by H. T. Kofruk
Clovis put his finger over his mouth indicating he wanted silence. The muffled sound coming from other rooms could be heard but nothing else. He knew there was something wrong; warships usually had several fission reactors, several million solar cells and a host of other backup generators in case the central fusion generator went out, itself a highly improbable event. Total silence of any machines or engines was an ominous signal that could only be intentional.
Two strategic missiles, both capable of flattening several cities, hit the Pristina almost at the same time. This was long after all Orthodox naval personnel had abandoned the large transport vessel and had transferred to one of the several warships in proximity.
The captain of the Pristina, a portly, chronically drunk man with a perennially red nose, looked at the double explosions from one of the viewing ports of the cruiser to which he had transferred. “Shit” he exclaimed before taking a swig of vodka from a metal flask. “It’s a damn pity about the ship.”
Chapter 13: Second Life
‘Certain species of intelligent beings have evolved collective consciousness, particularly upon death. The Nikruk, the Carulions and the Thalians have been known to be able to conserve the memories of deceased members in common ‘databases’. This is essentially what the information revolution on Earth is trying to replicate; a composition, a video, a holograph, an opinion of an individual survives eternally through the Web-Com and other networks and databases. Are the internalisation and bio-organisation of this network the next step in our own evolution? Is the fear of being forgotten upon death a strong enough source of power to spark our own physiological change?’ – Carlina S. Banks, xenothropologist, 22nd Saan Xenothropology Conference, year 2810.
Though her body showed virtually no traces of the horrific burns she had suffered from the Chinese destroyer attack, she could initially feel them every time she shifted position, every time the wind blew on her face, every time her clothes slid across her skin. She had lost consciousness the moment the missile blew the ship into a million fragments and every shred of intellect she held told that she should have been dead.
When she awoke in the vat of regenerative liquid, it seemed as if vertigo, agoraphobia and claustrophobia all kicked in at once. The sense of disorientation was so intense that she later told herself that it must be how a new born feels when coming out of the womb. She started to tremble violently and she had to be helped by the unfamiliar man from falling back in the vat and suffocating. She was helped out of the vat and a gown was wrapped around her.
A million questions entered her head. What was her name? Where was she? How long had she been ‘dreaming’? Who was this man who seemed concerned about her health? Why was she not dead? The room was well lit and it hurt her eyes. Tears rolled over the transparent regenerative liquid that was starting to cake on her face. She looked at the two people standing in the room, looking and waiting for her to react.
She didn’t recognize the small man who had helped her out. He had dark skin, bushy brown eyebrows and a moustache. His receding hairline and specks of grey told her that he was probably in his early forties or late thirties. Upon observing the alien, she realized she knew him. She recognized the yellow eyes, brown skin and great height. His expression was almost human-like, showing both concern and curiosity. The memory came back so suddenly and with such intensity that she almost slipped, only avoiding falling thanks to the short man coming to hold her elbow.
The memory relived itself before her wide-open eyes. He had been banging on the door, his anguished face visible through the round reinforced glass pane in the door. He was screaming something at her. She concentrated on the memory, the syllables formed by his mouth. Heera.
She looked around her with a panicked expression. Where was he? Where was Terry? Another flood of questions threatened to throw her into insanity. The small man was helping her to a chair. Her legs were trembling as if they would give way any minute. The large alien walked with purposeful steps towards her and knelt down to bring his eyes almost level with hers. He put his large hand on her shoulder.
The result of the contact was instant. She stopped shivering and her breathing came back to normal. She strained her lips to say something but it seemed she had to relearn how to use her body after a long absence.
“You’re safe” he said in Imperial Chinese.
Heera had to strain her mind to find the right vocabulary in the foreign tongue. She ended up only just pronouncing the two syllables “Bin. Ja.”
The alien nodded.
She realized who had kept her alive the past few…weeks? Months? Years?
“Where am I?” she asked in a firmer voice.
The small man walked forward. “You’re on a planet called I-9983. You’ve been in the regeneration vat for four months.”
Haseeb was surprised that Heera’s reaction hadn’t expressed more shock. “I was brain-dead when I arrived” she stated flatly.
The planetologist nodded. “All your vital signs were very weak. You had suffered third degree burns on eighty per cent of your body.”
“Yes, I know. I was in an explosion caused by the detonation of a fission missile. My burning body was in absolute vacuum for three seconds before it was scooped up and put in a damaged escape pod. The probability of my survival should have been zero. I was brain dead for almost a month before my mind was pulled out of death” she said in a calm voice as if she was discussing the weather.
Haseeb looked at her with his mouth gaping open. There was no possible way she could know any of that in such detail. What had the alien done to her in her unconsciousness?
Bin’ja didn’t understand the conversation which was taking place in English. Heera looked at him with eyes containing gratitude and sadness. He nodded back.
***
Two weeks later, Heera had regained most of the control of her body. She didn’t venture from the ship for a week since she hadn’t been vaccinated from local diseases and by the second week she was itching to get out. After months in a regeneration vat she felt desperately stiff and weak. She didn’t see Bin’ja for the first two weeks and she got the feeling that he was avoiding her. The scientist, Haseeb, seemed nice enough and took good care of her. But for some reason, she felt slightly uncomfortable around him, despite all the warm smiles, the collection of books and music he made available to her, even the food he shared. But she had to admit that his discoveries concerning the ‘Hummers’ were interesting.
‘You see, the world they inhabit is not very colourful. My theory is that it was once a very colourful place, but the planet’s rotation speed was reduced drastically by some event. With one face almost permanently facing the sun and the other in darkness, most of the colourful species became extinct. The Hummers, on the other hand, not only survived this event, they retained their ability to see a spectrum of colours almost as varied as what we see’ the scientist had explained with an almost religious fervour.
He had continued while checking Heera’s vaccination results. ‘This ability to see colours in a grey world became a key for their development of language, a vital trait of the emergence of intelligence. They became, in short, synesthetic.’
‘You mean their senses are linked?’ Heera had asked. She had learned in medical school about a fairly rare human condition where people could ‘see’ sounds, ‘hear’ colours, or ‘taste’ texture.
‘Exactly. The part of the brain that controls hearing started mingling with the part that’s in charge of seeing. They can see different pitches of sound in different colours or shapes. In short, by humming they create patterns, shapes and colours that others can read.’
Heera squealed like a little girl when she learned that he had not only managed to project the geometric shapes and patterns the Hummers ‘saw’ when hearing different sounds, but he had also deciphered their meaning. ‘Four years, it took me. Their language is as complex, perhaps even more complex than whatever we have on Earth. And it’s the only language that’s completely i
nseparable from its writing system.’
When he finally allowed her to leave after all the vaccination treatments, she felt as if she was about to fly, even though darkness inhabited part of her mind. The air had a sandy scent to it and she immediately felt its dryness. The village consisted of round huts made of grey mud and straw. She later learned that the ubiquitous grey sand had to be ground and mixed with clay from deeper down in the ground before water was added to form a cement-like substance.
She got the first glimpses of the huge male ‘Hummers’ that Haseeb had described. These giants were more than double the size of the females and didn’t sleep in the huts but formed colonies at the edges of the village. Dozens of male heads turned to look at her as she stepped out of the ship. She tried to shake off the stares but couldn’t help being nervous. It was like walking out into a dark alley populated by dozens of unsavoury men.
One of them got up and started to walk towards her, his massive upper body being supported by knuckles on the ground. His arms, shoulders and stomach were covered with grey fur while his barrel chest was bare and pale. Haseeb had told her that male Hummers, unlike females, elders or adolescents, seldom wore clothes. The one approaching her, however, was wearing a brown cloth around his waist. Heera held her breath until he finally stood towering in front of her and made unintelligible humming sounds.
Heera quickly put on the goggles that Haseeb had given her. They came with a mouthpiece into which the user could speak and would directly send humming sounds to those in the vicinity. This being the first time she had ever communicated in this fashion, she felt goose bumps on the back of her neck.
As soon as she put on the goggles and activated them, she saw a plethora of shapes shifting and moving in her vision. She was at first mesmerized by their beauty but realized the orchestra of humming sounds coming from the alien were getting louder, perhaps out of impatience for an answer. Haseeb had taught her the broad strokes of understanding their visual language but it all proved insufficient to decipher the rapidly changing shapes. She decided instead to express her inability to understand by speaking into the mouthpiece and releasing her own series of sounds.
The alien seemed to understand. Instead of speaking to her, he turned and gestured for her to follow with a lazy twitch of his head before striding off towards the perpetual sunlight. He led her through the village on gravel-paved lanes and patches of crops. She squeamed when she saw a large, cement-looking tub full of grey and black slugs, each one the size of her forearm. A young female wearing a dirty grey robe was tending to the slugs and looked up at her with surprised black eyes. Heera realized the female was giving the slugs ice shavings from a small cube of ice wrapped in fur.
The large male saw her interest in the slugs and approached the tub. With his large hand, he grabbed one. The slimy black blob started writhing when the male squeezed it like a tube of toothpaste. The slug, consequently, started oozing a clear, amber-coloured liquid from its mouth or anus that the male let fall into his mouth. After a mouthful, he seemed satisfied and offered the slug to Heera who politely declined through the translating device. The female who had been tending to the slugs walked up to the male and started humming rapidly. The virulently shifting shapes in Heera’s goggles gave her the feeling that the female wasn’t happy.
The male Hummer led her on through the village and they soon arrived in the elders’ part. The huts here were generally bigger. Heera observed that adolescents also lived here while the younger children lived with the females. Haseeb had told her that young adults not yet fully sexually developed into females gave off pheromones that males hated. His theory went that it was probably an evolutionary trait that prevented males from having intercourse with immature females. Since they couldn’t be close to males, they stayed with the sexless elders from whom they learned traditions and customs.
While the adolescents seemed shy and disappeared into the huts upon setting eyes on her, the elders all came out to observe her with intelligent eyes. None of them spoke – or hummed – to her but she could almost feel their minds trying to understand this new being. Even the large male who was leading her forward seemed slightly nervous around the elders. She then realized that it was the pheromones secreted by the adolescents that were making him uncomfortable and the reason behind their disappearance. Another difference between the elders’ part of the village was the works of art. Given the dearth of variety of materials, the works of art were often shapes dug out of the walls of the huts or flat rocks piled on top of each other to form towers.
The village was larger than she had thought and it took a good half-hour stroll to reach the edge which was marked by large boulders. The male Hummer stopped a good distance before reaching the edge and signalled that he wouldn’t go further. Sitting between two large boulders, she saw the hunched back of the alien who had saved her life. The contrast created by the flood of orange sunlight made it impossible to make out any details but she recognized the shape of the large alien. She approached quietly as if not wanting to disturb him.
“It is good that you are moving around” said Bin’ja, just about able to reproduce the subtle intonations of Imperial Chinese.
Heera smiled on hearing his deep, soothing voice but said nothing.
“You want to know something” said Bin’ja again. It wasn’t a question.
“You were talking to me for months. You brought me out of the coma. Why?”
Bin’ja got up abruptly and turned towards her. He walked steadily in her direction. “I’ve had enough of the sunlight. Let us go back to the village.”
Once Bin’ja started walking in front of her and had the sunlight on his back, Heera could finally see his scars and burn marks. Although he was certainly made from tougher stuff, his back bore the result of the catastrophic seconds during which she had been excruciatingly close to dying. It gave her the shudders and she hurried to walk alongside him.
“What happened?” she asked as she looked up at his serene face. She remembered the abrasive alarm, the flashing red lights and Terry’s face in the round window of the pressure door screaming in anguish. She had seen his lips move to form her name, though she couldn’t hear him at all. The last thing she felt was Bin’ja’s large body enveloping her own.
“Mother guided me. Before the fire came, I already felt it. She guided me to safety and told me to save you.”
“Save me?” exclaimed Heera. “Why would she want to save me? I’m a Renden.”
Bin’ja’s silence confirmed to Heera that he didn’t know the answer to her last question. Haseeb had told her that they had landed in a small escape pod, leading her to believe that in that short moment, Bin’ja had been able to sweep her up, reach the escape pod and launch it before the impact. For a split second, Heera and Bin’ja had been in contact with the blue flames that killed everybody on board, the same blue flames that left the myriad of burn marks on the large alien’s back.
They walked in silence until they reached a large hut that apparently now belonged to Bin’ja.
“It belonged to a recently deceased elder. They thought it would be suitable for me since it’s close to the edge of the village” explained Bin’ja.
The entrance was facing the dark side of the planet and was covered by strings of clay beads. The inside of the hut was cool and dry. Heera was surprised to see that the floor was not made of gravel but of a hard, concrete-like substance like the walls. One half of the round floor was slightly elevated, perhaps to indicate a living space.
Bin’ja went to one side of the hut and unblocked a small hole. A flood of sunlight immediately and illuminated the interior. Heera saw that the interior walls were glazed by a shiny substance, allowing the light to bounce off. It almost seemed that they were glowing.
“What were you doing all day looking at the sun?” she asked after sitting down with her back against the wall.
Bin’ja sat cross-legged near the middle of the hut. “I’m trying to make sense of things.”
&nb
sp; “How do you mean?” asked Heera as she dusted the blue trousers that Haseeb had given to her. She found them too big around the waist and too short for her long legs.
“I have shown you Mother, at least a small part of her. But I have recently felt a dark side of her that I never knew.”
Heera didn’t understand. “How did you revive me?” she changed the subject.
“I talked to your fragile mind. At first, I didn’t get any response but I knew that I could get you to respond if I had enough time.”
“You mean I was brain-dead but you were somehow able to push and prod it back into life” she said. Her shoes fit badly as well and she had to retie the knots. “So what’s next?”
Bin’ja looked slightly surprised by her question. “I must go and meet Mother and see what is happening to her. I must find the source of this darkness.”
“We can ask the scientist for his ship. He’s spent enough time alone on this planet. He could come with us”
Bin’ja looked at her and squinted his yellow eyes. “Somehow, I think that he wouldn’t be too willing.”
Chapter 14: The Saracen
‘Most of the people who didn’t die immediately after the orbital attack were in the countryside. Monks in more secluded areas came to assist the civilian population. None came within thirty miles of New Kaliningrad or any other large city, however, which was understandable. I can’t figure out how I survived; in one hour, I was exposed to more radiation that a human could endure in a lifetime. But two months later, here I am. My hair is starting to fall out and blisters have appeared on my shoulders and back. I thought I was from some deep gene pool that made me immune to radiation. But no, I’m just a tiny bit more resistant.’ – Irene Thomson, last survivor of nuclear attack on Constantine, holograph recording, year 2913
Paul couldn’t take his eyes off the man. He was tall, perhaps a couple inches taller than Paul with a fit, slim body. His deep-set, piercing eyes looked as though they were drinking in all information. The Saracen hadn’t shaved for a while and half of his face was hidden in thick stubble. Every nerve in his body told him to kill the bearded Saracen who had brought death on his mentor.