"Arthur is... here's a picture of him with me when I was nine years old. He and his friends taught me to swim and dive safely, and introduced me to the scuba diving gear. I met Arthur when we lived on the coast, and he was a good teacher of mine. I followed his work, and learned all I could about sea animals... and dolphins. I always used to think dolphins were leading so much happier lives than land-humans, and they are so intelligent... they liked me just as much as I liked them. Have you seen people playing with dolphins? On television?"
Oanss nodded.
"There are so few other animals that my people can become true friends with. Dolphins, dogs... that make you feel someone other than a human cares for you, understands you. Do Sirians have pets, or like, animal friends?"
The Sirian blinked repeatedly, and said: "I thiiink nnno."
"Of course, you have so much better things instead. Metal pets... Anyhow... I met Carl Sayers on Sri Lanka once, when he was visiting Arthur. We just said hello, he gave me a few books to read, that's all. Later I went to a university in America to complete my education in biology and anthropology... that's when I met Carl a second time, when he held a lecture there. What he said about his work to find extraterrestrial life made me very interested. I felt that we were both looking for intelligent life, only in separate places... he was looking to the stars, I was looking into the sea. Do you understand this?"
Oanss said he thought he did.
"We talked and became friends, not close friends, but enough to take an interest in each other's work and write letters to each other several times a year. Of course, it helped that we both knew Arthur. So over the years, after I returned to stay in Sri Lanka, we kept up the correspondence. You see, land-humans have been using letters for many thousand years, to communicate over great distances. Sometimes people who write to each other become friends, without ever meeting in real life."
"I doo nnot uunderstannd thhis. Explaain wword 'frriend' innn thiis conntext..."
"A friend can be many things, all of them good. It is someone who you help, and who helps you."
"Alsooo iif a frieend iis nnot ablle to reallly touchh youu?"
"Yes... yes."
He asked her to proceed with an account of her future.
"After... after your people leave, I will continue to work as a scientist. Many years I will spend understanding all the information we gained from your visit. We will probably start working on our own space travel to other planets, maybe one day to Sirius..."
"Thhere iis nno life iin thee Siriius syystem," he said.
"What?"
He told her: Earth scientists ought to know the double-star system was uninhabitable in the long run; the 'Sirians' had been living there for thousands of years but were now moving onward as had been intended all along. Ann didn't know what to say; this was crucial information that the amphibians had refused to reveal before.
She calmed down when he explained, without her asking him to, that the main migration was directed toward an altogether different star system - which one, he wasn't allowed to reveal. There were other ships than the one that had entered the Solar System.
"You understand that I must tell this to my friends?"
Again the amphibian made his alien laugh. "Iit iss diffiicuult foor mme too... adaapt tto thhe ffact thhat you doo noot shaare thhhoughts wiith otherrs. Yees? I offten maake a mmistake aand... thhhink yoou knnow all I thiink, beecausse iit is llike sso wiiith Siirianns. Thhis is aa jjoke? Go oon..."
"It is confusing. Well... I will grow older, then perhaps I will move to France. My mother has asked me to move to France where she lives now... and in fifty or sixty years from now, I will probably die of old age. And that's all."
"Expllain 'diie off ooold age'."
"Our machines, our science has its limits. A few of us can get as old as a hundred and twenty years... then the body just stops working. The heart stops, the lungs stop, the brain stops. The cells of the body cannot regenerate anymore. The cells start to decay. Bacteria start to eat the body. The body falls apart to dust. Only the bones remain. That is death to us."
Ann halted, and looked at the reflection of her own face in a puddle at her feet. The lifelong exposure to tropical sunlight had tanned and wrinkled her skin early, though it looked soft and healthy; the lines around the eyes were starting to run deeper. Her half-long hair was bleached by the sun and salt, making her skin appear almost brown by contrast. Old age? It hadn't even started on her yet. Arthur was really old; he might pass away any day. Carl was dangerously close to too old to lead the ECT. She wondered what her mother looked like now, living in retirement in France. They hadn't been on speaking terms for ten years. Oanorrn was about two hundred years old, or so the Sirians had told them - if one didn't count his time spent in suspended animation.
Oanss, Ann thought, would still be in his prime when she was a dying, bitter old crone in a wheelchair.
A tall, breathing shape behind her grasped her gently, and she imagined she was weeping. She wanted it to be a dream, and shut her eyes, trying to wish it so. "I did nnnot undeeerstand reallly buut noww... lllittle laand-humann doo not diie yyyet. Iit iss ssso alllone iif yyou doo..."
"But you will die too."
"No. I wwill becoome, rreally, nnot inn fiictioon, but llike in scieence aan Annceeestor. Decaay thhen... vvery muuch slooww. A trraditioonn... ffor many thoussaaand yyears."
The words sounded inadequate, the vocabulary inane, in a language not made to describe the facts he attempted to communicate. But it was so simple. Not a surprise to her at all. The surprise was that she didn't react to it. His hold ceased; Ann turned around at the sound of a splash, and he was gone.
Ann came to Carl's barrack late that night; she repeated to him Oanss' words about the Ancestors. She had to go through it several times before Carl was sure she had heard it right.
"I need more proof," he told her. "You must keep quiet about this until we learn more."
She agreed, but added: "I couldn't keep this from you. If... if there was a chance to save you, if your cancer comes back, I... thought you deserved a chance more than any one of us."
They hugged each other hard, and Ann left for her own barrack. She wasn't feeling quite as alone as before.
Chapter Twenty-Two
DAY 114
Around five in the morning, they knocked on his door. Carl stumbled out of bed, slightly irritated, and opened.
"Professor Carl Sayers?"
He faced a grim-looking general in dark sunglasses flanked by two soldiers - Pentagon guards, by the look of their uniforms.
"Who the hell are you? Make an appointment and come back later."
The general removed his shades and took a step into the barrack. He was of middle age, and Carl drowsily noticed his NSA badge.
Shit, he thought. Intelligence people.
Carl had met their kind before, and he despised them with all his heart. After two arrests for demonstrating at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site, and having openly criticized the "Star Wars" program, Carl Sayers was branded a traitor in certain military-industrial circles. He had deliberately avoided this department of the project, though he knew this would only confirm the intelligence community's suspicion of him.
"Whaddya want?"
"Please sit down, professor. You, make the professor a cup of coffee. I'll have one too - black, plenty sugar."
Carl sat down by his table while one of the soldiers went to work on his coffee maker; the other soldier shut the door and blocked it, as if guarding a national treasure. Both soldiers wore pistol holsters.
"I'm General Harrod, chief executive of the Alien Beach Security Committee. We haven't met before, for security reasons. I assume you were paying attention when the President told you a few months ago - the intelligence agencies were to open a field office right outside Alien Beach..."
"...on the U.S.S. Powell, I remember," said Carl. He got his coffee and took a sip.
The security officer produced a hand-held tape recorder
, and said: "Well... During the routine surveillance of the area, our personnel picked up this conversation from the island."
He played up the conversation between Carl and Ann, barely six hours old. Carl flew up from his chair; he wanted to punch the general's teeth in. One soldier sprang to attention, his hand on his holster.
"Calm - down! " the general hissed at them both. "Don't play the ravished virgin with me. Did you really think we'd let your team of scientists run the whole show unchecked? The President has already been informed. Contrary to some opinions voiced by you and your colleagues, the intelligence community remains loyal to the best interests of the country."
Carl sat down. "I refuse to talk to you. I will only discuss this tape with the President himself."
"The President is busy, what with the war coming that your alien friends helped stir up. Now tell me what they're really up to." The officer, still standing, sipped his fresh coffee and stared down the world's most famous astrophysicist as if he was a freshly caught spy. "How many of them are there in the mothership? What are their weapons? Have you been subjected to mind manipulation? Are you currently holding a position within a Sirian organization? Do you consider yourself loyal to The United States' government?"
Carl burst into laughter. The moment was equally absurd to the occasion, decades ago, when a diplomat from Soviet Russia had offered Carl to spy on the U.S. space program for them. His agenda did not concern single nations, but the world; some people would never understand that. The general's humorless face reddened with anger. Carl lifted his coffee cup - and tossed the scalding-hot liquid onto the general's chest. The furious bureaucrat grimaced, hesitated, and backed off toward the door.
"You think you're untouchable now, Sayers!" the general shouted with hysterical pointing gestures. "But when the day comes your name'll be on my list!"
He exited, closely followed by his henchmen. At least, Carl thought as he stood shaking, they made good coffee; his drowsiness was gone.
Carl immediately called his special direct number to the President.
"You asked for a weapon, Mr. President. They may have something much, much more powerful. But it's too early to say. Sirian thought processes operate differently from those of humans, at least at our present level of contact. They seem to have partly abandoned classical logic, which makes them unpredictable in the extreme.
"They'll never tell you everything at once. This latest information was just a fragment. No, there's no plan to it. It's just the way they are. Remember that we haven't understood them yet. But this much seems certain: the Sirians are convinced that they possess a technology that makes them immortal. I don't mean just 'longevity'. I mean life, or existence at least, without end."
He patiently waited for the news to sink in; he could hear nothing but the President's breathing for three minutes. At length, there came a reply.
"It'll be impossible to keep the lid on something this big. If the U.N. Security Council starts to think I'm keeping this to myself, the core of the Council might break up - and that's the end of world peace. And if I tell them this..."
"Tell them the truth, Mr. President. There is no longer any point in lying about anything."
Later the same morning, Takeru heard Carl recount to the ECT the latest information; he taped it all on his concealed pocket recorder, then excused himself. He had to smuggle the tape to his employer in Tokyo as soon as possible. This scientific breakthrough would make him a national hero, the savior of Japan...
While Takeru was walking back toward his barrack, lost in daydreams of grandeur, his head began to spin with dizziness. The "Ancestors" Carl had mentioned... did that include his own ones as well? Was this science or faith come real? His skin began to prickle; he thought he heard whispers in the breeze; he was going insane...
"Grandmother! Grandmother, where are you? I miss you so..."
"Takeru? What's wrong? You were saying something in Japanese."
Mats Jonsson had run up to Takeru, who staggered against a palmtree for support. The Swede felt Takeru's wrist for his pulse.
"You're sweating heavily, hyperventilating, and your heart rate... Lemme help you into the medical barrack, and I'll give you something to relax, okay?"
"I'm fine," Takeru whispered. But his legs wouldn't carry him anymore. Some invisible force was sucking away his vitality, and he couldn't tell whether it came from within or without. He pressed his palms hard against his ears, afraid to hear the breeze and what it might whisper to him.
"You're not fine, and you're coming with me," Mats insisted, pulling up Takeru by the arm.
He dragged him along to the hospital barrack, humming to himself. Mats felt rather excited himself about what little Carl had said - and not too surprised. In fact, he was confident and inspired. Whatever happened to mankind from now on, someone, somewhere had beaten his old enemy - death - and as a man of medicine he saw this as a victory. He hummed and whistled to himself all the way to sick bay.
Rumor is the poor man's oracle; it feeds on the desires and fears that are common to all people. The rumor fed on Man's supreme fear; thus it spread faster than any other word-by-mouth ever shared. General Harrod's security measures, imposed on the surveillance of Alien Beach, had to break at some point; one leak sufficed, and the rumor became unstoppable.
By noon on the 114th day, every statesman in the world had heard. In the evening, word broke through onto the Internet; the Church of Ranmotani was informed just minutes before that.
"During the last two hours, Libya, Jordan, Indonesia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Palestine have terminated their United Nations memberships. The declarations were made before the U.N. Headquarters in New York; the diplomats then left the premises without making further comments. From the White House it has been announced that the President will address the nation and the world within the next few hours.
"In another shocking development, Kuwait and Iraq have also terminated their memberships in the United Nations with immediate effect. Their governments have just openly requested to join King Khadi's alliance. Such an alliance, if completed, would be able to put a stranglehold on the world's oil resources.
"From countries all over the world are reported sudden and violent riots in the cities; most reports include testimonies of spontaneous attacks against churches, mosques, synagogues and temples. This outbreak of hostility against established churches may be connected to a strange rumor that's been circulating on the Internet for several hours..."
THE LAST HOUR OF DAY 114
Marlo O'Brien, reduced to a hysterical shell of a man, tore his robe apart and shouted to the 3,100 ecstatic cultists through his microphone. They swirled around his stage like a single, roaring entity.
"The time has come! Do not hesitate! I am the vessel of Ranmotani! I say, you are now one with me! By the cosmic power of my might, I make you immortal! You are now fully functional amphibians! We march to our undersea kingdom that I have built for you my beloved children! Join me in eternal oceanic life!"
The soldier struggled through the howling crowd, desperately seeking the face of Patty. All faces looked the same: staring masks, their mouths gaping wide, devoid of reason or sanity. Their leader, naked but dark with filth, marched off toward the nearby beach, and the thousands of followers tore off their robes, joining him.
The soldier was swept along; he couldn't go against the tide of flesh without risking getting trampled. They pressed him onward, still howling - was it the old chant he had heard at the airport? If his panic gained control of him, he would drown in the commotion.
From every direction the soldier was elbowed and pushed by naked, unkempt people; the darkness around him deepened as they pressed into the crashing waves of the beach. He couldn't see, only feel the water current pulling at his feet, the current of hands dragging him down. He took a deep breath and shielded his head with his arms; the writhing crowd pushed him forward and he tripped into the warm water. Still they pushed forward, flailing and dragging him down.
Too late, he heard the screams of the children struggling not to drown. There were just a handful of children in the cult - their parents forced them down with them, in absolute conviction that the children would not die when their elders forced them to breathe water.
The soldier's clothes were torn off. Now totally surrounded by water and bodies, his feet pumped but found no foothold; he surfaced once, took another breath, and was pushed down again. Panic caught him, and he lost control of his limbs; the crowd was sinking down with open mouths, gulping down water into its lungs, voices being abruptly drowned, making comical "blub-blub" noises. Then he recalled - there was something that wanted him to live - something that had lifted him out of despair and given him a glimpse of another life, of being something other than human.
He struggled upward, kicking and treading with his arms, past the grasping, drowning shapes, and surfaced again. He coughed up seawater, kept swimming - and the struggle ceased. The light from the beach made a faint reflection across the waves, and he could swim against the current back toward land. He bumped into a floating mass. Then another, and another. Yet another thing floated up to the surface and bumped into him. Thousands of drowned bodies, their lungs filled with water.
All looking the same.
All thinking the same.
All dead.
He didn't want to see their faces. He didn't want to see Patty, or even the hated leader. At last he treaded on solid ground and could stumble back onto the beach, where the waves were washing ashore clusters of naked, slumped corpses. Without thinking, he found his way to the camp, found some decent clothes and put them on, grabbed the last of his food stash, and headed for the nearby town.
Yngve, AR - Alien Beach Page 20