Those who had shared thoughts once could sometimes feel they were thinking the same thing. And this weird sensation was returning now.
As soon as Tmmtenaa had finished his half-hour speech, Carl, Lazar, Edmund, and Andrea faced Ranmotanii and refused to let him pass. Carl told the team to switch off all cameras; they obeyed immediately.
"Why have you not said a word about this... this thing?"
Carl gestured up at the towering monolith that shimmered in the sunlight; it cast a glowing blue shadow on the white sand.
"There is something about this monolith that is not in your nature," Edmund said, his strong, precise voice commanding Ranmotanii's attention. "The words are too well chosen - they were picked by a land-human. Yet none of us here admitted to helping you write those words. Why?"
"That soldier helped them," said Lazar. "It must have been him, and he's not here - why?"
Takeru added, cautiously at first: "I made a scan of the monolith while it was being erected - the writing on it says 'machine'. But this cannot be a machine. It has no moving parts. It does not absorb energy, hence no information. Its blue color might make people think it has something to do with Ancestors, but that is not the case. If this is just a stone with a piece of text on it, why call it a machine?"
The Sirians were very silent. Their eyes squinted, their limbs were tense and still.
Ann said: "So this is your gift to us, to save us from ourselves - a few pretty words written in stone."
It was Namonnae who answered; all the other Sirians were like paralyzed.
"Wee aare noot good at llying... uunlike youu. Lllike so, it waas a laand-huuman who assked uus too maake jusst this... 'mmonuumennt,' liike hee caalled iit. Annd a maachine it is, in iits wway - iff yyou will leet it bee called ssso. Wwwhy muust you ask mmore froom uss? It iis... nnot humann to bee liike yourr peoople -"
Her words were cut short by an anguished, hoarse squeak from Oanorrn. The Sirian group fanned out to give him space, but he was not calling for help. With shaking limbs, Oanorrn pushed aside his supporters and faced Namonnae.
He began to shout at her in rapid Sirian land-speech, and she seemed taken aback, but retorted with a sharp-sounding sentence of words. Several other amphibians made hissing noises, upset by the argument. The "land-humans" were stunned - they had never before witnessed such an intense row among their visitors.
"Stop it! Stop it!" Takeru shouted, running in between Namonnae and Oanorrn. He stood himself half a meter from her face, and looked straight up into her eyes, struggling not to choke on his feelings. He must not break - this was his last chance. "Namonnae!" he pleaded. "Please look at me, like I was a real human. Don't look down at me, put yourself at my level! Please!"
Her eyes, incredibly beautiful half-shut standing ovals, widened - her sleek arms flew up against her chest. Her gaze flickered from humans to amphibians, and back again - but no one would help her, Takeru would not move. He saw her exquisite, dark lips move, gasping open and shut like a fish fighting for air. Namonnae shut her eyes almost completely, and sank down. Standing upright from her knees and up, her eyes came at level with Takeru's face.
His hands were unsteady, and he was close enough to smell her scent - a strong scent, uncluttered by artificial substances, which intoxicated him in an entirely new way. He forced his hands forward and clutched her rounded, smooth, muscular shoulders.
"Did you want your people to put that monument here? To help us? Or did you say no to it?"
Namonnae struggled not to look at him, and her icy mask of indifference began to fall away. How strained her voice sounded, how much pain there was in each singing syllable:
"I diiid ssay... yyyes. Buut the yees meeans nnotthinng... Yyou wiill nnot channge beecause oof it. Iit chhanges noothhing oof youu. I haave sseen greeat mmuch enoughh oof yyour hiistoryy... youu lland-huuumans aare bad. Yyou made uus saad. Yyou waanted too killl uus. I haate yyour peoplle."
Takeru ought to have been devastated by her words. By some miracle of spirit, he could answer at once.
"Look! listen! Your people have helped me see and understand more, now it is your turn. Listen to this! More than a hundred years ago, the people of my homeland saw a new, strange people sail into our waters - in new ships, driven by metal machines. Our rulers then decided, that we must become like these newcomers, if we wanted to survive their arrival. And so my ancestors did.
"Yet even those newcomers, for all their superior technology, also wanted to learn something from my people. And so they did; they became better people - more real - through their contact with us. But those few newcomers who saw only our poverty, saw only our faults, they learned nothing! They did not grow! Like so, you are not growing! Ask yourself: what do land-humans know, that Namonnae does not know?"
She suddenly went limp in his grasp, her shoulders loosening up; her tall sleek head swayed, as she tried to deny his words.
"Wee doo nnot llearnn frrom yyou... wwe leearn ffromm Aancestoors... ffroom uus, froom thee uuniversse!"
"Then why did you come here? To prove that you are better than us? Is that what your Ancestors wanted?"
The other Sirians stared at Takeru in open fear, as if they were all being accused. Carl saw Oanorrn's agony over Namonnae, this one child of his who had failed to grow. At one time earlier in his life, Carl had feared his own child would also go that dark, inward way.
Namonnae could not answer, but kept rocking her head. Then Takeru understood, and he was filled with joy. She had twice his physical strength. He wasn't holding her down - she was, without admitting it to herself, surrendering. Or she was too young to find the words, or the language was too alien. He cupped one hand over her ear opening and whispered the words to her in English.
Then, speaking out loud, he added: "I thought you hated me, for not being like you."
Finally she could look at him, and her arms knotted themselves together, then unfurled.
"Iii thought I haated yyou onlly. Nnnow I knnow mmmore... I cannn ffeel maany thhingss abouut a huumann. It iss diiifficult to feeel really."
"Yes. It hurts to feel many things at the same time."
She reached out and embraced him, squeezing his bony shoulders with warm tenderness, and repeated his name like a chant, a spell against her sorrow: "Taakeruu, Taakeruu."
The moment seemed to charge the air, or maybe it was just in the minds of the people present... but amphibians and humans alike were able to share the moment. Time, or the illusion of it, briefly ceased.
Until Oanorrn broke the silence with a triumphant, reverberating cry: "Chiskr-r-r-r... chis chiptl mmer-r-r-r-lleee!"
Carl spun around and saw: the old amphibian was stretching up his arms, blissfully turning his face to the sky in a welcoming gesture. All the other amphibians scattered away from him.
From the parked lander vessel came a metallic noise, not unlike the sound of a steel ball being dropped into a bucket, only deeper and more drawn-out. Oanorrn collapsed, all strength vanishing from his limbs. A swarm of silver spheres shot out of a porthole in the round stern of the lander, scores of them, each the size of a human head, and flew with a force of their own toward the crumpling old amphibian.
Instead of hitting him, the metal spheres flattened out with a ringing sound and enveloped him like a liquid, while fixing him in the position of a coiled-up fetus. A few seconds had passed.
The metal cast of Oanorrn had barely hit the ground, when a much larger metal sphere swept down from the lander and swallowed the frozen statue - the machine snapped with sparkles of barely contained energy. The large sphere began to hum, and took off from the ground without visible exhaust, rising on invisible energy columns, humming louder and louder, accelerating incredibly, until... Like an anticlimax, as it touched the clouds, the sphere vanished with an echoing bang, the bang of air rushing in to fill the hole the sphere had left.
And Oanorrn vanished from everyday reality.
The Sirians peered up at the clouds for a moment, speechless, aw
estruck - then Namonnae took up a chanting call, clear and long, and the other amphibians joined the call, a choir of amphibian voices blessing the new Ancestor. Suddenly the few humans on the beach were just being ignored, looking feeble and small next to the taller, ecstatic beings who expressed their rapture and reverence to unseen bloodlines beyond time.
Yet the scientists did not revert to petty envy - the event was too wonderful for that. They began to laugh and cry, scanning the clouds for signs of the Ancestors' presence, thanking whichever gods or spirits they still had faith in, that they had been allowed to witness this ascension. They saw the blue monolith with new eyes now, and understood it really was a machine, like a book was a machine that changed a reader's mind.
As Carl looked up past the monolith, he saw how a cloud swirled into a little vortex high above and dissolved.
He thought: Maybe, with a little tweaking of reality, you could drop by in one of my dreams. Oanorrn, Ranmotanii, Namonnae... you are, in a way, already Ancestors and have always been so. Before and after you came to our planet, where time is just an aspect of real things. You don't have to give me an everlasting life. It's enough knowing you were always there.
When the Sirians withdrew into their vessel, and it began to slide back into the lagoon, hours seemed indistinguishable from minutes. The lander moved out into open sea, rose on a cloud of roaring jets, and began its flight up through the clouds.
The behemoth shrank into a rumbling black speck, leaving a wide vapor trail as it speeded away, and finally went out of sight. The scientists were left on the beach, gathered around the blue quartz monolith.
The soldier was nowhere around to be seen.
Chapter Thirty-Five
DAY 162
"Good morning, and welcome to our live Sirian Departure special feature, which will last all evening.
"As you can see on these recent satellite images taken from Earth orbit, the Sirian lander ship is now heading back toward its mothership, near Mars. In a matter of days, our friendly visitors will steer their course for some other star.
"It is unlikely that mankind will hear from the amphibian people in many years to come; space is without end and our galaxy holds billions of stars. No more transmissions to Earth have been sent from the amphibians after the departure of their lander."
"Yet, we have been given memories and wisdom to last for ages, and the parting message inscribed on the blue monolith on Alien Beach.
"The native owners of Alien Beach have agreed to let the island keep its new name, and are expected to reap huge profits from the expected waves of tourists on pilgrimage to the site. Chief Fongafale, who holds formal ownership of Alien Beach, has told our reporter he will restrict visitor quotas to a minimum, to spare the archipelago from over-pollution and exploitation.
"The U.N. Security Council has stationed a permanent peace-keeping force in the area to uphold law and order as the stream of pilgrims increases - cult tragedies will not be repeated in the future.
"Only now, in the Sirians' absence, people start to realize the visitors' deep and lasting impact on culture, language, religion, and science. It is already proving to last longer than expected. The early excesses of the suicidal cults is being replaced by a more thoughtful approach to ancestor worship.
"The trend of recent years to only hold up the faults of previous generations, is making way for a greater respect for the past, without which neither of us would exist.
"Our attitudes to clothing are changing, perhaps permanently; in the tropical and subtropical regions, more and more people are taking to wear no clothes except jackets to carry their personal belongings.
"State and private funding of space exploration is now being boosted in a way not seen since the race to the Moon. Related sciences, such as the study of controlled fusion and high-energy states, are also receiving generous grants.
"A new generation of students, who previously might have spurned science and technology as dull and soulless subjects, are now expressing a newfound link between science and the spiritual world. Music classes are more and more being mixed with science classes.
"To help us understand these profound changes, we have with us Carl Sayers live from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, with his longtime collaborator and wife, Eve Andru. Also, from Cairo, we have direct contact with Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Lazar Mahfouz. And also with us, from London, are Andrea McClintock and Bishop Edmund Soto. They have all graciously offered CNN the time to answer some of our questions.
"Thank you for being with us, Mr. Sayers. May I personally congratulate you for your great effort with the ECT."
"Thank you. The honor belongs to my colleagues of the team as well, and the team of amphibians, bless them all."
"Well - they have taken off, to wherever they're heading next... do you think we'll ever hear from them again?"
"I think we will. In an infinite universe, anything is possible... Eve?"
"I agree. Future generations will depend on what we decide now. It's not over."
"What will you do now, Mr. Sayers? It's being widely speculated that you'll receive the next Nobel Peace Prize."
"It's not important. Sure, it's going to be hard to wind down... going through all the data that we gathered during our year will take the rest of my life. It's going to be great. But I will gradually leave the workload to younger people, and spend more time with my family. I've had offers to host a remake of my old cosmology TV series."
"What about the rumors of your ill health? Are you still suffering from cancer?"
"It never really went away. I'll have to keep fighting it, but I have a long experience of doing that by now."
"What about you, Mr. Mahfouz - will you wind down your lecturing schedule now, or keep on working?"
"I'd rather die working, while sharing my experiences from Alien Beach, than face obscurity. My family will, I'm afraid, feel a little neglected but... I hope they understand."
"Bishop Soto? What lies ahead for you?"
"I haven't yet decided if I should retire completely from my duties, in order to devote all my time on writing down my experiences. Not an easy decision, you see, and made more complicated, because... Now the public wants to see me, reach out and touch me, in a way that I haven't experienced before. A certain religious confusion has arisen about my status. Some people seem to expect me to represent a kind of extraterrestrial religiosity - and that's something I was never meant to do. Which might force me to resign from my post, either voluntarily or by higher decision. Andrea?"
"My plans... yes, I will certainly keep working, and do all I can to inspire younger generations. I have a duty to the public now, I can't just isolate myself the way I used to. I... I have seen how others think, and I'll never feel alone again. The Sirians have my deepest gratitude."
"So... what came out of this visit? Who learned the most, they or us? Was this contact a success, Mr. Sayers?... Mr. Sayers?"
"The contact was a wonderful, glorious, inspiring, breathtaking failure. It can only inspire us to better ourselves. Therefore, it was of enormous value. Like Eve says, it's not over."
"Thank you, both - and good luck."
"Thank you."
"Thank you."
"Those members of the ECT who have not yet optioned retirement, are expected to remain occupied with analyzing data they gathered during the contact. A handful of them have chosen to stay in the archipelago to study changes in the wildlife, and to make sure no alien microorganisms are spreading from Alien Beach.
Among them are Ann Meadboure, Mats Jonsson, and Takeru Otomo, who all have declined comments. They are regularly assisted by visiting expeditions from the scientific community, but get to spend most of their time on their own... until the pilgrimage route opens later this year."
DAY 220
"Look!"
Ann pointed up into the night sky, past the flickering red point that was Mars. A new star was being lit.
It was the Sirian solar-sail, slowly
turning its reflecting side to face the Sun and Earth at once. The Sun's light was reflected across a thousand-kilometer wide, extremely thin metal foil, so that the pressure of radiation could push the sail out of the Solar System. This new "star" was not nearly strong enough to light up the Earth, but it outshone the other stars and competed with the Moon in brightness.
Mats and Ann stood and admired the bright star for a long while, thinking of the beings who were in it - the passengers who were on their way to their moving homeworld, somewhere out there.
"Where's the soldier?" asked Mats. "I'll go find him."
"Don't," Ann told him, holding him back. She knew where the soldier was, and didn't want to disturb him; he had been spending the last few days and nights in the deserted lagoon.
The soldier opened his eyes -
He was back in his old high-school classroom - sitting down by his bench - and across the room, at the teacher's desk, stood the soldier's old homeroom teacher. The man's profession was mathematics, and he was a middle-aged man with a slight overbite in a melancholy, lined face.
"Son," said the math teacher. He had never used the title 'soldier' - enlistment had come years after high school. "I called you over here for a serious talk. About how to overcome your difficulties."
Now the soldier recalled the entire situation - that awkward, humiliating talk with the homeroom teacher, way back when he was an overeager, curious teenager who asked weird questions.
He knew in advance what would happen. This was the day he had tried to forget for the rest of his life - the day when he had decided he was not thinking right...
"You interrupted class again today," the teacher said, more like a stating of facts than an accusation - yet the soldier felt his neck flush with embarrassment. "I told you then, that you shouldn't ask such questions. If you don't admit that, how are you going to pass the tests this year?"
Yngve, AR - Alien Beach Page 31