by Hana Starr
Actually, as she hurried over, slipping and sliding on loose stones in her designer boots, grabbing at stumps to catch herself, she realized that she couldn’t see any openings at all. With the sunlight glaring so harshly against the metal she couldn’t really tell, but it all seemed to have been cast from a single mold. No way in or out.
What’s going on?
As she drew closer, she heard a faint whirring but it quickly fell away under the wind. An engine of some sort, she recognized. Then she was up the side of the hill, standing on the crest and looking at the fallen object from only a few feet away.
It was larger than she thought. It was longer than her and nearly as fall, looking flattened and yet oddly birdlike. And it was warm, emanating pulses of heat from deep within. The smoke had stopped, though.
“Is anyone in there?” Saffron said loudly, closing the last few steps and laying her hands on the metal hood. “Can anyone hear me?”
Suddenly, a sleek circle appeared on the top of the object. She snapped her hands back, watching with an open mouth and wide eyes as the circle appeared first as a slender line and then darkened before lowering in on itself slightly to form a panel. The panel slid into the rest of the roof, allowing her a brief moment to realize just how thick the metal was –at least as thick as her hand on this part- and then someone stood up.
It was a man, but not just any man.
He was dark-eyed and fair-haired, dressed in a strange suit of shining fabric and metal that left his arms and shoulders bared. He was slim, nearly as slender as a woman, but his exposed skin bulged with tight muscle. And when he shook himself, it was like watching a bird spread out its feathers.
“Are you hurt?” she asked, managing to find her voice. “Are you okay? Who are you?”
The man lifted his eyes to hers. His black eyes pierced her straight through, as bleak and knowing as the void. “So, it was true,” he said roughly, with a terribly strange accent. “Karree had said you spoke a language nearly identical to ours but I did not believe her.”
Her confusion deepened, along with a great deal of concern. “It’s going to be okay,” Saffron soothed, making a slow motion with her hands. “I think you must have hit your head. Can you just sit down?”
The man looked at her, almost seeming to be amused. She scanned him over as she reached into her pocket for her phone. He didn’t look injured but that didn’t mean he hadn’t hit his head.
“What is that?” he asked, and reached out to take her phone.
She protested, “Hey!” but he ignored her and turned it over and over in his hands before giving it back with a confused murmur about there being such strange technology here.
Here? Where was here compared to where he normally was?
Saffron tried again. “Sir?”
For some reason, that was what did it. He looked up, and she saw that his face had changed into a fierce mask of concentration. “I apologize for my strangeness. Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eban, commander of the Icari. I am representative of my people. Will you represent yours?”
She stared at him. “I’m…sorry. I don’t understand.”
He frowned a little bit. “Perhaps your civilization is not as technically advanced as I had thought. Your signal indicated otherwise, however?”
What signal? she wondered, and then had to take a step back to adjust to what she’d just thought. This man was obviously an alien, or at least seemed to think he was. He was the commander of some people, and he had crashed down here in her field after picking up some signals from somewhere. And her main concern was what kind of signal? Have I gone mad?
But, she had to admit there was no other way to look at things. This guy obviously wasn’t any government official that she’d ever heard of or seen before. He hadn’t flashed a badge or immediately started pushing her around. And so far as she could see, no one else had followed him here. Her whole life she had been taught nothing but acceptance of various ways of life, of the rhythms of how the earth moved, and now the biggest challenge she had ever faced was standing right here in front of her. He might not fit into her belief that the earth moved in circles, but so did the universe. So did every universe. Everything was interconnected and she’d been playing her part since the day she was born. Perhaps this just happened to be her next step.
Saffron ran her hand through her hair, adjusted her headband, and then nodded a little to herself as the strange, potential alien started to speak again. She would listen, and she would understand. “At first, we merely followed one signal. However, as we grew closer to this planet, we began to receive many signals!” He gestured, looking earnestly excited. “So many signals that our computers cannot receive them all swiftly enough. We also intercepted your communications broadcast. We knew by then that you were intelligent, but I cannot describe to you our astonishment when we discovered how similar our two civilizations were. And the sight of your planet only convinced us further.”
Saffron tried to follow along as quickly as she could, her adept mine pulling in information rapidly. They had intercepted some kind of broadcast. That had to mean the Arecibo message, a one-time broadcast sent far out into space that contained numbers, elements, DNA, and other assorted human-related information. She remembered being fascinated by aliens for a long time after learning of those various attempts to communicate with other lifeforms in the universe, and so that was where her information came from.
Fascinating to think it had finally found some use, and that the recipient was standing in her backyard!
“What was it about our planet, though?” she asked curiously. “If it’s okay to tell me. And why do you speak English so well?”
He, the alien man who called himself Eban, just shook his head. “I had the same question for you, as to how you have such mastery of Icarian speech. But, perhaps that is best left for another discussion.”
She had to agree. As much as she wanted to learn immediately, right at this moment, she was starting to feel like her head might explode.
Eban gestured around at the barren fields, the overgrown weeds and the two-foot-tall grasses, and then he pointed over at her garden. “This is why we came,” he said softly. “Why I am here. We have learned much in our few hours of studying. Your planet is so lush and full of life. You have plots of land everywhere upon which food grows, and your animals do not even have to be raised by hand to thrive! And then, there is you. We heard of you almost before anything else, and how you have done wonderful things for the life here.”
Embarrassment heated her cheeks. She looked away a little bit, suddenly feeling shy. “I was just doing what I love,” she explained. “And I ended up helping people. That’s not so uncommon or weird.”
“No,” the alien agreed. “You are correct in that, but the fact of the matter is that this is more than anything we could ever have hoped for. I need to bring you with me, back to my people.”
There it was. All this time she’d been waiting for this to go sour, and there it was. She backed away, stumbling a little as her heel hit a stone behind her. Eban moved as though to catch her, but she just backed up again. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere with you,” she said coldly, trying to hide her fear.
To her amazement, the alien held his hands up and out in the same gesture she’d used on him when she thought he was hurt. “Make no mistake, I would not force anyone to do anything against their will,” he reassured her. “It was not a demand, but perhaps I did not phrase it correctly. Please, will you tell me your name? I wish to speak with you as equals.”
Saffron stayed where she was, eyeing him warily. Her initial impressions kept getting interrupted and fading away too rapidly for her to get a good hold on him yet. Until she knew she could trust him, if that moment of epiphany ever came about, it was best to just keep her distance. “Saffron,” she replied.
“Saffron,” Eban repeated, tasting the word. “What does it mean?”
She shrugged a little bit. “It’s just a spice. For c
ooking.”
He looked a little puzzled about that, but didn’t push it. “Saffron, will you hear my plea?”
It was a plea, now. “I can’t promise anything.”
“Nor do I ask you to,” he replied. “All I ask is that you listen to what I have to say. My people do not have a home. We are up there, above your sky, waiting in a ship which carries the only of us left anywhere. Our home was destroyed by attackers who caught us unaware.”
That part came out a bit stiffly, though she didn’t think it was quite a lie. It sounded more like he was omitting something he felt was too unsavory for the moment. That tempered a bit more of her enthusiasm but something deep inside her was still tugging, urging her on to accept his offer before she’d even heard everything.
“Ever since then, we have just been wandering. We have a very specific low-gravity requirement but not much else, or I would have simply brought us all down here to settle. Your planet is exactly what we are looking for, but we would not be happy here. However, you are also what we have been looking for.
“If we find somewhere that is more suited to our needs, it will be lacking in another. We need someone who knows plants. We need a scientist who has expertise in areas which we are lacking. That would be you.”
“But why me specifically?” she challenged, narrowing her eyes and looking right back at him just as fiercely as he watched her. “There are plenty of scientists around here for you to choose from.”
“We learned your life and history from only a few hours of observation. You are obviously vastly more important than any other scientist that we have not heard of. And then there is the fact of your invention. You know how to make plants grow quicker. That will be important for a struggling remnant of a people such as us.”
He had a point, but an easy way around all this suddenly occurred to her. By this point, she had long since accepted the whole situation and didn’t feel any weirdness discussing it like she would the weather. That was just her way. “Why don’t I just tell you how to use the serum?” she suggested. “Even better, I’ll show you how to make it. The formula I use to make the plants grow faster, I mean.”
Eban shook his head however, and she wasn’t sure whether her disappointment and excitement was bigger. “We don’t need merely that. We need someone who can show us how to work the earth. Someone who can perform tests in the first place to let us know whether or not we might settle down at all. You are all of the above and more. I am asking you to come with us. Please.”
She hesitated. A path opened up before her, one of indecision and longing. The one route was clearly-marked and bright all the way down, a continuation of her fame and good fortunes. She could keep her house and continue to work at the lands as the seasons went by, acquiring that horse and those ducks she always wanted since there was a pond out there on her property, too. It would be a shame to leave this all behind just as she was beginning to enjoy it. Her father would like it. Clear-cut, relatively no risks. Her fate was in her own hands.
But, down that darkened side path, there was no knowing what might await her. There was only knowing what wouldn’t: a steady life, a horse, ducks, perhaps a family when she was ready. Perhaps that was the allure of it, the reason she knew her answer long before she actually thought through the pros and cons. This might be her death, but she was going to die someday anyway. That was just a fact of life which had to be accepted.
And her whole life, she had known where she was going. Perhaps it was time to follow in her mother’s footsteps and embrace the mystery.
“Okay,” she agreed. The decision paid for itself right then and there, just watching the wave of relief wash the stress from his face. Actually, in that instant, she thought he was quite handsome. Perhaps not the type of man she normally found attractive, but perhaps his stiffness could be excused.
Hell, look at me too, she thought. I’m not acting like myself right now, either.
They stood there in silence for a moment before she broke it, preventing any awkwardness or second thoughts from coming between them. “So, what do we do, now? Do I…go back with you now?”
Eban shook his head, leaving her relieved and disappointed. On the one hand, she wanted the time to prepare but on the other, she really didn’t want to have second thoughts. Never before had she broken a promise but now she was just as scared that he would change his mind, too. But all he said was, “The pod is calibrated only for my needs currently. And do you not have any loose ends to tie up? I would understand that if you did not live in such a place, but all this belongs to you.”
Saffron just shook her head in response. She had no boyfriend, her parents were both dead by now –her mother of cancer, and her father by his own hand- and the neighbors treated her like…an alien.
Smiling a little now, she said, “I’m good whenever you come back.”
“I will be as swift as I can,” he promised, and then turned to his craft. “You may wish to stand slightly back. Perhaps several hills over, actually. The thrust is quite powerful and it would be a shame to hurt you.”
Something lilted tenderly in the back of his voice, and she wasted no time in doing what he said. From her perch in a ditch between gentle hills, she watched as Eban climbed back into the pod. The ceiling panel slid back into place, sealing so firmly that she couldn’t remember where it had been only a second later. Then, it rose up with a whir and a blast of flame that made her turn her face away even from such a distance.
In the end, she missed the actual takeoff because while her face was turned away, the ground heaved and knocked her over again. By the time she brought her dizzy head back up again, there was nothing but a plume of smoke trailing up high into the sky to remind her of what used to be here.
Well, that and the gigantic hole in the ground.
Shaking her head, she held her nose and breathed out hard to unpop her ringing ears. She sat there on the ground for nearly ten minutes, just mulling over the events, before pushing herself to her feet. Clenching her fists around her determination, she nodded and started to head inside. There were some things that she did need to take care of, just to make her disappearance easy on those who were going to be slightly affected by it.
For once, she was glad at how far away she was from her neighbors. While it saddened her that they would never be close enough to her to realize that she was nothing at all like the stuck-up celebrity millionaire the newspapers made her out to be, she was glad that none of them would come out to investigate the strange sights and sounds.
They might wonder, because there was no hiding the streak of fire that Eban’s ship left as it came and went, and the plume of smoke was spreading out before dissipating, but they wouldn’t come.
Returning inside her house, she shut the door, cracked her knuckles, and set down to work.
Chapter Four
When she woke the next morning after a long night of writing down a will that parceled out her land to her various neighbors in equal amounts, everything had changed. She wasn’t in her bedroom, but in a sort of medical bay. Her first thought was confusion and fear, wondering what had happened to her, but then she remembered the day before and started to get excited. That excitement was tempered with disappointment that she hadn’t been awake for the actual process of being picked up, but that hardly mattered when she started looking around and taking the sight in with greater detail.
It was a large, round, clean room overcast with blue lights that played daintily over the tiles and various pieces of medical equipment. Somehow, she liked the sight of this room even though it reminded her of the hospitals where her parents died. The equipment, beeping monitors, and various information-flooded screens were all rather serious but the lighting soothed her somehow. The shadows were mellow, dulling any harsh edges. And though there were several rows of beds all across the room, they were all empty but for hers –though each was as plush and fluffy as the last.
She was so comfortable that she could have laid her head back down an
d gone to sleep again but that was a bit of an impossibility at the moment. There was too much to do, too much to see.
Trying to sit up, Saffron suddenly realized that, despite her comfort, there were strange lines of pressure across her chest and stomach whenever she moved. Her arms were free, however; grabbing the blankets and thrusting them away, she saw there were straps holding her down. The fear returned, but she could have smacked herself for being stupid about what was quite obviously a normal nursing procedure. Even on earth, patients were strapped in to keep them from rolling around and hurting themselves.
And she was apparently free to undo them as she liked, so she did.
Immediately, she felt a lightness overtake her whole body now that she wasn’t held down. It was like floating in her dreams, but she wasn’t exactly getting any lift. It was just as though her limbs felt lighter rather than heavier. As if she tried to drop them, they might head in the opposite direction.