“How about, everything?” Bower cried in reply, to which Elvis laughed.
“What’s the worst that could happen?” he asked as she walked forward and stood in front of the proboscis. Mucus oozed around her boots.
“We could die.”
“We could,” he agreed.
Why did he have to agree? That really didn’t help. He was supposed to say something encouraging.
Bower stood there realizing that with one step she would move from her world to another, from the coarse, gritty, battleship-grey flight deck of the USS William Lawrence into a living creature that had traversed the heavens. She took a step, feeling the soft, spongy inside of the trachea beneath her boots, a stark contrast to the firm deck of the warship.
Bower reached out with her hand, leaning to one side so she could use the inside of the proboscis for balance as she stepped into the creature. It didn’t feel right to be standing on soft tissue. Everything about what she was doing screamed, No. She wanted to turn and run, but Elvis was right. There was nothing to fear. Her fear was of the unknown, it was irrational. The inquisitive doctor within pushed her onward.
No sooner had Bower’s other foot left the deck of the warship than Stella rushed past, twirling across the side and then the roof of the windpipe as she passed Elvis.
Bower felt the proboscis lift off from the deck of the Lawrence. She couldn’t help but look back. She watched as the deck of the warship dropped away rapidly. The proboscis was being withdrawn, its mouth closed like a sphincter, forcing her to move on. The cartilage-like rings were no more than twenty feet apart, but Bower struggled in the soft tissue in between. It was hard to keep her footing and she fell to her knees. Thick mucus covered her trousers.
“Well,” she said, accepting a sticky, gooey hand from Elvis to help her stand. “I guess things could be worse.”
“That’s the spirit,” Elvis replied.
Stella returned. Bower assumed it was Stella, but she wasn’t sure when another two creatures appeared beside the first alien. It was impossible to tell them apart, although they probably thought about human’s the same way. The creature she assumed was Stella picked up Elvis and carried him away, only he was floating on a sea of constantly moving fronds gently slapping against his back. As the creature moved, its arms became legs, wheeling backwards and transforming into arms again as they came around yet again to carry Elvis on.
“Oh,” he yelled. “Crowd surfing. I love it.”
Bower held out her hand, wanting to say she was fine, that she’d make it on her own, but there was no discussion to be had. Another creature wheeled toward her, engulfing her and raising her up.
She lost sight of Elvis, which worried her.
As she was carried along she called out, “This is like being massaged by a car wash.”
“Just go with it,” Elvis yelled back, and Bower felt comforted hearing his voice.
To her, being carried by these creatures was the wrong term. Rather than being carried, it felt like the creature never really got her in the right position to hold her properly. She was constantly falling backwards, sliding off as the mass of fronds gently prodded and slapped at her back, keeping her from slipping to the gunky floor. If walking was falling and not hitting the ground, being carried by Stella was akin to being a lumberjack rolling on a log without slipping and getting wet.
And which one was Stella?
Bower noticed the third creature remained between her and Elvis, traveling upside down on the ceiling, and the central core of the creature was larger than either of those that carried them on. That had to be Stella. Rather than committing herself to either of them, Stella was overseeing both of them.
A rhythmic pulse filled the air, deep and resonant. Bower knew the limits of human hearing extended from a mere twelve cycles per second up to twenty thousand hertz. Whatever this was, it only just reached the lower register. Each pulse was roughly thirty seconds apart, but with each pulse, Bower felt the alien craft push higher into the sky.
“Feels like we’re climbing a roller-coaster,” Elvis cried from somewhere ahead of her.
“Yeah,” she yelled, trying to compose her thoughts. “Did I ever tell you how much I hate roller-coasters?”
Although she couldn’t hear Elvis clearly, she was sure he was laughing. And in some ways that was good, that was what they both needed, to distract each other from all that was transpiring around them.
They emerged from the fleshy proboscis into the inside of a large dome towering hundreds of feet above them. It took Bower a few seconds to realize where they were. Whatever this creature was, they were in or on what seemed to equate to the head, but they were still inside the creature, inside the giant bladder providing buoyancy.
Stella’s companions let them down gently, rolling them over the top so they descended on their feet. Bower was relieved to find the ground was dry. She wiped the mucus from her trousers and hands, hoping she wasn’t breaching some alien protocol by wiping her hands on the warm, leathery ground.
“Home,” Stella said, coming before them, confirming for Bower that she had been guiding the others as they carried the two humans up from the warship.
Bower watched in awe as the tiny insects that comprised the heart of the three alien creatures abandoned their spiky red structures, leaving them standing to one side, inert. The insects swarmed across the uneven ground, moving toward the front of the massive floater. As Bower and Elvis walked forward, they saw a cavity before them filled with millions of the tiny creatures, spanning an area easily the size of a basketball court. What had been Stella, to their minds, mingled seamlessly with the sea of tiny creatures below them.
“Look at the turns and folds, the crevasses and channels,” Bower said, pointing at the living, pulsating mass before them. “There’s structure here, an interconnected network much like a human brain.”
Again, a pulse drove the floater higher. The pulses were coming more regularly now, every ten seconds or so. Bower found she had to watch her footing as each pulse drove so hard she had to fight from falling to the ground.
She could see through the semi-transparent membrane out across the indistinct ocean. Clouds dotted the horizon in the distance, but along with the sea they appeared tinted purple through the skin of the bladder. The muted shades reminded her of the view through a pair of designer sunglasses.
The floater was already well above a cluster of fluffy clouds drifting with the wind. Bower tried to recall the different types of clouds and the various heights at which they drifted, but all she could remember was that cumulus were white and puffy, like a pinch of cotton wool, while cirrus clouds looked like a streak of white paint daubed on the sky.
The craft passed through fine wisps of vapor, cirrus clouds barely visible as smudges against the darkening beyond. They had to be somewhere around twenty thousand feet up. To one side, the coast of Africa appeared as a long, jagged line on the horizon.
Elvis didn’t seem too bothered by the pulsing thrust of the alien spacecraft. Bower followed him as he walked around the sloping brain cavity to the front of the alien vessel. There, facing forward, was a set of seats.
“What the hell do you make of these, Doc?”
Bower blinked a couple of times at the sight, trying to process what she was seeing. The seats looked man-made. The sharp lines, repeating square shapes, and straight tubular frame were out of place within the organic structure. Bower wondered if they had been ripped from the fuselage of an aircraft. The dull grey frame supported a row of ten military cargo seats, seemingly identical to those in the Osprey.
Bower was struggling to walk, her knees were on the verge of buckling beneath the pulses. Every five seconds the craft surged higher.
Elvis examined the thin, canvas padding on the seat, the seatbelt and buckle.
“Looks new.”
“Looks deliberate,” Bower replied, dropping down into one of the seats, relieved to rest her legs as another pulse thrust the craft higher.
“You think they got these from the Osprey?”
“The design, maybe,” Bower replied. “Stella must have figured we would think this was comfortable.”
“Damn,” Elvis replied. “We should have demanded an upgrade to First Class.”
Bower was struggling for breath now the floater pulsed every two to three seconds. Above them, they could see the massive bladder being drawn back into the body of the craft.
They were seated at the blunt end of the living alien vessel, with just a thin membrane in front of them. Cirrus clouds soared low beneath them. The curvature of Earth was apparent, as was the darkening sky.
“Just like the seats on a roller-coaster,” Elvis said.
“Yeah, just like a roller-coaster,” Bower replied, pulling the seatbelt harness over her shoulders. “Only this roller-coaster is passing through fifty thousand feet.”
Elvis laughed.
The pulsating thrust continued to increase in tempo, driving them on several times a second. Finally, the pulses merged, becoming indistinguishable and the thrust became continuous. Bower felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. She took short breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. Her arms felt like lead weights beside her, while her neck and head were pushed back into the headrest.
Bower felt light-headed. She focused on clenching her arms and legs, trying to use her muscles to keep the blood from rushing away from her head.
She could feel her body being propelled onward, accelerating upward. Her face felt stretched, her cheeks pinned back, and still the alien vessel thrust them on.
Suddenly, the pulsating engines eased and Bower felt like she was going over the top of a roller-coaster and plunging down the far side. Her eyes were shut. She didn’t want to look. She had to look. She opened her eyes and saw Earth curving beneath her, stretching out as smooth as a bowling ball.
“Oh, dear God,” Elvis mumbled.
At first, Bower didn’t notice the physical change around her, but she was no longer anchored to the seat. She was so distracted by the sensation of falling that all other considerations faded. This was worse than jumping out of a plane with a parachute. She couldn’t even begin to tell herself everything was going to be all right. Bower felt as though she was plunging down an elevator shaft or falling from a skyscraper, falling in a dream, a nightmare from which she desperately wanted to wake. In the darkness of night, she kept waiting to hit the ground, but the ground never came.
Even in retrospect, Bower couldn’t identify whether the view around them changed smoothly or abruptly, all she knew was once there had been an alien spacecraft, now there was nothing, nothing between her and the dark void of space.
Elvis had his eyes shut, she remembered that, but the alien spacecraft had disappeared. Whereas before the alien membrane in front of their seats had given her a tinted view of reality, now she could see clearly.
The horizon ran in an arc before her, cutting through the darkness, separating the night below from the pitch black of space. It would take her some time to get used to having no fixed point of orientation, but initially she thought the planet was on an angle, sloping away steeply to her right. That she was slowly turning wasn’t apparent at first.
A hazy blue line traced the horizon, revealing how perilously thin Earth’s atmosphere was as seen from orbit. The gently curving planet looked serene. What little she could see in the darkness looked flattened, as though there were no elevation, no mountains or valleys.
Clouds and coastlines curved with the planet, catching her eye not because they were familiar, but because they looked stretched and elongated. A mesh of lights lit up a city off to one side and Bower wondered where they were relative to the various major cities on Earth.
She felt small.
The pitch black of space was ominous, foreboding. Even the stars seemed further away, which didn’t make sense to her, and yet there they were, static pin-pricks of light fighting off the eternal darkness.
Bower clenched at the straps running over her shoulders. Her knuckles were white with terror. She looked at Elvis. He’d opened his eyes and was staring straight ahead, trying not to look at anything in particular.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck,” he repeated silently to himself.
It was only as she was looking at him she realized there was no seat beneath either of them. The straps she thought she was holding onto were the bunched folds of her own clothes. Bower put her hand down, wanting to touch the stiff, hard cushion beneath her, but her fingers grasped at nothing.
She was floating freely in space.
In her initial panic, she turned only to find she kept turning. Bower twisted the other way, trying to stabilize herself.
She watched as her hands floated up before her, drifting as though they had a mind of their own. Bower felt as though she were swimming, floating in deep water. Her body naturally moved into a neutral, fetus position, with her thighs out in front of her.
She breathed deeply, calming herself. She had drifted to one side and couldn’t see Elvis, but she could hear him still cursing under his breath.
“Hey,” she said.
Bower wanted to add something else but she was at a loss as to what. She was disoriented physically, mentally and emotionally, unsure quite what to think as the stars rolled past her blurred vision.
With each motion, the horizon shifted. Any notion of up and down dissolved. She reached out with her hands, stretching out her legs, trying to steady herself. If a skater could spin faster by drawing in their limbs, she sought to slow her motion by extending hers. Her heart was racing. She needed to calm down.
A hand rested on her shoulder, turning her gently to one side.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Elvis said, and she could hear him trying to suppress a gag reflex.
“Try to look at something in the distance,” she said. “Just like at sea. Try not to move.”
Elvis didn’t answer. He looked pale.
“Breathe slowly, and keep your eyes on some fixed point.”
Typical bloody doctor, she thought, great advice for someone else, but never advice you’ll take yourself. Bower turned slowly, trying not to subject herself to any quick motion. She tried to pick a point in the distance, but everything was in motion. She too was struggling with the urge to vomit. A sickening feeling welled up within her stomach. It felt as though her insides had become unhinged. Not only did her hands and legs float freely but so did her innards.
Elvis couldn’t help himself. He vomited. The contents of his stomach sprayed outward in a thick stream. Bower expected his spew to arc, but it projected in a straight line.
His stomach muscles contracted and he spewed again. Bower noticed he was drifting away from her. She reached out, grabbing at his loose shirt.
The sick continued to drift away. Bower watched, wanting to see what it would hit, but it simply kept going as though there were no boundary, no wall enclosing them, and yet that wasn’t possible.
Elvis wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Small drops of spew floated before him. The smell got to her, making her feel green. She couldn’t appreciate how remarkable it was to see fluids floating there undulating in globules of various sizes.
“I don’t understand,” Elvis said. “What’s happening?”
“Ah,” Bower began. “It appears we’re in orbit.”
“Where are they? Where’s Stella?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
As she gazed into the distance, the spew faded from sight, drifting out into space. Distances were impossible to judge, but she figured she lost sight of it somewhere around a fifty yards.
“Are we still in the floater?” Elvis asked.
“I don’t know,” Bower replied.
“How can this be?” Elvis asked. “If we were in space, we’d die. There’s no air.”
“At a guess,” she said, “I’d say they’ve given us front-row seats and are di
storting our view. They probably think they’re honoring us with a unique experience.”
“I’ll take a tin can any day,” Elvis replied.
Earth looked majestic, not that Bower could appreciate it as she struggled with the sense of disorientation coming from her swirling inner ear.
As they moved out of the shadows and into the light of a new day, they could see the alien mothership looming large hundreds of miles above the Pacific Ocean so serene below. Sunlight caught the underside of the organic vessel. What had looked like fine cilia from the ground were gigantic tubular growths protruding below the craft, casting shadows along what Bower assumed was the hull. Fat fingers, sprang to mind, and Bower found herself wondering about their function, not in a mechanical sense, but from a biological perspective.
The alien vessel rotated slowly along the length of its axis.
“That’s not a spaceship,” Elvis said softly, and Bower nodded.
As they passed beneath the craft, traveling along the length of the alien vessel, Bower felt as though she were looking at a bacterium under an electron-scanning microscope, only this bacterium radiated color. Like a beetle’s shell, the colors shifted with the light reflecting off the seemingly oily surface.
Below them, the curvature of Earth looked out of place. Whereas before they had been held spellbound by the sunlight reflecting off the azure blue waters of the Pacific, now the ocean seemed distant, as though it were incorporeal, a figment of their imagination.
The jagged coastline of South America came into view, with dark streaks of lifeless desert and rugged snow-capped mountains giving way to lush green forests, and yet their eyes were transfixed by the alien creature.
Creature, yes, thought Bower, Elvis was right. This was no spaceship, it was alive. There were no steel panels, no portholes or blinking lights. As if in response to her thoughts, Elvis murmured.
“How does this thing work? There’s no machinery, no rocket engines or engine bells, no heat shields or fuel tanks.”
“Nope,” was all Bower could muster in response, mesmerized by the dangling alien structures sailing by above them. For some reason, they reminded her of tonsils, or perhaps they were an enlarged version of the tiny papillae covering the tongue? Whatever these structures were, they had the chaotic mesh of life about them rather than the clinical, deliberate placement of mechanical parts.
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