by Calista Skye
Caveman Alien’s Secret
Calista Skye
Contents
The Story so Far
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
The Story so Far
The Abduction
Sophia, Emilia, Aurora, Caroline, Alesya and Delyah are working on an advanced translation device at their university when a UFO rips the roof off the building and beams them on board.
They try to hijack the spaceship, but are dumped on a jungle planet after Alesya is killed by the abducting aliens, called the Plood.
The Alien Planet
The girls are dumped on top of a mountain on planet Xren, light years away from Earth.
It’s a jurassic planet where alien dinosaurs roam around, most of them deadly.
Equally deadly cavemen live in tribes scattered around the jungle.
The girls settle in a cave and decide to become the best tribe on the planet and create good lives for themselves, despite the difficult circumstances.
The Cavemen
There are no native women on Xren. They are said to have been abducted by the evil Plood.
The cavemen live in villages of a few hundred tribesmen, waiting for the day when one of them will encounter The Woman. She’s a mythical being sent by The Ancestors to bring all the women back to the tribes.
New babies are born in the villages, made by Lifegivers, large hybrids of plant and animal that can conceive and gestate male fetuses until they can be taken out.
Bune
The mountain where the girls were dumped is called Bune by the cavemen. It is in fact a huge, ancient spaceship that looks like it’s crashed. It’s a mysterious place where there are many dactyls (alien flying dinosaurs that look like pterodactyls).
The girls feel that a lot of what’s happened to them has something to do with Bune and whichever entity controls it.
The Girls
Sophia
Sophia was the leader of the student project to develop the translator device. She was also the first of the girls to encounter a caveman, called Jax’zan. They are married and have a baby together, little Jaxia Aurelia.
Emilia
Emilia is married to Ar’ox, another caveman from a different tribe. She’s now pregnant by him. She befriended an animal that the cavemen call a ‘gray ghost’, but which looks more like a mix of a mouse and a monkey. Emilia called her new friend Alice. Alice is now a rare guest at the cave.
Heidi
Heidi was caught by Dar’ax, a caveman who can tame dinosaurs. For a while he was riding on the T. rex-like dinosaur named Gerk, but he now prefers to ride on dactyls. Heidi and Dar’ax are married, and Heidi is pregnant. She's the only one of the girls who wears glasses, and also the only one who can ride a dactyl alone.
Aurora
The temperamental Aurora is the only one of the girls who made a bow and arrow for hunting and self-defense. She’s married to Trak’zor, a caveman she shot when out hunting. She’s a few weeks pregnant, and she's now replaced her bow with a much more powerful crossbow.
Caroline
Caroline is almost as unassuming as Delyah and likes taking care of the other girls. She hunts, cooks, and experiments with food and drink. With her husband Xark’on, she trapped and killed the dragon Troga, sent by Bune to guard twelve other Earth girls who are now a part of the little tribe.
Alesya
Murdered by the Plood abductors as retaliation for the hijacking attempt.
Delyah
The shy but fiercely bright Delyah is the elected leader of the little tribe. She spends a lot of time studying the old wall paintings in the cave, trying to figure out what Bune really is and if it might be possible to use that ancient spaceship to go home to Earth.
But she secretly hates being the leader of the tribe. The pressure of her responsibilities is starting to get to her.
This book is her story.
1
- Delyah -
“There it goes again.”
Sophia comes out of the cave and looks over at Bune, hands on her hips. The light from the insane light show over the peak of that mountain which is really an old, crashed spaceship plays on her face.
“It does,” I sigh. “And nobody’s playing with the pad. Not our pad, at least.”
“It’s buried under six layers of furs and dinosaur skin,” Sophia agrees and sits down with her back demonstratively towards the spectacular dance of lasers and light beams in all the colors of the rainbow and probably a few more. “Everybody hates that spying thing. So it’s not that. And I don’t think it can be a celebration of the miracle that’s going on in there right now.” She nods into the cave, where Emilia is busy giving birth.
“Definitely not,” I state. “Bune never liked us much. No, it’s something else. Like it wants attention. That show has to be seen by every tribe within five hundred miles or more.”
The laser show has been going on once in a while for several hours, since late afternoon. It lasts for a count of fifty-one Mississippis, and it’s brighter and more intense than any aurora borealis I’ve ever seen.
Now it’s well past midnight, but nobody can sleep with Emilia about to bring another little life into our tribe. Her husband Ar’ox is in there with her, as well as Trak’zor with his miracle gel in case it’s needed. Most of the others are standing around in groups outside, chatting quietly and marveling at the silent alien light show. Sophia and I are allowed in the cave during the delivery, Sophia because she gave birth herself just a couple of weeks ago, and me because the girls want me to be involved in it.
Like in every fucking thing that happens.
Yeah, it’s flattering to be trusted. And it puts a whole bunch of stifling pressure on me. Every time something important comes up, the girls look at me and expect me to have some kind of genius answer for them. And I never have that. All I have is platitudes that make me cringe inwardly. I’m not nearly as smart as they want me to be. But they’re pinning so much of their hopes on me, I hate to let them down. So I play along as much as I can bring myself to. Which is, shall we say, not quite my natural state.
I don’t hate being the elected leader of the tribe. I just really dislike it.
“Yeah,” Sophia says and changes position on the cold rock. “I think that mountain might be a busy place tomorrow, with all the tribes sending someone to check what the hell was going on in that sacred place.” She glances at me in a way I know only too well: Do you agree with me, Delyah?
What should we do?
I take a sip of cold herbal infusion. “Probably. We should send someone, too.”
“Might be dangerous,” she says carefully. “Bune itself is no picnic. And with a whole bunch of cavemen there, all from different tribes… I don’t know. Maybe we should just wait until we’re ready to go there in force, armed and ready for anything. The way we planned.”
She’s right, of course. That would be safer. But I’m curious. And the girls depend on me for hope that we’ll be going home to Earth someday. If there is a way to go home, Bune is our only chance. I hope for that, too. I really, really hope for that. I’d love to be home again. I ache for it. I weep sore, silent tears over it in the night.
I even miss Atlanta. Never thought that would be possible. Now, I yearn for that dirty city. If I could go back there again I’d become a librarian, spend my days reading and never be in charge of as much as a children’s party.
“We’ll see,” is all I can say. I’ve decided to go to Bune as soon as the sun rises, provided Emilia’s delivery goes well.
The light show is over for now, and the jungle is dark again. From inside the cave, there’s only calm talking to be heard, and I hear Emilia laughing at a joke. Clearly everything is fine in there.
I survey the space in front of the cave, the yard which has now been expanded to the area of a good-sized football field. The trees the men have cut down have been turned into a fence to separate us from the jungle and all its extreme dangers.
It’s a puny little fence. Any moderately determined dinosaur could break through it or just step over it with little effort. And if we were attacked by another tribe, one that had done its job and spied on us first, we would have no chance.
That time has to be coming. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. At least five caveman villages now know that there are women here on Xren. And rumor travels. Even if the tribes usually don’t talk much with each other, I’m sure they all know by now. Or most of them.
“So I’ve been thinking,” Sophia interrupts my thoughts. “The cavemen. The tribes. They speak the same language. I mean, exactly the same. Tribes that are hardly ever in contact with each other. Jax’zan’s cavemanese is the same as Xark’on’s. They’re not even dialects. In Europe, you can tell the difference in speech between villages six miles apart. Here, there are no differences that I can hear, even though the tribes live much further apart than that. But the cavemen claim to have been here for generations. That can’t be true, right? From linguistics alone, I’d conclude that all the tribes have been apart for much less time than that.”
“Less than I century,” I agree. “The French language started as a dialect of Latin. It took less than eight hundred years for it to become totally different. I doubt any language could stay exactly the same between separate groups for more than a hundred years, and even that’s stretching it.”
Heidi comes over and sits down. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I thought maybe the lack of women would play a part in that. Women probably influence language more than men do.”
“Probably,” I agree. “Women do talk more than men, usually. And they talk more to kids, with the influence going both ways. According to studies, anyway.”
“Less than a century,” Aurora muses and squeezes my shoulder from behind me. “I think I know where they came from, too. That room in Bune where Trak’zor found the magical birth gel. It had the glass cylinders with room for a good-sized person in each. Fill it with some kind of nanofluid, hook it up to the alien machines and you can probably keep a guy in suspended animation for years. If that equipment is as advanced as it looked. Most of the ones I saw were broken, though.”
“One guy,” Heidi muses. “Or many more. Enough to populate a planet with caveman tribes.”
“The cavemen are as alien here as we are,” Sophia concludes. “I don’t think they ever had women here. I think the men are the ones that were taken from their home planet. Not the women. That’s just a myth. The cavemen don’t come from Xren at all. They were placed here. Just like we were. They were put here by Bune.”
“That makes sense,” I add. “Have you guys noticed the vocabulary they have? It’s gigantic. Much larger than any caveman society should need. They have endless synonyms for everything. Fifty words for the same thing. I’d say they originally come from a much more sophisticated culture than this.”
We all look at each other. We’ve probably all been having some of these thoughts, but we’ve never articulated them before.
“This sounds like a breakthrough,” Heidi says. “Just a matter of putting the pieces together. Using Linguistics to Determine if Certain Sexy Cavemen Came from Xren or Not.”
We chuckle.
The girls and I have taken to phrasing all kinds of things in terms of pretentious titles of imaginary essays, the kind of stilted titles of scientific articles we would sometimes help write back at the college. It’s one of the things that happen in small communities, and I think it’ll pass as suddenly as it appeared. Meanwhile, we enjoy coming up with silly titles like Are You Kidding Me with This Shit: On Laundering Dirty Diapers on a Jurassic Planet or The Societal Issue of Water Dripping from the Ceiling of Caves Right into Your Fucking Face when You’re Trying to Sleep or Is the Persistent Lack of Coffee on this Damn Planet Inherently Sexist? A Study in Bullshit.
Of course these aren’t things we intend to write, we just say them out loud and crack each other up when we need it the most. It kind of lightens the mood sometimes. Also, I think we’re just a pretty weird bunch of chicks.
Aurora strokes a hank of hair behind her ear. “Is there a plan behind this, Delyah? Bune has to be behind it.”
I’ve been thinking about that a lot, ever since the day we came here. “It feels organized, sure. There probably was a plan behind it. But then I think it all went to shit when the spaceship crashed and just became a mountain with a bunch of pretty lasers on it. Now, I have no idea. Most of the things we’ve experienced with Bune seem chaotic to me.”
“Like a science experiment gone haywire,” Sophia agrees. “But still with some supervision. Think she’s part of it?” She points.
Alice comes bouncing towards us across our yard, a little more slowly than usual. In the darkness I totally get why the cavemen call her species ‘gray ghosts’. She really looks very gray and almost translucent, and her glowing eyes just make the illusion stronger.
I can’t help noticing that she wasn’t hindered at all by that little fence of ours. And that’s the only defensive structure we have.
“Hey, Alice,” Aurora says and discreetly grabs her crossbow, which is never far from her reach. Like all of us, she takes no chances with the native creatures here, even the ones we know. “Come to see Emilia on her very special night?”
The monkey-like alien animal with the many arms and mousy face stops a few paces from us and shows us that she’s brought a whole bunch of salen fruits. Those are the best fruits any of us have ever tasted, and they’re nutritious enough to have kept us both strong and even somewhat heavy these past months.
Sophia carefully gets up and takes one of the fruits. “Thank you, Alice. You’re concerned about Emilia? She’s giving birth right now. I’m sure she’d love to see you.”
We don’t know how much Alice understands. She seems brighter than most animals. Just her coming here tonight after weeks of absence is pretty remarkable. As if she knows that this is Emilia’s due date.
Alice places the fruits except one in a heap on the ground and peers past us with her luminous eyes, looking into the cave.
Sophia takes one of her hands. “Shall we go inside? I’m sure she’d appreciate seeing you.”
“Are you suuure that’s a good ideeeaaaa?” Heidi singsongs to nobody in particular, as if she doesn’t want the alien creature to understand what she’s saying. “She might be carrying all kinds of germs.”
Sophia hesitates. “What do you think, Delyah?”
Because of course this also
becomes my responsibility to decide.
“It’s probably okay, if she stays a couple of feet away. No touching,” I state, just guessing and hoping I’m right.
“We’ll keep our distance,” Sophia promises and leads Alice into the cave.
I look at the strange little being as she goes into the darkness of the cave. “To answer the question, I think she’s native to Xren. She’s so well adapted to everything here. The salen trees and the not-dactyls and just staying alive. Only the cavemen gave her some trouble. Another indication that they’re a recent arrival to this place.”
“She might be a proto-human,” Aurora suggests. “Like humans descended from apes, right? So Alice and her kind might be a step on the ladder to real sentient people. Not human, of course. But something similar. Given a few million years of development, they might be driving cars and paying taxes and playing Angry Dactyls on their cell phones. She seems pretty sentient already.”
“And getting student loans that she won’t be able to pay back until she’s sixty,” Heidi adds. “Having the choice between two politicians who’re both total trash. Seeing the woods you played in when you were a kid turned into a parking lot for a Dunkin Donuts. Getting bills in the mail and knowing that your budget for the month was spent two weeks ago. Guys, I don’t miss civilization as much as I did in the beginning. Now I only miss my family. Not much else. Well, the food, I guess.”