“What the hell is this thing?” Elvis asked, soaring beside her. “I mean, it’s not a spacecraft, not as we’d think of one.”
“Why leave your planet?” Bower asked, “when you can take it with you.”
Dark cloud-tops rolled beneath them. They were still inside the vast alien ship; that much was obvious from the transparent dome stretching out easily ten miles above them. Here and there, lines were visible, crisscrossing the dome, providing some sort of structural support.
“Are those stars?” Elvis asked, pointing at several massive clusters of light further down the body of the vast creature. Bower couldn’t bring herself to think of the alien vessel as a spaceship, it was a living organism, or at the very least, an ecosystem.
“I don’t think so.”
There were dozens of clusters, each one rising above the clouds with thousands of tiny lights glowing like the sun.
As their path took them closer, they saw that what looked like thousands of miniature stars resolved into hundreds of thousands and millions of fine pinpricks of light, all tightly grouped together in structures that reached up for miles above them.
“They’re trees,” Bower said.
“Trees?”
“Yes, look at the structure, look at how they’re connected.”
As they wove their way between the gigantic structures towering over them, Bower could see fine, silk-like threads grouping the lights together, banding them into twigs, branches, limbs and various central trunks.
“Trees?” Elvis repeated, clearly struggling with her analogy, but that was all she could come up with to describe what she was looking at.
Each tree of light spanned several square miles, reaching up at least a mile or two in height. They were lopsided, lacking symmetry, often with vast blooms of light in one area or another, while other sections were hollow, devoid of light, allowing them to see through to the interconnected core within.
Around each base, roots spread out across the cloud tops, a tangled mess set in stark contrast to the neatly branching structures reaching up toward the lights. In some cases, the roots of several trees were interconnected. In almost all cases, the lights on the roots reached out beyond the farthest branch.
“Understand,” Stella said, although Bower wasn’t sure which Stella had spoken.
They slowed as they came up to an irregular tree standing on its own. Millions of pinpricks of light spread out through its root ball, reaching for miles beyond the largest of the branches. The inside of the tree looked dead, with just a smattering of lights at various junctions, but the outer branches teemed with life.
Life, that was it. Bower understood what she was looking at.
Slowly, they drifted to within a few feet of the various twigs stemming from the branches of the largest limb. Bower reached out and touched at the lights, half-knowing what to expect.
A beetle.
At least to her it looked like a beetle, and it wasn’t quite what she expected, but it was life. She’d figured she would see something associated with terrestrial life.
Floating before her was a beautiful scarab beetle with six spiky legs, its iridescent shell glistening in the sunlight.
“I don’t get it?” Elvis said. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a beetle,” Bower replied.
“I know it’s a beetle, but what’s a beetle doing in space?”
Bower heard his reply, but his words didn’t register. She ran her hand over the other pinpricks of light. She watched with childlike amazement as the image of various beetles appeared above each of the fine pinpricks of light. The beetles varied in size and shape, their colors, the textures on their shells, and the length of their legs, but the variation was ordered. If she moved in one direction, the beetles changed in coloration while their shells slowly elongated.
Bower was fascinated by the beauty before her. Hints of turquoise gave way to scarlet red, shades of orange and yellow. The specimens were ordered, clustered together on various related twigs and branches.
As her hand left each section, the beetles there disappeared from sight, returning to pinpricks of white light.
Bower found she was neutrally buoyant, weightless. Reaching out, she could propel herself by pulling on the stiff structure. As she skimmed slowly along the surface of the tree, barely half a foot away from the glowing lights, beetles continued to appear before her. Their abdomens would swell in one direction, while their mandibles and antennae would increase in another, and always with an astonishing variety of color. For her, it was as though the insects had been dipped in a rainbow.
Elvis came up beside her as she examined one of the beetles in detail.
Bower found that if she worked with her hands she could enlarge, rotate and manipulate the three-dimensional image before her. Zooming in, she found the view before her continued to expand. She was able to zero in on a single strand of hair on the head, and from that point, closed in on the insect’s compound eye.
“As freaky as that is,” Elvis began, “it doesn’t look out of place here.”
Bower moved closer, and the hundreds of segments within the eye slowly increased in size until she had focused on just one dark panel.
Bower was smiling like a kid on Christmas day as she said, “I think I understand what we’re looking at here.”
Elvis was quiet.
She was sure he was itching to ask her to explain further, but, like her, he was in awe of the view around them. Within seconds, they were at the resolution of an electron microscope, and still she could zoom further, constantly plunging her hand in close to the point of focus and then slowly drawing back. What had looked like the smooth, curving outer wall of a single eye segment now looked ragged and pitted, like the surface of the Moon.
Bower zoomed still closer.
Slowly, cells came into view, and then cilia on the cell walls along with a clearly defined nucleus within. There were ribosomes, mitochondria, lysomes, all the various elements she remembered from her university days. And, coiled up in the nucleus, there were chromosomes. Moving closer, the tightly wound double helix was visible, as were the individual nucleic acids linked in lumpy pairs, forming rungs on the ladder of life.
Bower put her hand back by her side and the image faded, returning them to the sea of stars on the vast, sprawling tree.
“Is that it?” Elvis asked. “Is that what they came for? Beetles?”
“Not just beetles,” Bower replied, gesturing to the gigantic tree towering thousands of feet above them. “All of life.”
She pointed at the lights glistening in the thicket of roots hundreds of feet below them, stretching out across the cloud tops like a tangled bush.
“Do you see that? Do you see the way the matt and tangle down there looks like a root-bound plant? At a guess, I’d say that’s the microbial world, with its reliance on asexual reproduction and horizontal gene transfer. Oh, my mother and father would love this stuff.”
“Did you say horizontal sex?” Elvis asked. From his tone, Bower knew he was being facetious.
Bower went to repeat herself, and then thought of a simpler explanation in just two words. “No sex.”
“No sex,” Elvis repeated, looking at the roots as they crisscrossed each other. “Bummer.”
Bower laughed. “This is the tree of life. For the most part, complex organisms rely on sex passing gradual, successive change down through countless generations, and in this way, life has slowly branched out from a common point of origin, just like a tree, but microbes are more like a public library, constantly swapping books between themselves.”
“Huh,” Elvis replied.
She could see he was lost in thought.
“Like a library?” Elvis said absentmindedly. From his tone of voice, she could tell this wasn’t a question, it was an inquisitive statement.
Bower felt jubilant, playful. She wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was the excitement of discovery, but in that moment she felt mischievous.
“Are you feeling a little like those microbes in the library?” she asked. “Not getting any sex?”
Elvis bust out laughing. That got his attention, she thought, smiling.
“No, it’s not that,” he replied, grinning. “When you said, library, it sparked something in my thinking.”
Elvis turned, gesturing to the other trees dotting the celestial plane, each of them resplendent with millions of lights glowing like stars.
“Perhaps that’s what this is,” he said. “Some kind of interstellar library.”
Bower was surprised by Elvis; he’d made a remarkably astute observation, one she’d overlooked.
“Do you think,” he began hesitantly. “Do you think those other trees would show us life on other worlds?”
Elvis seemed unsure of himself. He shouldn’t have been, she figured.
They were both out of their element, but given her upbringing at the feet of a university biology professor, Bower was comfortable with what she was seeing. Whenever her mother had lacked a babysitter, she’d taken young Elizabeth Bower into her lectures, setting her to one side with some dolls and coloring pencils while she taught. In the same way in which most kids would play with Lego blocks, Bower had fond memories of playing with anatomical models of the brain and a segmented model of a frog. She’d spent her childhood playing with fake hearts and not-so-fake skeletons. And yet, she hadn’t seen this. Elvis was right. She smiled at his insight. For all his gun-toting, macho image, he’d seen something she missed, and that impressed her.
“Yes,” she said, knowing the certainty in her voice would give him confidence
“So they’re like scientists, or something?” he asked.
“I guess so. I suspect if we examined this tree in detail, we’d be able to trace life back to its origins. See those inner nodes, devoid of light? Those are the extinct parent species that led down to this point. Once, they shone like these species do today.”
“So this is like missing links and stuff?” Elvis asked.
His voice carried a slight hint of disdain, and Bower wondered about his upbringing, if he’d been exposed to creationist dogma instead of science.
“There are no missing links,” Bower replied gently, feeling she needed to take some time to clarify this point. “We may not have seen all the links, but none of them are missing. Chronologically, the chain is unbroken. If it weren’t, these life forms wouldn’t exist.”
Elvis was silent, and she suspected he wasn’t convinced.
“Evolution can seem a little intimidating, but it’s actually quite simple. Animals are like a lump of soft plastic. You can shape them. We do this all the time. Ten thousand years ago, there were no dogs. Wolves roamed the wilds. Not only did we tame them, we molded them to suit our every whim and fancy. We bred them selectively over countless generations to form Chihuahuas and Great Danes.
“And today, you might ask, where are the missing links between them? Where are the Great Chihuahuas? And of course, there are none. Chihuahuas and Great Danes aren’t linked to each other, they’re linked backwards in time, through some distant, common ancestor not too far removed from a wolf.
“When it comes to natural selection the only difference is, nobody chose to have thousands of species of beetles. They are the result of selective pressure from predators and disease, limited food and even things as seemingly innocuous as fussy females or feisty males.
“I know it’s hard to imagine, but the largest trees on Earth were once seedlings, and the same is true of life springing forth from its humble beginnings billions of years ago.”
“Huh,” was all she could get out of Elvis. He was non-committal. Well, she thought, we all need baby steps.
The Stellas were becoming agitated, circling around them in the air.
“Come,” they said in unison.
Although this was a request, Bower felt herself pulled away from the tree as though she were caught in a rip at the beach, being dragged with the swell of the waves.
“No! We need more time,” she cried.
Bower and Elvis were caught in an updraft, swirling high above the massive tree-like structures with their clusters of star-like lights glowing beneath them.
From up high, they could see the breadth and length of the alien vessel, if it could be called a vessel. To the rear of the craft, easily a hundred miles away, a vast rocky cliff arose. At that distance, the sharp shapes were impossible to resolve into anything other than a ragged mountain range breaking through the cloud tops.
The transparent dome stretched out overhead. Beyond the dome, Bower could see the gently curving slope of Earth passing to one side of the craft. She had given up on trying to figure out which way was up. In space, all ways were up, and yet without realizing it, she’d instinctively assumed up was aligned with the craft, but the alien vessel must have been positioned almost side-on to Earth, making her feel lopsided once she saw the planet. Earth curved away before them.
The sun set. For Bower, the view was counterintuitive. On Earth, sunset was marked by a tiny glowing ball of fire slowly dipping below an immense horizon. In space, sunset was sudden. Earth simply blocked the nearest star for a short while.
As they flew on within the vast alien craft, Bower felt she could have reached out and touched the dome, but the slick surface was probably still hundreds of feet above them. The dome was comprised of interlocking hexagonal tiles as clear as glass, with just the finest of seams running between them. Bower felt as though she were on the inside of a gigantic compound eye, looking out from within some vast insect as someone else looked in.
Their flight-path took them forward to the bow of the great interstellar ship, where most of the alien activity seemed to concentrate.
“I will never get used to that,” Elvis said, pointing at hundreds of spiky red aliens blowing past them like tumbleweeds.
They descended into what looked like an open football stadium, with thousands of tiered levels enclosing a low platform. The three alien creatures they’d once affectionately referred to as Stella touch down gracefully before them.
As her altitude fell and her forward momentum slowed, Bower turned to land on her feet. She found herself reaching for the ground but not feeling it as she slowed to a pace no quicker than a light walk, drifting just inches from the platform. Finally, her feet touched gently on the ground. Sand crunched beneath her boots.
The three creatures that were once Stella wheeled around the edge of the platform some thirty or forty feet away. Their behavior was erratic, as was that of the crowd before them. Bower couldn’t help but wonder if they were appealing to the vast alien audience, telling them something about their harrowing escape from Earth.
After several minutes, they returned to her and Elvis and spoke as the crowd settled.
“You.”
“... Must.”
“... ... Speak.”
Elvis looked at Bower. She wasn’t sure what these creatures wanted them to say, and she felt a little cheated that Elvis had looked at her before she could look to him. Somehow, she’d been volunteered.
Bower raised her hand, hoping a flat palm was a universal gesture of openness and friendship, although she doubted that kind of body language extended beyond Earth.
There was considerable noise within the stadium, and Bower doubted her voice would be heard.
Thousands of alien creatures thronged the tiered platforms enclosing them, their fronds waving, slapping against each other and the ground as they moved around.
“Ah, hi.”
Bower cringed, but she took solace in the fact no one could hear her.
In that instant, the amphitheater fell deathly silent.
A blinding light shone down upon them as darkness descended on the stadium. Bower covered her eyes, struggling to adjust to the influx of light. She squinted, barely able to see Elvis less than a couple of feet from her. In that moment, the pitch-black darkness beyond the light seemed to stretch on into eternity.
She turned,
but couldn’t see anything beyond the small halo of light surrounding the two of them. It was as though reality had dissolved, leaving them isolated.
A voice spoke, uttering one word.
“Why?”
The voice was male. For the first time, this wasn’t Bower’s voice repeated back to her. That one word echoed throughout the stadium, having come from all around them.
Elvis turned through three hundred and sixty degrees, half-crouching as he did so, as though he felt threatened. Bower felt it too. The tension in the air was unbearable.
“Why?” she repeated softly, aware the acoustics within the amphitheater were carrying her voice. Honestly, she felt this was a question these alien creatures should be answering. She wasn’t sure what they wanted to hear from her. One word could not be considered a sentence, let alone a question, while hers were the only actions she could speak to, so she cleared her throat and spoke with measured deliberation.
“We were trapped, captured. We had to escape.”
The silence within the stadium was eerie. Bower felt she had to speak, if only to break through the haunting quiet.
“We were imprisoned with your pilot.”
Was that it? Was that what they wanted to hear? Did they want to know what motivated her to help Stella? Even with Elvis standing just a few feet away, Bower felt alone, vulnerable. She felt as though the white light shining down upon them passed straight through her, as though this alien species was sitting in judgment of her.
“Your pilot killed our friend, but I knew ... I knew there had to be more ... I couldn’t believe she meant us harm ... I couldn’t believe you had come all this way to destroy life ...”
Bower paused, wondering how much they had understood.
“Why?”
Although it was just one word, the tone was different. A woman had spoken.
Bower was confused. She needed more context. A single word was not enough. They wanted her to explain herself, but she didn’t understand why she needed to. And there was no interest in how, no interest in what she and Elvis had gone through. Motive and intent were the only priority.
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