Charlie started hearing a song in his head that he wanted to write down. He could hear the throbbing keyboards underneath a staccato guitar riff. He could barely keep watching from a desire to write down the music and not lose the idea. He was possessed by it.
He took out the pack Wu Gwei had given him and searched through it. There were no writing implements or paper, but he did find a sharp little knife. Charlie took the knife and started writing the music out against a large smooth piece of white coral. His hand moved faster than he could have spoken the idea as inspiration possessed his body.
“Be careful not to die, or you’ll lose all your notes,” Avraam teased.
He wrote the least that he could before looking up again. The bones of the song were down. Mew Tse’s movie was still playing. Almost as impressive as the simple existence of the movie from her memory was the level of skill with which it had been shot. The shots seemed to have been carefully positioned. The timing, which at first simply overwhelmed Charlie, now seemed to be designed by a genius of cinematography. He found himself wondering what movies she might have shot in her lifetime and if there was a way in which Charlie could ever see one of them.
The “camera” dropped down over a cliff and into a vast underwater plain. The coral was bunched into what almost looked like “villages” of different colors. There was a blue town, an orange town, a yellow town, and a red one. The frame lovingly took in each from a distance and then moved in tenderly on the yellow coral outcropping.
“This is gorgeous,” Sally expressed the thought out loud.
There were two silver animals swimming near the yellow coral. They resembled whales or large dolphins except that they each had a pair of long, sharp, armored tails dragging behind them, and a back covered with hard shells. The shells glittered in the wet sunlight like opals. In the video image, Charlie saw Mew Tse’s hand rise up and stroke one of the beasts. It coiled and rubbed against her hand like a cuddling kitten.
He found himself looking at her head, not in the movie, but in real life. Her face was gone and replaced by the images she projected, but his eyes sought out details. They tried to find her mouth, her eyes. The image covered it all and didn’t leave any imperfections in the transmission. She played her images in the 28th century version of high definition. It blew Charlie’s mind.
He found himself with a new idea in his head. He had to turn away to carve it into the living rock, in the hope that the coral would help him to remember the soundtrack Mew Tse’s work was inspiring him to compose.
When he could look up again, he found himself for some reason wanting a beer very badly. Mew Tse’s movie was continuing and she was approaching a series of tall and thin rocks, almost like the rocks at Stonehenge. No, actually nothing like them, more like Easter Island. They were statues. He was sure of it. They looked like incredibly old carvings of people. The faces were all eaten away by the water, but the legs were there, the arms. He was sure he could make out a hand and what could only be a belt and the shape of pants on one of them.
They were statues of humanoids. He didn’t know how human, the weathering on the ancient undersea monoliths was extreme, but there was no question. These were carvings. She took some time, swimming around each one and getting in all of the details which she could. This was certain evidence of intelligence.
“Have we encountered intelligent aliens here before?” Charlie asked.
“No, never. Not here, and not anywhere in creation,” Sally answered. “This is wholly unprecedented.”
One of the statues still had a couple of details left in the face, but only the one. It looked like it might have had a nose. But it was so vague that there was no way to know if it was a human or only something distantly similar.
Avraam stood up and pointed at the screen, at somewhere near Mew Tse’s belly button. “That’s a man. That’s not a fish man.”
“It could be anything.” Wu Gwei contradicted him.
“It’s artificial. This is not a natural formation,” Charlie said.
“Perhaps,” Wu Gwei said skeptically. “But it’s too vague to be sure. There could be any number of processes which lead a rock to take a shape which makes you think of a human. Don’t assume its proof of intelligent life. The odds are strongly against that. Ask anyone born after the 24th century about the Moon Cities of Europa, which after a decade of study turned out to have been built by insects.”
The show ended and the woman re-appeared. Charlie saw her gazing at him for just a moment before looking back down at the ground in embarrassment. He found it hard to express in words how impressed he was with the film she had created in just a few moments, and so he didn’t say anything. In any case, he found himself in awe of the futuristic woman.
Just a few heartbeats later, Avraam began to vomit.
Wu Gwei tried to help him. The Russian looked tired and barely able to stand. The cyborg held him up and kept him from falling to the ground as he spewed on the coral. It seemed strange to Charlie, who had heard that Avraam had actually killed Wu Gwei in their previous lives. It seemed they had worked past that and actually become friends. He wondered how long they had each been alive in their present incarnations. Avraam had said he had known Charlie in two other lives.
Avraam leaned suddenly and sharply back, shoving his chest upwards. Two long green worms could be seen reaching out of his body. They were brightly colored and long, maybe a foot or more. Wu Gwei grabbed at one and started pulling. The forced of his tugging made Avraam scream, but the cyborg didn’t relent and soon he pulled the long parasite out of his comrade’s wounds.
He held it inside of his metal grip as he looked at Avraam. “You have a very bad infection.”
The Chinese warrior turned and looked at the alien worm. A blade protruded from his left arm and he prepared to slice the creature, but just before he could, a stream of liquid was shot out from the mouth of the parasite right into Wu Gwei’s face. It landed on his forehead and nose. It dripped down over his cheeks and mouth.
Wu cast the worm out into the ocean as hard and as fast as he could. Then he wiped his face with one gauntleted hand. It wasn’t as effective as a normal hand would have been.
“Use the water,” Brightly ordered him.
Wu walked to the ocean and began to wash the goo from his face.
In the meanwhile, a second worm was still visible on Avraam’s chest. It protruded from the center of the largest of the suction mark circles and clung to his flesh like a baby.
The big man reached up to his own breast, grabbed the worm and began to pull. It seemed to have latched onto his chest just as tightly as his insides and barely moved as he yanked at the middle of the alien invertebrate body.
When Wu Gwei believed his face was clean, he walked back to Avraam and placed his palm against the second worm’s body. Avraam screamed again. Smoke rose, and everyone could smell the worm and Avraam burning.
Wu Gwei took his hand away and a blackened and shriveled worm fell away.
“How many more of them do you think I have in me?” Avraam asked.
Wu Gwei didn’t answer.
Charlie leaned back on a rock and suddenly felt a sharp pain in his palm. He turned his head and lifted his hand up just in time to see something small and black fly away. There was a small red bite mark in the meat of his hand. It felt like a needle was still jabbed into the flesh, but he didn’t see anything except the bite.
Wu had a knife out and he was preparing to cut into Avraam’s chest.
“What are you doing?” The Russian shouted, backing away.
“Hold still, boy. It’s just under the flesh.” Wu Gwei cut what looked like a deep gash into the already burned skin of Avraam’s chest. Then he made a second perpendicular slice. The red liquid splashed up, coating the cyborg’s face and neck. Avraam looked to be in very bad pain, but he was still standing.
With a quick motion, Wu Gwei grabbed one long green worm, and then a second from inside of Avraam’s chest and flung them away into
the water. There was a high-pitched sound as he pulled the second one, almost as if the creature were screaming. He then let go of Avraam and stepped away.
Sally came over and began to tend to Avraam’s chest. The carving and burning had left the skin and muscle in a horrific state.
Charlie walked over to Wu Gwei. “Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease?”
“It wasn’t done with malice. Yes, I remember when Fock killed me. I remember watching him destroy my soldiers and I remember when the walls of my fort began to fall. But in this life Avraam is not my enemy. The worms had to be removed.”
“Was that all of them?”
Wu Gwei nodded. “All that my system could see. There may be microscopic invaders in his blood stream yet, but those four were the only large parasites which he was carrying.”
“What do you know about my third eye?” Charlie asked.
“Eh? I know you’ve never gotten it to work. Your last self concluded that it was just a mistake. That something had gone wrong with the signal which made you.”
“Is that possible?”
“I know very little about the technology in use five hundred years after I was born. What might not be possible?”
“This all feels religious, not scientific,” Charlie said uncomfortably.
“Indeed. We are speculating about things which are not just unknown, but perhaps unknowable. Perhaps the scientists of the 30th century were never men at all? In my time I saw monsters as large as cities. I saw millions of human minds combined together into a single organism which I controlled with a simple computer program. We had a wishing machine which made every human being wealthier than Ming ever conceived. All of this was in the 25th century. I don’t know what the 30th century was like. I don’t know my creators.”
“They weren’t Gods.”
“Ah, perhaps. To an ant a skyscraper has no limit as far as height. The difference between those who created us and an actual deity may be more subtle than our brains were built to handle.”
“What do you mean?”
“Perhaps they did not want us to understand, and so made us just a little more feeble than we had to be?”
Sally Brightly had begun taking some of the broken benches and metal pieces from the rubble and using them to reinforce their shelter. She filled in a few holes and provided a little protection from the rough coral for them inside.
Avraam took a series of broken pieces of white and red coral and began building a sculpture of some sort with them. It looked impressionistic, but deliberate and intricate. His face was pale. He gritted his teeth, and his chest looked like a mangled corpse’s. Only then did Charlie realize that Avraam’s necklace was gone. He had probably lost it to the sucking tentacles of the monster below.
It began to gently rain.
The crabs came out again. Wu Gwei and Sally got hard at work crushing them. He with his metal boot, and her with a large chunk of bent steel from the crash. Charlie tried stomping on one with his shoe, but it didn’t seem to be hard or heavy enough to hurt the creature.
One of them scurried over the top of his shoe.
He walked up to the shuttle’s wreck to try and find something good and heavy to use against the vermin. The rain was growing harder, but wasn’t heavy yet. He could see a gray cloud rolling in in the distance. There were flying creatures, which appeared not to have wings. But they flew all the same, and they were heading in the opposite direction from the cloud.
“There’s a big storm coming,” He called back down to the rest of the group. As he did, a big gust of wind suddenly filled his jacket and shirt. His tie whipped up and then flew away, out over the reef.
Sally and Wu Gwei were still stomping the creatures. Fock had picked something up and was smashing them as well. Charlie was amazed that a man wounded as badly as Avraam could exert himself that way. The Russian was fat, and he was sloppy, but Charlie had no question about whether he was tough.
From the other direction, away from the crew and towards the storm, Charlie heard a tweeting sound. He turned back and looked to see what had made it. He had to walk a few more steps to see, but there was a humanoid creature.
This Mud-Man hadn’t been one of the ones on the Shamballa. It had never been exposed to Doctor Aelfwyrd’s experiments. Its eldritch skin was translucent blue. Charlie could dimly see right through It. Charlie could see the bones, some of the organs, and the rock behind the alien. It stood on a patch of sand next to a tidal pool. The creature held one of the black “crabs” and had apparently been eating it before Charlie interrupted.
“I’m – I’m sorry about what we did to your people,” Charlie said sadly and seriously, although he did not expect to be understood.
The Mud-Man didn’t look like it should be called a Mud-Man. If Charlie had named it right there, he would have called it a Water-Man. Its flesh was loose on its body, like the domesticated specimens, but it seemed to flow gently. It looked like water. The being was incredibly alien, but beautiful in a ghostly way. It took another bite of the crab, looking up at Charlie cautiously as it did so.
Charlie took a careful step forward.
And then suddenly, the alien bolted into the water, just as fast as the projectiles from Sally’s drive-rifle had flown. Charlie moved forward, hoping to see the creature swimming away, but it was long gone. Not even ripples were left behind. It was as if the alien had been absorbed into the ocean.
As Charlie returned to their cave, the wind was blowing very hard. The rest of the crew had crushed hundreds of the crabs outside of their shelter. A large metal makeshift door covered the entrance and was quite heavy to lift as Charlie went inside.
Their shelter was lit by a couple of tiny lanterns, which were apparently to be found in their emergency kits. The light was limited by the uneven shape of the cave, but where it fell it lit very brightly.
“I saw one of the Mud Men, one of the wild Mud Men.”
Wu Gwei raised an eyebrow. “Is he out there?”
“Oh, no. He ran away like lightning. He was afraid of me.”
“You know that they’re dangerous?”
“Sure. I saw one kill Allambree in seconds.”
Wu nodded soberly.
“But he wasn’t violent. He was very different than the ones on the ship. I liked him.”
Sally explained. “We had to change them so they could survive on our ship, and to make them more useful. The natives weren’t strong enough to carry or to dig.”
Charlie sat down and was quiet for a long while. Wu did his best to make sure the door was secured as well as it could be. Finally, Charlie spoke again. “What we did to these creatures was a terrible crime. And bringing back the ones that we did might be even worse. What’s the Aelfwyrd-edited DNA going to do to the species? I know he would make it as dominant as he could. What if in a few generations, the beautiful blue Mud Men are extinct, replaced by our slave race?”
No one answered.
“That will be our fault. We’ll have ruined a humanoid species.”
“Charlie…. They’re not noble savages. They’re animals. They’re not the Cherokee. They’re more like the coyote.” Sally spoke to him like he was a child.
“And you think it would be the good thing to ruin the coyote?”
Avraam butted in. “Where do you think dogs came from? Earth would not be Earth without humanity interfering. We can’t know that we have done a bad thing.”
“This isn’t our world,” Charlie said sourly.
“You don’t understand our mission,” The Russian argued. “It was never exploration. That was a lie. It was a test.”
“Alright then, tell me. What’s our mission?”
The Russian didn’t answer.
“Tell me!” Charlie screamed.
Mew Tse rested her hand on Charlie’s arm. “Peace now.”
7
Early the next morning, Wu Gwei opened the shelter to take a look outside. It was no longer raining, but the clouds were still dark, and a win
d was still blowing. He stepped out carefully. Charlie climbed over and followed closely behind.
The dead bodies of the crabs were all gone, and almost all sign of the shuttle’s wreckage had disappeared as well. A few pieces which had been wedged against their shelter were still there, but that was all. Wu Gwei was in the process of stepping up on a long wet rock to see if the burned wreckage could be seen in the distance, when he slipped and fell onto his back.
As Charlie watched, the “rock” which Wu had slipped on seemed to grow longer and longer, and began to rise up. It was not a rock. It was not coral. The massive and devilish tentacle lifted up and then clasped itself around Wu Gwei’s body.
A red light was shining in Wu’s chest. There was a burst of smoke and a putrid smell. Charlie shut his eyes for a second. When he looked again, black goo was pouring out of the side of the wounded tentacle, but the monster still had its grip.
Charlie saw their shelter’s door wiggle. He ran forward and slammed his weight down on it as hard as he could, blocking the rest of the crew from coming out.
Wu Gwei was lifted high up into the sky, and then hammered back down into the coral with incredible force. Soaked plant-matter, black crabs, and what appeared to be eels fell from the monster’s slippery limb. The strike shook the reef beneath them and Charlie lost his balance. The door slid a few degrees diagonally, but he still did his best to hold it closed.
A wave came up and splashed over Wu and up to Charlie’s shoulders, before retreating again. As it slipped back, Charlie could see Wu’s bloody and impassive face. The tentacle pulled him into the water and the cyborg didn’t resist any longer.
“Till we meet again,” Charlie whispered, still holding the door closed behind him.
The tentacle soon rose up once more and crashed into the coral, blindly looking for more prey. As the rain continued to fall, a second oozy tentacle joined into the groping and began hammering the reef. Charlie’s mouth filled with salt water. He lost his balance and scratched his legs on the coral. He lost his hold on the makeshift door and then watched as it fell away into the tide.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 14