"Yesss... yees... I thhink sommethiing sstrange noow. Iff I couuld nnot rrecord annd plaay mmy thooughts, I wwould doo painteed imagess iinstead?"
"Yes!"
Ann giggled. She couldn't recall seeing any Sirian do anything artistic, except song, simple flute-playing, and that ritual dance on the island. She looked at the amphibian, and she was intensely curious to follow his thread of thoughts.
"Oanss. A question: if you painted an image of what you were thinking, on this wall, what would you paint?"
Oanss'e eyelids fluttered rapidly; he looked from Ann to Lazar to the cave paintings, with visible and growing confusion.
"I doo not understaaand," he told them, voice rising to what might or might not be a wail of inner turmoil. "I doo noot understaaand!"
Oanss suddenly walked away from them, back up to the cave entrance, ignoring their shouts and gestures.
"What... what did I do?" Ann asked Lazar. "How could it be so hard for him to imagine that, with all his knowledge..."
"Plato's cave," Lazar muttered. "Plato's cave."
"Let's go back up. Explain yourself."
They ascended toward the surface, ducking down in places where the roof came down low. Lazar did the talking, while Ann helped him tread his steps through the ill-lit passage.
"Do you remember from school textbooks, that ancient philosopher Plato... who wanted to abolish all artists from his imagined 'perfect state'? Well, the Sirians have finally reached that 'perfection' themselves. At first, I didn't know if they were hiding their culture, to avoid making too much of an impression on primitive mankind."
Ann shook her head dazedly; Lazar went on.
"Of course they must've had 'art' at some point in the past, while they were yet developing. But now... they have reached all their dreamed goals. And whenever they feel like sharing their thoughts and yearnings with a fellow amphibian, their technology can handle that.
"So there is no need for art as a creative outlet, or to channel your inner secrets to the community. Hence the blandness of their culture..."
When they reached the exit, Lazar was sweaty from the exertion, his voice hoarser than usual.
"I've come to these conclusions in the last few weeks... but I decided to not talk about them... until my final report is delivered at the end of the Sirian visit..."
Ann stared at the wrinkled, sweaty light-brown face of Lazar. He was smiling at her, as if he hadn't noticed the incoherence of his last sentence, and casually wiped his own brow with a handkerchief. She looked away reflexively, yet knowing that he was oblivious to her reaction. As if... as if he... she refused to finish the thought.
"Let's see where Oanss went," she said abruptly, avoiding Lazar's strange, contented gaze.
DAY 80
"Brother Soldier, for the last time: reject these false visions! Your mind has been clouded by the mental pollution of a materialist society!"
"But Elder Tanii, they meant something. Just help me think this through -"
" Don't think! Unthink these false visions! You must let nothing obscure the true path to Sirian enlightenment!"
"Yes, Elder."
"Chant with us, brother Soldier. Chant the praise of Sirius!"
A disturbing mixture of sweat-inducing panic and ecstatic joy filled the soldier. The chanting, ever louder, sounded like the roar of the ocean to him. He began to vacantly stare out at the nearby Pacific Ocean.
"Yes... Such beautiful song... now I truly hear the meaning of the chant..."
He thought his head was aching, but he wasn't sure. It was all so fuzzy.
DAY 81
Berlin, Germany.
The group took the bus straight through the city. The Sirians asked for some postcards. They said very little, even to each other. Carl and the scientists sensed a new ambience from the silent, watchful amphibians - something akin to tension, without an apparent reason. Carl dared not ask what was bothering them - he was afraid of what their answer might be, and recalled the fate of Bruno Heinzhof. How much did the Sirians know of mankind's history? Still, they came here of their free will... why?
In the evening, Carl became too confused to think or see clearly. He felt incredibly weak and inadequate, a mere child trying to make sense of a too large world. They were incomprehensible to him. Perhaps they would always be. There had to be some factor he was overlooking... some vital clue...
Lazar felt ill. He wanted to leave the city. It had to be his age showing.
"This is an evil place," Takeru said to himself.
"What?" Carl asked.
"I just realized that I missed the chance this year, to see the blossoming of the cherry-trees in Tokyo," Takeru told him. "A very important festival back home."
"I wonder why the Sirians did not ask to see Japan when they were in the Pacific Region," Carl said. "Takeru?"
"Why don't you ask them?"
Carl did so; their answer alarmed him. He hurried to tell Takeru in private.
"They have equipment that's measuring the tensions in the planet's crust... and they expect a major earthquake in Japan."
"When?" Takeru asked.
"They couldn't tell for sure. But we ought to warn the Japanese government."
"Yes, yes. Why didn't Ranmotanii warn us, until we asked them - by - by pure coincidence?"
"I really don't know. I thought I had them figured out, but -"
Both men were speechless. At least, a great loss of lives could be averted - but how many other waiting catastrophes did the amphibians already know how to predict?
There was something on the soldier's mind, a thought struggling to take shape... but his near-constant hunger and the constant work schedule made it hard to think. He needed more food than they allowed his group. The downtown marketplace? He had no money, and he ranked too low in the church to be trusted with any.
To steal, then.
When the opportunity came, he opted to join a small group on an errand to the marketplace; the group's overseer followed and watched them. The overseer's name was Patty. The soldier waited, tense, until the moment Patty looked another way - and snatched a can of corned-beef from a market-stand. He was in a crowd and the shopkeeper didn't see the theft. The soldier's stomach rumbled more painfully, but he kept the can hidden the whole day.
Later, he found the time to eat the stolen food. He ate too quickly, and his stomach reacted violently after having been adapted to rice and lentils. Pale and sweaty with nausea, the soldier excused himself from his group and went to rest in his tent. Yet a few hours passed; he felt a little better.
DAY 82
Stonehenge, England.
The site had been evacuated just an hour earlier. British troops had forced the regular tourists away, before the Sirians were allowed to enter the open hill with the stone circle in daylight.
The Sirians were excited and happy, examining the tall, ancient megaliths, stroking their surfaces with reverence, using their metal instruments on the gray rock. And for once, they eagerly told the scientists why: the previous Sirian visit by an automatic probe - 6,000 years ago - had surveyed and recorded the site while it was being actively used by humans. The old Sirian records matched the location perfectly, confirming their reliability.
The British linguist of the team asked permission to see the recordings of Stonehenge from circa 4,000 B.C. The Sirians surprised the scientists by accepting at once. They set up a small device, and projected a hologram onto the surface of one of the megaliths, for everyone to see.
Moving 3-D images at natural speed appeared, showing primitive people at work and in rituals, dressed in skins, furs, and woven clothing - more and finer clothing than one usually associated with the "Stone Age". There were few surprises in the images, except that they were taken at such close range. The Sirians explained that the observations were made by a camouflaged, remote-controlled probe that the natives mistook for a bird. In these moving images, Stonehenge had not yet taken its present form. The circle of stones was familiar in si
ze and position; but the stones themselves were much smaller, less impressive and more irregularly shaped.
This made sense to the scientists. It was a well-known historical fact that new religions often built their ritual grounds on the sites of older, dying ones. Tents and wooden structures, an entire provisory village, surrounded the outskirts of the open height of the central site.
Then followed images that shocked the team. A priest tied up and sacrificed animals to the sun god, on the central altar of the Stonehenge. First tame dogs, then a wild boar, then a deer, then a bear... then an adult man, then a woman... and finally a little child. There were even recorded sounds, coming from small loudspeakers in the Sirians' wearable machinery that the group could hear. The animals screeched and so did the little child, as the grave priest slit their throats. Only the adults died without protest, and the primitive crowds cheered the slaughter.
Lazar thought: It must feel peculiar to look at the human race's history from outside, and see the patterns we don't see...
Carl said almost nothing during the rest of the day. He could barely make himself speak over the phone, even when his wife called.
DAY 83
With his full mental capacity slowly returning, herding and stealing all kinds of food in secret, the soldier could finally find the strength to realize what had been nagging him.
He was still unhappy.
Not just because he was shaven bald, owned nothing (even his shabby robe and sandals belonged to the Church of Ranmotani), and his life now consisted mainly of hard labor and chanting. As if for the first time, he saw his entire past life, and saw that he had always been unhappy - with himself, with what he could expect of his life, with being human, not even a very bright human at that. Why had he wasted so many years of his life acting like an overgrown teenager? In hindsight, his joining the army had been nothing but a desperate attempt to break with adolescence and become a grown-up, once and for all. His army years, he saw now, had been an immense disappointment; the war had shattered his aspirations to improve himself, to belong to a purpose. He had proved incapable of following the basic purposes of any army: to kill in combat, and to obey orders without question.
The soldier felt moved by a sudden, skewed gratitude toward the cult. The half-starvation it had put him through, must have cleansed his system of all the alcohol and dope he had been destroying his brain with, ever since he dropped out of the military. Finally he was cured of his addictions. With the poisons sweated out, he could no longer escape himself and his past. So, the soldier asked himself as he was sweeping the open place before the main stage, what should he be doing now? What about the aliens on nearby Alien Beach, he wondered. Had they really anything to do with his visions...
He had not yet decided if the cult actually was in touch with the Sirians - there was still some mental block that stopped him from doubting the cult's leaders. For now, he had to assume the visions were an individual experience. And they were about alien life, about life in a totally different culture. He could not have made the visions up himself; they were too detailed, too vivid. And there was a pattern to them; each vision had felt like coming from the one, same alien. Sampled experiences from a life.
The soldier recalled the TV broadcast from the first Sirian landing on the Moon, when that astronaut had received a gift. What was it again? A device that records and plays thoughts, wasn't that what Ranmotanii had called it on TV? There had been no further news of that detail - the government had of course classified it.
You idiot, the soldier thought, how could you have missed such an obvious lead! They have the technology to record and play thoughts, and I'm the living proof. This is some kind of experiment they're doing... First they contacted us with television, because they wanted to meet us on our own level. But then they'll start to try and communicate in the way that feels natural to them. But how? And why me? Shouldn't there be others receiving visions as well? Others in this cult?
Out of the corner of his eye, the soldier glimpsed Tanii, the Regional Elder, coming his way across the dusty field. The fat bearded man moved closely surrounded by his robed officers, bodyguards, and his accountant from the church's American headquarters. The soldier stepped aside, and they passed by like he didn't exist. The Regional Elder had discarded the soldier's hallucinations as mere delusions. But if Tanii was in telepathic contact with the Sirians, as he always claimed, why didn't he also read the soldier's thoughts now?
Screw you, you fat bastard, the soldier thought, glowering at The Regional Elder's neck. The Regional Elder didn't even slow down his pace. The soldier frowned with newfound insight. He had been indoctrinated. And he had been too weak, too addicted, to desperate for acceptance to resist. But after curing his drug addiction, the cult could be of no more help. It was getting to be time to leave, when the opportunity came.
A few days before, two cult members had tried to escape on a boat leaving the island; one of them made it, but returned back on his own a day after - so strong was the pull of the cult. The soldier could admit to himself now, that he too had grown afraid of the outside world which might condemn him as an insignificant lunatic among others. With that insight came great shame.
Chapter Fifteen
DAY 85
New York City, USA.
With only half a day's beforehand notice, the security buildup had proved swift and immense.
Yet, anyone could have expected that the Sirians would eventually come to New York, the city featured in countless broadcast images and words. Armored police trucks were driving down every block of Manhattan Island. Heavily armed officers, wearing vests and helmets, were posted on every street-corner. Scores of helicopters were buzzing in the dirty sky above the high rooftops. Four Secret Service agents, constantly overhearing the police band through discrete little headsets, flanked the back and front end of the bus. The Sirians had been asked to visit the United Nations Headquarter long before, but they had not given a definite answer - up to and including this particular day.
"We can take you straight to the U.N. building, where you must meet the leaders of the planet. The rest of New York... is just not worth seeing."
Carl explained the state of things to the seated Sirians, before the bus left the Kennedy airport. He wanted to take them straight to the United Nations building - this was the city where he grew up, and he didn't want his guests to risk visiting it.
Moanossoans spoke up for her group: "Caarlsssayeers... vvery impoortant ffor uss to sseee reallly. Nnnot onlly traansmitteed imagess offf Neeew Yyyork. Wwhen wee see reallly... wee becommme less nooot realll. You doo understaand thhis I sayyy? Uniteed Nationns... lateeer. Whennn theen wwwe sayy soo."
She assured him she knew the place's reputation for danger. Ranmotanii casually agreed with her - whatever authority the old alien purportedly held, it now seemed far less absolute than the humans had first assumed. (Which went to show how much humans took for granted.) Carl could at least comfort himself with the fact, that New York was less violent now than it used to be. It was also a lot blander.
"Give'em the grand tour, then head for the U.N. and wait for further orders," he told the driver.
The bus moved, went from the airport onto the highway, across one of the many crowded bridges, and entered one of the most urbanized islands in the world. Most of its major sights were passed by on the way. The seven amphibians stared out the one-way windows and pointed excitedly at various things: the Statue of Liberty, the rebuilt twin towers of the formerly destroyed World Trade Center, the neon signs on Times Square, and the new, pastel-colored Disney block. They behaved much like the other tourists groups from Europe, Asia, and South America, though their "cameras" were infinitely more advanced.
After an hour's driving through the straight streets of Manhattan, a brief summer rain ended. The sun burned mercilessly at the wet pavements - Carl was busy talking over the phone with various important people, preparing for the Sirians' hotel stay and their security arrangements for the U.N. Hea
dquarters - if they should suddenly decide upon going there after all. A large concentration of police forces were already sealing off all blocks surrounding the building. Ann and Lazar were talking to Oanss, asking him what he thought of the city.
"Neww Yoorrk lookss llike otherrr... ooother thaan Siriuss way off liiife. You uunderstannd thiis? I donn't uunderrstand wwwhy mannny laand-hummmans live inn theee conncentraation oof nummber lllike soo."
"Land-humans want to live and work close to other land-humans. Back at Alien Beach, we always saw you, Sirians, moving in groups of several people... so you are a little like that too?" Ann suggested.
Oanss didn't nod when he answered - nodding didn't come naturally to his kind. Instead, his lips widened slightly. Suddenly understanding that Oanss hadn't intended to speak, Lazar made a question.
"Oanss, have your people seen cities that resemble New York, but on other planets than this one?"
The amphibian blinked slowly - he fumbled uneasily with the knobs of his jacket, but didn't linger on any of them - then he replied.
"No... will not talk aboutt thhat yeet. Loook... theere lllook. Is thaat aan animalll?"
He pointed out toward a Mickey Mouse impersonator in the street, half a block away on a corner of Times Square. The man-sized "mouse" pranced about outside a huge IMAX cinema, surrounded by tourists and children, his lifelike facial expressions shifting constantly - the very latest in animatronics, Ann and Lazar realized. "Mickey" was soon joined by "Donald," "Goofy," and a new figure: a Disney version of... a Sirian .
"What the hell is this?" Ann gasped, staring at the cute, tall moving suit with its dangling tentacle-arms. The impersonator's costume had huge, rolling animatronic eyes and was drawing quite a crowd. Ann wanted to cry with anger; she bit into her knuckles and swallowed her fury, trying not call for more of the Sirians' attention.
"It's like some bad joke," Lazar mumbled to Ann. "What are we going to tell them?"
She merely shook her head.
Yngve, AR - Alien Beach Page 14