House of Midas

by Chloe Garner

  “There are no plants,” he said.

  “Not here,” Cassie said. “Nothing that would be a weed.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Olivia said. Troy frowned, looking around. How had he missed that?

  “This way,” Cassie said, taking a sharp swivel turn as they reached a larger roadway.

  The street was busy with people, shapes and structures so diverse that Troy couldn’t catalogue them. It felt like he couldn’t even see them. They just slid by his consciousness as he tried to grab key features, anything that would make him remember them.

  Cassie would have been able to tell him their coloring, key skeletal details, and likely evolutionary influences.

  He kind of hated himself. He was supposed to be better prepared for this, having studied foreign terrestrials most of his life.

  Aliens!

  One of them caught his eye, made eye contact, and made a small, informal gesture. He mimicked it, hoping that was right, and the encounter was over. He had such a rush of giddiness that he missed the next fifteen seconds.

  Cassie steered them through a double-wide doorway, one with glass doors that pushed open and swung shut just like they should have, and Troy and Olivia followed her to a small platform with a waist-high pole on it.

  “We all three need to fit up here,” she said. “Bunch in.”

  Troy waited for Olivia to step up, then he tried to get both his feet off the ground. He stumbled once and fell backwards, trying it again, but Cassie was already off, brushing past him and grabbing his elbow again.

  He looked around.

  The room was different.

  Bigger, more elegant, with looming space overhead, and a quiet, professional feel to it. Cassie approached a desk and spoke with the foreign terrestrial seated there, one with faintly mauve skin and flat features, if he had any features at all. The only orifices he seemed to have were the ones for three dark eyes that must have had a field of view that was well over a hundred-eighty degrees.

  Troy tried not to stare. The foreign terrestrial addressed him, but his interpreter hadn’t caught anywhere near enough language for him to understand. Cassie answered for him, then made a waving motion of some kind at the foreign terrestrial and took them back to the platform with the pole. She frowned.

  “That was just silly,” she said. “Olivia, you come with me. Troy, don’t move.”

  Olivia gave him a sharp look, then vanished. Troy stood, stunned, for a few seconds, then Cassie reappeared and pulled him up onto the platform.

  “Clearly this is only made for one person,” he said, nose to nose with her. She laughed and then the sense of space vanished. He looked around. Olivia was only a few steps away in a two-story room of glass and white, smooth furniture.

  “What is this?” Troy asked.

  “It’s a hotel,” Cassie said, going to the window like she’d expected it to be there. “And this is Ankara, the capital city of the dying race of Gana.”

  The window slid aside for her at a touch and she was out on a balcony, breathing air that no human had breathed before. Olivia went to join her before Troy did. He was still too overwhelmed that he was actually here.

  Six hours before, he’d been asleep in his bed.

  Great stone buildings, short but dense and impenetrable, sprawled as far as he could see. To his left and to his right, the height of the buildings increased considerably. They were on the edge of the center of the city, where the population density would start to spike and the pace of life would go up.

  Just being able to identify that settled his mind, and he started to see the details he’d been missing up until now.

  The plant life was yellow here, in thick chunks. City planners had left space between sections of building, like a hundred tiny central parks. The buildings were white and tan, and they were elaborate in quiet, functional ways, with color and pattern that often stretched well beyond a single building.

  “Wow,” Olivia said. He resented that she’d gotten to it first, because now he couldn’t say it. Cassie giggled and clapped her fingers, dashing back into the room. Troy and Olivia ignored her, taking in the foreign-familiar view. Just another city, but one unlike any they’d ever seen before.

  “I know you probably didn’t really want this,” Troy murmured, edging closer to her. “But I couldn’t imagine coming without you.”

  “Shut up, Troy,” she said, smiling out at the world. “Just enjoy it.”

  He grinned at nothing and they just stood, silent, until Cassie came back.

  “Put these on,” she said, handing each of them a set of spectacles. Troy frowned, but put them on as instructed.

  His vision swam, things flowing in and out of focus in wild patterns. Olivia gasped, and he held on to the edge of the balcony for balance as his inner ear squirmed.

  After a moment, though, his mind regained control and he realized that the glasses were trying to help him see. They focused on the things he was looking at, regardless of how far away it was, letting the things around it fade out of focus. He broadened his attention, and the focal zone broadened, as well.

  He still felt a bit ill, but he was getting the hang of controlling the glasses.

  And then he started to see.

  The world glittered below him in vibrant, clean colors. The vegetation caught gusts of wind that tossed amber shadows across the gold foliage, and smooth, gray streets wove a vital pattern through the city, like blood vessels, rather than a grid.

  “Up there,” Cassie said, pointing. The ground sloped up gradually, then with accelerating elevation, to the side of a mountain where a cluster of blue and green trees interrupted the gold plants. Focusing harder, he could make out a grand house perched on the mountainside.

  “That’s where we’re going tomorrow,” Cassie said.

  “What is it?” Olivia asked.

  “It’s where the living royalty of the Gana live,” Cassie said. “Jesse prefers to slum it, but I’m going to go up there and introduce us.”

  “And they’re just going to let us in?” Olivia asked. Cassie laughed.

  “They will because I’m Palta,” she answered. “And they’re going to know it immediately, unlike you guys.”

  “What’s Palta?” Olivia asked.

  “You think the US military ever asks what a race calls itself?” Cassie answered.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked. The world swam again and he snagged the glasses off. Olivia was still basking in the beauty of the city.

  “You didn’t need to know,” Cassie said.

  “You sound like Jesse,” Troy said. She laughed.

  “I am the ultimate test in nature verses nurture,” she said. “If you could extrapolate the results to humans.”

  He frowned at her and she grinned.

  “Troy,” she said, as though she wanted to shake him. “Look around. We are so far away from Earth that you don’t have the right units to measure it.”

  He breathed the clean, caramelized air and turned to look out over the city again.

  “I want to meet foreign terrestrials,” he said. “I want to see how they live here.”

  Olivia turned and leaned against the glass, pulling off her glasses slowly.

  “Troy,” she said. “Look at those.”

  She motioned to the glasses in his hand.

  “Have you thought at all about how they work? How much processing is going on, how the lenses are actively adjusting themselves, why they even fit your head? This is how they live.” She shook the glasses. “Look at these.”

  He looked at the slender frames in his hand.

  Too big. He was looking too big.

  If these had come into the lab, he’d have spent months looking at them and appreciating them, feeling jealous of the jumper who’d gotten to use them.

  He looked up at her, giddy again.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  “You guys want breakfast?” Cassie asked. “The people-watching here is unreal.”

  *******
**

  The path up to the great house of Gana was one not intended for motorized vehicles. Large, round stones were placed at intervals that would have been comfortable for walking over, had Troy been about two feet shorter. As it was, Troy felt like he was waddling along one of the most expensive, elaborate pathways he’d ever seen. In the ground in between the stones were threads of gold and white metal, small precious stones that glistened in the fragile, gold light. The sun was broadly overhead, but the thick gold air blocked out much of it, making it feel more like a lamp than the glaring sun he was used to. Troy’s shadow was not clear and sharp across the stones, but softer.

  The path wound back and forth up the increasingly steep slope, the patterns in the ground growing more elaborate, now like water running over rocks, now like a serpent’s scales.

  The foliage around them gradually changed from gold to green to blue, the plants more and more domestic, smaller, more intricate. Small flying animals went past in the plants, vibrant ones with odd little motions.

  “Aren’t there any predators here?” Olivia asked.

  “They’re up at the top of the hill,” Cassie said lightly, stepping from stone to stone like a cat.

  Troy considered that, then shook his head. He had no idea what to expect.

  Breakfast had been an experience he would remember for the rest of his life. Cassie ordered everything on the menu - he had no idea where she got money from, or even how she paid for the meal - and they had sampled all of it. Some of it he could barely swallow, but other dishes had gone back clean, they were so extraordinary.

  Some of it, he couldn’t remember because he’d been so enraptured with watching the diversity of species walking past the window. Even in the little shop, they had any number of chairs suitable for anatomies he couldn’t even imagine, chairs that reconfigured as needed to become straight-backed, four-legged L-shaped seats for three humans - two humans and a Palta - or sloping and S-shaped scant inches off the floor. The process was just assumed. Foreign terrestrials would enter the restaurant and someone would set up chairs for them without even asking how they wanted to sit.

  They just knew.

  Small miracle. They just knew.

  A tall, elegant foreign terrestrial with shaded skin and motion like a willow frond arrived and Troy leaned across the table to Cassie.

  “Surely that’s a Gana,” he said in English. It hadn’t taken but a few minutes at the table for them to catch on to the locally-used language, but they still spoke in mostly English at the table. Cassie shook her head.

  “No idea what species that is,” she said. “Not Gana.”

  Olivia watched the creature with admiration.

  “I’d love to look like that,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “He,” Cassie said.

  “He?” Olivia answered. “I thought you’d never seen one before.”

  Cassie shook her head and looked out the window, taking a sip of the hot drink that had been too strong for Troy.

  “I haven’t,” she said, “but there are certain biological structures that are key markers. Humans actually haven’t done a bad job cataloguing the most important ones, but he has some of the more subtle ones.”

  “Gender,” Troy said. It was a long-standing argument among the academics who ran alongside the developments of the portal program, gleaning anything the program would make public. “How common is gender?”

  Cassie flashed him a look that told him that she knew he was digging at a buried landmine, and that she knew that he knew it, too. She’d pressed her lips and looked out the window again.

  “I’m going to decline to answer that,” she said.

  “Chicken,” he said softly. She laughed without looking at him.

  He’d seen so much in the space of a few hours, more than he’d imagined in a lifetime. He wanted to write reports, just to get it all written down before he forgot any of it. How often had they mocked the reports from new jumpers, the sense of breathlessness as they reported even the most mundane of details? And here he was, desperate to write the exact same report, without so much as even having someone to read it.

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Olivia asked, at his elbow. He looked up at the sky. No stars, during the day. He wanted to see the stars.

  To see stars that weren’t his own.

  “It is,” he answered. “I’m still in shock.”

  She laughed.

  “I’m stuck in denial,” she said. “It isn’t real. It’s just a dream and I’m going to wake up. So I don’t have to think about it. I can just enjoy it. Maybe next she’ll tell us we can all fly.”

  “Peter Pan,” Troy murmured.

  “I’m not Peter Pan,” Cassie said from ahead of them. “I’m Wendy.”

  He wondered what that meant.

  He was preparing the question amid the dozens of quick-moving little distractions in the bushes and trees around them when they turned a final corner.

  The path narrowed again, now only wide enough that the three of them could have just walked comfortably alongside each other, but no more, and took one last sweeping curve through a curated lawn of tiny ornamental plants, many no larger than a grapefruit, in a wild variety of colors.

  “Impressive,” Cassie said, pausing to look around. “You know a lot of them aren’t indigenous.”

  “How can you tell?” Olivia asked. Cassie shook her head.

  “Too much, too fast,” she said, taking the next step forward. The path went through a wall of carved tan stone and disappeared, but the great buildings they’d seen from the city rose above the thick wall. Tan stone bedecked with sweeping curves of metal and glass in prismatic colors grew out of the blue forest.

  “They built it to be the greatest royal residence in the known universe,” Cassie said, “without being the biggest, the most ornate, or the most heavily fortified. The standard of taste for a millennium.”

  “Sounds like a beauty contest,” Troy said. Olivia made a nervous little motion at him as a pair of heavily-built foreign terrestrials appeared from nowhere inside of the gateway arch. Cassie stepped forward a bit more quickly, leaving distance behind her in front of Troy and Olivia.

  “I was assaulted the last time I was here,” Cassie called forward as she walked. “I assume you won’t make the same mistake as your lower brethren.”

  The two foreign terrestrials waited for her to get closer, their postures, for what little posture they had, not showing terribly much concern.

  They had broad, barreled backs and peaked scales that had a background of gold and a foreground pattern in red and blue. Long, wide mouths and strong shoulders, they were biped, but looked like they might be comfortable using their arms to run. Their fingers curled like they weren’t intended to ever be straight, but there was nothing uncivilized about them. They stood straight-backed with heads that were straight above their feet, and despite their towering height, neither of them seemed to stoop patronizingly or intimidatingly at Cassie.

  “We had been told that the Palta self-extinguished,” one of them said as he got close to Cassie.

  “They did,” Cassie answered. “But we’re hard to kill.”

  The other laughed, a rough noise, but one that was not without a certain musicality.

  “It’s been a long time since we’ve had a Palta here,” he said.

  “Eno-Lath Bron before he retired, I’d guess,” she said.

  “His successor,” the first one said. “You know Eno-Lath Bron?”

  “I consider his son a friend.”

  “Were they among…?” the second asked as the first peered around her back at Troy and Olivia. Cassie glanced back at them, giving them a small signal to join them, then turned back to the tall gold man with the scales and the row of pointy teeth.

  “We are hard to kill, but the security is set up to prevent anyone leaving the planet,” she said. “She shook her head. What happened was tragic, but we all understood it was necessary.”

  “How have you
stayed unknown all this time?” the first one asked. Cassie tipped her head to the side.

  “I’m Palta,” she said. The two guards looked at each other, then the first looked at Troy and Cassie again.

  “These are not Palta,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “They’re uninitiated. Not of any particular importance, other than that they are my friends.”

  “We will tell Kron that you are here,” the second said. “What name can we give him?”

  “I’m Cassie,” she said. “These are my friends Troy and Olivia.”

  The Gana made a quick conference and one of them turned away, moving back into the residence on short, powerful legs.

  “Why have you come to us now?” the remaining Gana asked as Troy and Olivia divided their time between exchanging glances and taking in everything around them. Troy was more and more confident that they didn’t belong here, but no one seemed to have noticed. Cassie wasn’t really Palta, no matter what her DNA said, and simply being a part of a species didn’t warrant a royal audience, Troy didn’t care who you were. Not uninvited.

  “We came to Gana to see it,” she said. “I’ve been here once before, but I’ve never been inside the royal residence. I want to see it.”

  The guard made a hand motion that would have looked like a dance move, if he hadn’t been such a pure-formed killing machine.

  “You said you were assaulted before,” he said.

  “Yes,” Cassie said. “Down in the city. A group of Gana tried to kill myself and my companion.”

  “We know they’re down there,” the guard said. “There are so few of us.”

  “Yes,” Cassie said. “I can understand.”

  The guard waited with them silently, and after another minute, Cassie turned to face Troy and Olivia.

  “They’re really just going to let us in?” Troy asked in English. “Just because you’re Palta?”

  “Of course,” Cassie said. “They’re one of the oldest species in the universe, but they respect what Palta are, just like Palta respect what they are.”

  “And what’s that?” Olivia asked. Cassie laughed.