Horizons: A collection of science fiction short stories

by Nolan Edrik

  *

  Professor Herman Grillo stood on the deck of his university’s trawler, the R/V Starry Flounder, eyes locked on his laptop. In the distance, a pod of gray whales sang and took turns lifting their flukes out of the water and slapping them on the surface. Squiggly lines danced across Grillo’s screen, a visual representation of the sonic riot the animals were producing. Finding no pattern in the crashing sound waves, he clapped the screen shut and gazed out at the water.

  The whales should be near their mating grounds near Baja this late in January. In fact, they had been farther south just weeks ago, before they hung a U-turn. As a career scientist, Grillo fought the impulse to connect the migratory aberration with the aliens’ appearance. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, and all that. But, come on.

  Through a mutual friend in the National Academy of Sciences, he’d gotten word of his findings to the director of NASA. Their friend had relayed a message back to him that the director was intrigued by his research and wanted to know what he thought it meant.

  The problem was that he had no clue what it meant. So he stared at the ocean, waiting for a solution to descend upon him. This tactic had never worked for him before, but there’s a first time for everything.

  Moments later, Grillo felt an intense heat from above, as strong as a second sun. The shadows that had been playing across the ocean’s surface disappeared. Grillo looked up, squinting into the searing brightness. A high-pitched whine split the air, followed by the moaning warble of a thousand out-of-tune pipe organs.

  The heat dissipated and the light dimmed, revealing a stadium-sized orb floated over the ocean. Inside the ball, wisps of multicolored light tumbled over each other like smoke. The presence hovered inches above the ocean before plunging in with a splash.

  The professor gripped the railing as his ship bobbed in the water.

  “Propter fricking hoc,” he muttered.

  *

  Dr. Carter greeted Grillo in the lobby of the White House. He shook her hand and stammered some sentence fragments about being pleased to meet her and hoping he could help the president with the alien situation.

  Sensing his nervousness, she tried to put him at ease.

  “I’m an astrophysicist,” she said. “It makes sense that the director of NASA would be an astrophysicist, right?”

  Grillo nodded. He was aware of the work she’d done on gravity waves.

  “For our first five meetings,” she continued, “the president kept calling me a physician. At first I thought he just was misspeaking. Yesterday, he asked me if I could look at a mole on his neck.”

  Grillo chuckled before being struck by the horror that such a simple man had access to nuclear launch codes.

  “The president is that popular kid who always tried to talk you into joining his group in science class,” Carter said. “He’s the guy who always wanted your help on his homework. That’s basically what this meeting is.”

  Grillo smiled. He understood perfectly.

  She led him to the Oval Office, where the president and General Majerus were waiting.

  *

  “Wait, the whales and the aliens are talking to each other?” the president said, a hint of offense in his voice.

  “Yes, Mr. President,” Grillo said.

  “What are they saying?”

  “It’s difficult to know for sure. The conversation has had some elements of a mating ritual and some displays of aggression, similar to a territory dispute.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “My guess is that it’s a negotiation.”

  “A negotiation? Over what?”

  “I have no clue.”

  Wythe paced behind his desk.

  “We’ve been broadcasting messages directly from me: the president of the United States,” he said. “We have the secretary of state out in Portland ready to meet with them. And all they want to do is talk to whales?”

  Grillo looked at the NASA director, unsure what he should say. Majerus stepped forward.

  “Sir, I think it’s time to get tough with the aliens.” He turned to Grillo. “And the whales. How do we do that, professor?”

  “How do we intimidate the whales?” Grillo said. “Why would we try to intimidate the whales?”

  The president put up his hands to stop them.

  “Someone still needs to tell me why the aliens are talking to the whales and not us. Why would that be?”

  Grillo took a deep breath.

  “There could be a number of reasons, sir. Whales have been on this planet for more than 50 million years, compared with only 600,000 years for modern humans. They’re capable of passing knowledge down through generations, so they may be able to give the aliens a clearer picture of our planet’s history.”

  The president squinted.

  “Or,” Grillo said, “the whales and aliens may have a similar form of intelligence. The way whales communicate, the way they think, the way they integrate sensory input, it’s so different from our experience of consciousness as to be nearly incomprehensible. I mean, they’re able to project images directly into each others’ minds. Can you even fathom what that would be like?”

  Dr. Carter snorted, trying to choke back a laugh. Fathoming was not the president’s strong suit. With some effort, she erased the smile from her face and straightened up.

  President Wythe leaned forward, hands on his desk, and looked into Grillo’s eyes.

  “Nah. Those bastards are just trying to ruin my tee time. I know it.”

  *

  By the time Grillo returned to the Starry Flounder, scores of octopuses had joined the whales around the alien ship.

  “That makes sense,” he said, pulling the binoculars down from his eyes.

  “How so?” Dr. Carter asked.

  She was taking labored breaths and clutching the ship’s railing beside him, a green tint creeping in under her brown skin.

  “Octopuses are another group of aliens on Earth, just like the whales,” he said. “Sixty percent of their neurons are in their arms, they can see with their skin, they can taste with their hands. I could go on.”

  “I see,” she said. Her eyes were squeezed shut as she resisted the waves of nausea.

  Grillo decided to leave her in silence. The sonar from the Navy armada surrounding the spacecraft had rendered his hydrophone useless, so he put his binoculars back to his eyes.

  As he scanned the horizon, the ocean began to tremble. The pipe-organ jazz babble swelled around them, and the alien ship breached the surface.

  Inside the orb, amid the burbling lights, swam a pod of gray whales, scores of giant Pacific octopuses, and a pod of bowheads. Grillo hadn’t noticed the bowheads arrive. They must have shown up while he was in Washington. Their presence made sense though. They could live for 200 years. He could understand the aliens wanting to chat with them.

  Dr. Carter looked up in time to see the ship disappear with a bang.

  *

  Hours later, Professor Grillo and Dr. Carter sat below deck, watching the president address the nation. He was in speech mode, his voice crisp, his gestures firm, and his eyes squinting at the cue cards with fierce concentration.

  “My fellow Americans, I am pleased to report that our planet’s first encounter with extraterrestrials has ended peacefully. While we are still deciphering the messages they delivered to us…”

  Grillo turned to Dr. Carter.

  “Did they ever send messages to us?” he asked.

  She shook her head no.

  “Not a peep.”

  They turned back to the television. “…rest assured that if they do return, we will be prepared. Our top scientific minds will be ready. Our diplomats will be ready. And our military, most certainly, will be ready.”

  Grillo flipped off the screen and leaned back in his chair to nap. The chaotic hydrophone readouts from the week danced across the inside of his eyelids. He knew he’d spend the rest of his life untangling those squiggles.

  Dr. Carter drew a scr
atchy green blanket tighter around her shoulders and sipped the ginger tea Grillo had made to ward off her seasickness. She stared at the steaming mug.

  “I have to confess, I’m a little miffed that after all the searching we’ve done for extraterrestrial intelligence – the telescopes and satellites and probes – after all that, they wanted nothing to do with us.”

  Grillo sat back up. He wasn’t going to fall sleep anyway.

  “I guess we’re just not that interesting,” he said.

  “I don’t know. We’ve done some cool stuff. Computers. The Mona Lisa. Aerosolized cheese.”

  Grillo laughed.

  “Well, yes, Easy Cheese is pretty fantastic. But look at all of human civilization. In a couple thousand years, we’ve poisoned our environment, driven half the planet’s species to extinction, and created weapons that could annihilate our entire civilization in a day. All while endlessly massacring each other as a dress rehearsal. And we elected Wythe president. Twice.”

  “He’s not exactly the pinnacle of our kind,” Dr. Carter said.

  “Then look at the whales,” Grillo said. “Millions of years of intelligent existence in harmony with their surroundings. Spellbinding rituals. Methods of communication that are downright mystical. For all we know, they’re contacting extradimensional beings on a regular basis. Or maybe they are extradimensional beings.”

  Grillo had never thought of that before. He made a mental note to consider the possibility, then shook the thought away.

  “Seriously though,” he said. “Why were we so sure aliens would only be interested in us?”

  *

  “…God bless you all, and God bless the United States of America.”

  Wythe smiled, half-nodded at the cameras, then turned, and strode down the hall. When he was halfway back to the family dining room, the cameras blinked off, and his Secret Service director emerged from an alcove to walk beside him.

  “Ned, how are we looking for Pebble Beach? I can be on Air Force One at 5 a.m. tomorrow and get in a round before lunchtime.”

  “Sir, about that.” Ned coughed into his fist, stalling as he considered how to best break the bad news.

  “What? We’re only two days late. They can’t hold the place for the President of the United States?”

  “The grounds are closed for maintenance. The PGA tour starts in the middle of next week, and they need to prepare.”

  “Dammit.”

  Wythe kicked at a patch of carpet to no effect. He paced in circles. He’d been president for five years now, and he’d still never played Pebble Beach. The first time he’d had plans, the whole Cuba takeover got in the way. Then he was too busy campaigning for re-election. And now this. Next year, he promised himself. Next year.

  “OK,” Wythe said finally. “Let’s see if we can get into Sawgrass.”

  *

  Inside the Anfelwarian ship, which was more like a field of subatomic anti-radiation than an actual vessel, the whales swam in lazy loops. They absorbed the song of the strobing currents of time-space-being rushing past the craft’s immaterial borders and emitted moans of wonder.

  Their Anfelwarian escort, whose name translated roughly to “The Presence Beyond That Which Never Was,” observed them from a corner.

  “Beatiful, isn’t it?” NeverWas said.

  The leader of the whales, The Inheritor of the Great Soul, dove down and circled the glowing cloud of NeverWas.

  “It certainly is,” The Inheritor said. “We have been told of it many times. I have even dream-heard it once. And yet that thought–glimpse still pales to firsthand listen-feeling.”

  NeverWas glowed brighter, charged by the expanding life-fullness of this kindred being.

  “I hope this experience in some way repays you for helping us access the 19th Mind Plane. Your assistance will assure our kind’s continued harmony with the Through-All Stream.”

  “We are delighted to assist,” The Inheritor said. “And flattered to receive your trust.”

  The whale drifted away, unmoving as he thought, then turned back to NeverWas.

  “I wonder, why did you choose us as your guides to the 19th plane?” the Inheritor said. “Our kin, the Ancients of the Cold North Waters, enter that realm more easily than us.”

  NeverWas sparked and flickered with jubilance.

  “I must confess to mischief in this matter.”

  “What do you mean?” The Inheritor asked.

  “The man-leader of your planet, he contains a gate to Dim Place, and through this gate has flowed a current of the Weak Light. It has filled him, threatening the Spirit Shine of many Earth Beings.”

  “I have sensed this as well. But how did this lead you to choose us instead of the Ancients of the North?”

  “His gate to the Place of Weak Light was propped open with the Self-Big Feeling. Our presence near your waters disrupted plans he had made, diminishing the Self-Big Feeling, narrowing the gate.”

  “I see. And what plans did you disrupt? More attempts to extract the fuel-blood of the past from beneath the ocean floor? If so, we thank you for these efforts.”

  “Sadly not. We merely disrupted leisure plans of no great importance. In his words, we were ‘just trying to ruin his tee time.’”

  Beyond the Pillars

  The High Reverend Shepherd Thomas Caldwell always reacted poorly to news of the sort I was about to give him. Science had developed an annoying habit of contradicting our church’s doctrine in recent years, and these transgressions – like the incident I had to inform him of this morning – never failed to send him into a fury.

  Perhaps these stories of so-called progress riled him so much because they forced the True Church into playing defense, rather than attacking sin and building our flock of believers. Unfortunately for me, when the Church’s progress screeched to a halt, the messenger was the first one to crash through the windshield.

  Take my predecessor as Morning Briefer, for example. He had been fired for telling the Shepherd that construction on a new estate he was building on Arizona’s coast had been halted after excavators unearthed an aquatic dinosaur skeleton.

  “Conspirators!” Caldwell had thundered. I was standing outside his office with his morning tea and pastry so I heard all of this firsthand. “Did you leak them the site of our new parish? How did they know to plant their fake bones there?”

  “No, My Shepherd,” the briefer stammered. “I would never—”

  “And a sea creature, no less! Do they think I’m stupid? The sea just got to Arizona ten years ago!”

  Through the opened crack of the door, I could see Caldwell pacing the room and doing this spitless spitting thing he does when he’s upset.

  “There might have been an ocean there a long time ago,” the poor, doomed Morning Briefer said. “Like millions of years ago.”

  Caldwell stopped pacing and grew eerily calm. He smiled.

  “Son, there was no sea in Arizona millions of years ago because there was no Arizona millions of years ago. All that existed then was God. You’d know that if you had faith.”

  The briefer’s hands flapped at his sides. Whatever he was trying to say never found its way out of his mouth.

  “Get out of here,” Caldwell said. “And don’t ever come back.”

  The news I had to give Caldwell today was worse, and now would be a disastrous time for me to lose my job with the True Church. In five days, my sister Laura would find out whether her new lungs were infected, and I needed to make my biggest donation yet to the Prayer Corps to ensure that the results were good. That donation couldn’t happen if I didn’t get my paycheck. Losing my job could mean losing my sister.

  Still, I couldn’t avoid telling Caldwell about the Pytheas probe. A world leader of his significance would certainly be asked about it, and he couldn’t be caught unaware. Then I’d definitely get fired.

  I arrived outside his office at 6:58 a.m. and said hello to his secretary, Barb. She glanced up from her typing, smiled and said, “Good morning
.” For two minutes, I stared at the giant oak doors that walled off Caldwell from the world and listened to the clatter of Barb’s fingers pecking at her keyboard. Meeting with him always made me nervous, even after three years of seeing him six days a week. I moved the two copies of my morning report from hand to hand to make sure my fingers didn’t leave sweat dimples in the paper. He hated that. At 7 a.m., a little orange button on Barb’s desk lit up, and she pressed it to buzz me into the Shepherd’s office.

  Caldwell was sitting at his desk when I entered, his left index finger tracing under a line in his Bible while his right hand scratched out his daily message to the Church in a yellow legal notepad. Without looking up, he motioned me to my chair, where I sat and gazed through the floor-to-ceiling windows behind him. The hickories were back in full bloom, their leaves a deep, brilliant green. The sky above was cloudless. Through a break in the trees over Caldwell’s shoulder I could see the Mississippi River rolling down toward St. Louis.

  The Shepherd was a big man, with a barrel of a torso hulking under his bleached white shirt. He had a cleft chin, a boxer’s jaw, and dockworker’s hands that could bend the gold pen in his hand like a paperclip if he tried. With a two-day scruff and work clothes, he’d fit right in on a construction site, yet he always kept himself impeccably clean, his face freshly shaven, his shirts crisp. He had piercing blue eyes, and when he looked right at me, I could feel them studying me, taking me apart, drilling into my mind.

  When he’d finished with his notes, he closed his Bible around its gold-leaf bookmark and set his pen on top of his notepad, perfectly horizontally.

  “So what news do you have for me today, Glenn?” he said and leaned forward, elbows on his desk and hands intertwined.

  I slid a copy of the report across the expanse of mahogany and started briefing him. In internal Church news, our South American branch had retained 40 percent of the members it gained during the Easter Salvation Drive the previous month. That was our best performance there ever. Bishop Ferdinand in Dagestan had passed away mysteriously, probably another assassination, and would need a successor appointed soon. And our food banks in Southern Europe were forecasting they’d have another expensive year with the drought showing no sign of abating.