrains observable from low lunar orbit.

  Thus equipped, he abandons the lifeless craft and strikes out on foot toward the sound of falling water.

  .

  At the same time, drawn by the same inviting sound, the exhausted, disoriented refugee band is taking shelter in a deep cavern behind the waterfall. There, they hunker down to rest.

  Arriving at the fall, the man tentatively tastes the water and finds it sweet and refreshing. He steps out of his clothes and lets the wet, stinging shower bathe and massage his stiff limbs and tight, knotted shoulders.

  Refreshed and hopeful, he lifts his arms in supplication and loudly sings out his thanks to a beneficent fate that has rescued him from the sterile vacuum of space and set him down in this new Eden.

  Jolted from his rest, the band’s leader springs to the cavern entrance and, peering through the waterfall, beholds a hairless creature, anatomically not unlike himself, raising its arms and dancing in the bright light. Fearing this new apparition is somehow connected to the spiteful spirits they left behind in the darkness of the coomb, he silently withdraws farther into the cave. Motioning the band to remain quiet and still until the new threat passes.

  Exhausted himself, the man dresses quickly, consumes one of his MREs and lies down in a dry, shallow, nearby depression some earlier iteration of the waterfall carved in the rock ages before finding its current course. Soon, darkness overtakes the world around him.

  In the depth of slumber, he does not see the furry band file silently past him, each pausing to marvel at the sight of so hairless a creature, as they make their way out into the dim light of early dawn. When he does awaken, light is abroad in the land, and he is astonished to see a closely ranked line of smudged footprints in the soft, wet earth bordering his stony berth.

  Filling his water bottle and quickly consuming a second MRE, he sets off on a mission to follow the footprints and discover their source. While smudged, the prints are not unlike his own and, he reasons, their authors might be bipeds similar to himself.

  He does not have long to wait before discovering the unknown creatures.

  As soon as he leaves the falls and regains the openness of the high desert, he spots a dozen or so furry bipeds in the distance. They are headed for what appears to him to be a sea of tall grassy, reed-like plants. Dismayed by their head-start, he redoubles his speed to overtake them before they can disappear into the high grass.

  While the band is determined to do just that, the man is much the faster runner. He soon reaches the wall of grass. Well ahead of the band. And there, he waits.

  Almost immediately, the leader motions the band to halt and walks ahead toward the man. Who is struck and reassured by the peaceful aspect and unthreatening demeanor of the fur-covered creature.

  When the leader approaches to within a few feet, he pauses and raises both arms in much the same manner as he observed the man do at the falls. Responding in kind, the man mimics the other’s gesture. And he extends his outstretched arms toward the leader, who does the same.

  Then, it happens!

  Like Michelangelo’s Adam reaching out at the Creation to touch the very hand of God, they, too, meet hands in this epic, seminal contact between alien species.

  Their grasp is firm, respectful and reciprocal, and both sense this encounter marks a new beginning and a mutual destiny. Pointing back to his band, the leader motions the man to follow him. And the hairless newcomer is embraced by all.

  Thus
begins an odyssey of alien species, joined as one, across a mysterious and menacing world.

  The man walks side by side with the leader as he motions the band toward a narrow opening in the grass wall. Together, they follow the open pathway leading like a tunnel through the thickness of the reedy stalks.

  The path takes them into a silent, still and sunless world in which the only sound is the soft tread of their footsteps and the only air movement is the soft breathing of the alien intruders.

  After a lengthy and arduous trek, the path branches in two. The leader kneels and studies the ground. After examining the entries to both paths, he motions the band to absolute silence and perks his ears up in both directions. Then, after listening for just a moment, he strikes out confidently in the righthand tunnel and beckons his fellows to pick up the pace.

  Despite his years of physical training and rigorous conditioning, the man has difficulty keeping up as the members of the band glide swiftly and effortlessly along the path. While he is the swifter sprinter, they are tireless marathoners able to endure long, arduous treks without tiring.

  Thankfully, it is not long before the leader brings them to a rill running across the path, and they stop and drink deeply from this fortuitous source of fresh, sweet water.

  As the man stands, unable to drink any further, he is surprised to see the other creatures continue to drink . . . and drink . . . and drink. In fact, they appear to take no notice of him until he produces his water bottle, bends down and fills it.

  Whereupon, the creatures spring to their feet and inquisitively touch the bottle with gestures of excitement and wonder. By way of explanation, the man lifts the bottle, takes a few sips and holds it aloft for all to see before once again refilling it from the small stream.

  When he clips the full bottle back on his belt, the creatures seem to lose interest and, to his amazement, continue drinking from the stream.