Stars Fell on Alabama

by M. Alan Marr

  “Any problems?” Dev says while programming their departure course.

  “The panel down there says the truck is mag-locked?”

  “Good man.”

  “Think anyone will see us?” Chaz says, still watching the threat panel.

  “Well, it’s night,” Dev replies, “and the ship has a stealth system to help us blend in with the surrounding environment, so unless anyone gets too close, I think we’ll be all right.” Dev sees that Chaz is both amazed and apprehensive. “Deep breath, Chaz.”

  “I’m fine,” Chaz says quickly. He looks around the deck. Mostly military-looking, it does have a comfortable seating area at the forward end. There is so much happening, Chaz doesn’t know what to look at, so he continues watching the threat display, since he knows what’s going on there. The helicopters are just to the edge of lake. The lack of motion inside the ship makes the danger feel uncomfortably imminent.

  “We are moving, right?”

  Dev smiles. “Oh, we’re moving.”

  The computers signal a chime, and the engine power reduces significantly.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s okay. We’re in orbit. Westbound over the Pacific.”

  “Already?”

  Dev gently takes Chaz’s upper arm. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  Chaz follows Dev to the forward seating area. Dev pulls out his iPhone, still engaged in special mode and powers down all the wall panel displays and shuts down the overhead interior lights. The glow of individual computer panels and the line of floor-level lighting outlining the aisle light their way.

  “Watch this.” Dev keys another button, and the hull mechanically unlocks. The outer fuselage begins to retract. The black glass display panels surrounding the sides and front of the cabin are actually transparent pressure bulkheads. Nearly the entire perimeter of the ship is now an amazing wraparound vista of panoramic daylight.

  “Holy shit—”

  “Surprise. That’s your world.”

  “My world—” Chaz approaches the windows and then has another realization. “Take some time off and show me your world; in a crowded world like this one; money buys security on this world; tough world we live in; my time on this Earth is limited. Oh my God, you’ve been saying things like that from day one.”

  Dev smiles and then joins Chaz’s side as he gazes out the large windows. “Are you doing all right?”

  “Yeah.” Chaz nods and looks outside. His smile fades after a few seconds, and then looks at Dev with longing eyes. “Dev . . . where are we?”

  “We’re in orbit.”

  “No. I mean . . . where are we?”

  “You mean us,” Dev says. “Well, that depends. Are you breaking up with me?”

  Chaz smiles. “What, over this?” He shrugs. “I’ve dated worse.”

  Dev sighs in relief. “In that case, when this is all over, I . . . could stay on Earth, or you could . . . come to Trieste.”

  “You would do that?”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” Dev says, sincerely. “I can’t.”

  “But you and me, it’s not just an act?”

  Dev nudges his body against Chaz. “I told you, the stars brought us together.”

  Chaz smiles. “Suddenly, that phrase takes on new meaning.”

  “Not to me.” Dev smiles.

  “Wait, would they let you stay? Or for that matter, would they let me go there?”

  “Well, the average Tertian can’t just go back and forth to Earth. But I’m a senior commissioned Officer of the Crown. They don’t have to worry about me altering Human destiny on Earth, that sort of thing. Who knows, might even be good to have an officer stationed on Earth permanently.” Dev motions for Chaz to follow him. “Come on, I’ll show you a better view.”

  Chaz hesitates. “There’s a better view?”

  “Yeah, wait one sec.”

  Chaz follows Dev to the starboard pilot station, where Dev programs the flight console for orbital ops. That done, he moves aft toward another console and presses a key that releases a small buoy, which can be heard being ejected from the ship.

  “What was that?” Chaz says.

  “Relay buoy,” Dev replies. “I was supposed to drop it when I first arrived, but the space station sneaked up on me and I didn’t get a chance.”

  “How does something as large as a space station sneak up on you?”

  “In order to remain stealthy, I could only employ passive scanning techniques. I didn’t detect the space station until it was coming up on the horizon.”

  “That must have been a surprise.”

  “Yes, it was. Not exactly the best start to a covert operation. Anyway, the relay buoy will finish downloading the rest of the information I need to collect. Come on, the better view is this way.”

  Chaz follows Dev forward past the starboard pilot station to a set of short spiral stairs. As Dev’s foot touches the first step, the upper hatch slides open to the observation canopy. Reaching the top of the steps, Chaz looks up in amazement.

  “Whoa!” Chaz says, gazing at the unobstructed view of Earth.

  “Breathtaking, isn’t it?” Dev activates the system monitor panel in the tabletop in the center of the round observation room. Both he and Chaz make themselves comfortable on the circular couch.

  “Okay,” Chaz says, “is there anything you need to do right now, or do we have some time?”

  Dev glances at his iPhone display. “We have some time.”

  “Good,” Chaz says. “I want to know everything. Just start at the beginning. First of all, if you’re not human, then what exactly are you?” He doesn’t let Dev answer. “Jesus, you’re not going to pull your skin off, are you?”

  “Really?” Dev says with furled brow. There were a lot of factors Dev considered before revealing everything to Chaz. This was not one of them. Dev didn’t realize, until just now, how limited the scope of an Earth resident really can be. It had always irked Dev to read the word Human written as human in Earthly books, since species are always capitalized on his world. More to the point, it seems like Earth residents somehow minimize their own significance by calling themselves merely human, rather than Human. And the expression you’re only human is the biggest insult of all. But that comes from lack of vision. Chaz’s vision is about to improve significantly.

  “You don’t know this, Chaz, but there are other Human worlds. Lots of them. Yours just happens to be, well, the way it is.” Dev explains further, “Humans from the Crown have been out in the cosmos for a very long time. We’re responsible for all of it.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Nope.” Dev motions toward Earth. “We’re also kind of responsible for Earth being all screwed up.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. This goes back to the beginning.”

  “The beginning of time?”

  “Not quite that far back.”

  “Well, tell me the history,” Chaz says.

  Dev takes a breath and replies in a sort of you-asked-for-it way, “Okay. This is going to rock your world.”

  Chaz doesn’t flinch. “You’ve already done that. But let’s hear it.”

  “Very well. First, it would be best not to tell anyone about this.”

  “Really, Dev?”

  Dev cocks his head. “All right, smart ass. Keep in mind, this all happened a while back. We knew about Earth long before we actually came here. But after a large asteroid devastated the planet, we decided to investigate. By the time we got here, the skies had long since cleared, and we found a fertile world with only remnants of the large reptile population. Just about everything else was annihilated by the impact.”

  “Population? You mean like people?”

  “No, no, dinosaurs,” Dev replies.

  “Wait, that impact happened like sixty-five million years ago.”

  “Yeah, not quite,” Dev says. “Your people’s estimates of that event are off, by a lot.”
/>   “How did we screw that up so bad?”

  “They used carbon dating and radioactive decay rates to establish the time of impact. What they failed to realize, is that the asteroid itself was sixty-five million years old. But that’s not when it hit the planet.”

  “Whoa.”

  “The asteroid drove deep into the planet, effecting Earth’s core. The internal temperature rose so high it liquefied the mantle. The seismic shock broke apart the crust, sending entire continents drifting along the liquefied mantle. Eventually, everything cooled down and the continents settled in their current positions.” Dev continues, “So, as the indigenous population was no longer in residence, we decided to stake claim to this world by introducing Humanity into it.”

  “You guys did that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you never came here before then?”

  “Would you want to land on a world full of giant, dangerous reptiles?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Neither did we.”

  “What about evolution?”

  “Well, it didn’t evolve the way you think.”

  “No shit? What did you do?”

  “First, we supplemented Earth’s food chain with additional plants and animals from home. Then we set up large-scale agricultural outposts around the planet. And for a time, everything worked out fine.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “This was an enormous endeavor. The biggest we ever undertook. At the time, Trieste was a very different world than the one I know. Pollution was an enormous problem, worse even than Earth today. Like you guys, we consumed most of our planet’s resources with little regard as to the future. We turned to other worlds to help sustain us. But what we did was create extensions of Trieste elsewhere without changing our methodology. Instead of one polluted world, we now had several. When we realized the error in our ways, it was almost too late. Newfound Earth was perfect and offered an opportunity for many of our people to start over. They recruited large numbers of volunteers from all over the Crown and settled them on Earth in climate zones similar to what they were used to. Most of the volunteers were, what was then called, Agro-class labor, who eventually sought autonomy on their new world. They rebelled against the Governors, who were later driven off the planet.”

  “Driven off?”

  “Basically. In many ways, it was like your own American Revolution. People came to Earth seeking a new life, but the challenges involved with establishing a new society, while maintaining governance from a distance, began to cause problems. You see, in the Crown, we had a structured and complete society. Here on Earth, we had what was, essentially, a planetary farm with a frontier mentality. The workers tilled the soil, harvested crops, and so forth, but whereas in the Crown, work gave them avenues into other facets of society, here on Earth, really all they had to look forward to was another day of hard work.”

  “Why didn’t they just go back?”

  “Not that simple. Back then, transit times were incredibly long.”

  “So what happened?”

  “There were revolts, land grabs, territorial fights. Groups began splitting themselves off by ethnicity. Sometimes, splinter groups would attack others. It was the type of societal breakdown we hadn’t seen in centuries. The workers basically told the Governors they quit, but were unwilling to move or relinquish the land they tilled. By then all of the large transports were years out of range on an auto trajectory back to the Crown. Besides, none of the settlers wanted to return to the polluted worlds they fled, and many would have faced prosecution for their insurrection. It became known as the Extra-Sociologic Disaster. No one technically owned the planet, and, of course, these people weren’t indentured servants, so there was no legal framework to either force them to work or to leave. We never had an outpost so remote, and had no experience with the problems extreme separation could cause.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “It got very ugly, and at times, very violent. Ultimately, the surviving Governors abandoned Earth and escaped to the few remaining ships in orbit.”

  “What happened here after they left?”

  “Initially, lawlessness. There were territorial battles, uprisings, wars even. Understand, the Governors were not overseers; they were doctors, administrators, technical specialists, and so forth. Without the Governors, what technology remained behind eventually fell into disrepair, which the Agro-class was in no way equipped to service. Some of them tried operating the power systems of the time with . . . catastrophic results.”

  “How catastrophic?”

  “They exposed themselves to radiation, or worse. One province in India was totally annihilated when its reactor imploded. After that, we sent down teams to deactivate all the remaining power systems. And in very short order, the population was left living off the land. I don’t need to tell you that without adequate support, life on Earth can be very harsh.”

  “Wait, those ancient cities had power?”

  “Of course. The Giza pyramids provided power for the entire region, and transmitted energy to the transports left in orbit.”

  “And you really turned the lights out?”

  “We had to. We didn’t want to see another disaster like in India.”

  “What happened to everyone after you cut the power?”

  “At that point, the Governors had no choice but to return to the Crown. The ships back then didn’t have the kind of energy reserves to stay in orbit forever. Plus, their food supply was limited to whatever they had aboard.”

  “What about on the ground? How did they cope with not having power?”

  “It wasn’t just the power,” Dev says. “Without doctors, even simple pathogens ran unchecked; sometimes decimating entire cities. It was chaos. The Mayan Province in Mexico was one of our most advanced settlements. It was a center of education and discovery. And in no time, only a trace of their existence remained; their technologies lost on Earth forever. Even to this day, their pyramids stand like great monuments to the dead.” Dev gazes outside at the Earth below and laughs. “If people down there ever figure out how to fire up one of those ziggurats, any question about life beyond Earth will be answered once and for all.”

  “What are you talking about? They’re made of stone.”

  Dev gives Chaz a sideways glance. “Sure they are . . . I actually went to Mexico and tried using one of them to send my dispatch reports to the Crown.”

  “When was that?”

  “Remember when I got mugged? You said I had gotten some sun.”

  “You flew to Mexico? Did the pyramid still work?”

  “No,” Dev replies. “I mean, it would have, but somewhere in history one of the critical blocks was replaced and disrupted the signal pathway. I was able to download everything the structure recorded over the ages, though, so it wasn’t a total loss.”

  “That’s unbelievable.”

  “Why? Doesn’t it strike you at all odd that a jungle people would build mathematically and astronomically correct structures just . . . because?” Dev continues, “The old technology used the crystalline properties of the rock as a type of analog circuitry.”

  “Wow. What about the rest of the ancient stuff?”

  Dev thinks. “The Great Wall of China wasn’t built just to keep the Mongols out.”

  “Unbelievable. So, go on. They cut the power, people got sick, then what?”

  “The savagery down there got so bad within two generations, none of them could ever be re-acclimated into our society. For centuries, entire civilizations rose and then wiped themselves out, time and time again.”

  “Did you guys ever return?”

  “Eventually. As advances in our technology shortened the transit times, it was decided we’d attempt to re-establish contact.”

  “Did the people on Earth welcome them back?”

  Dev sighs slightly. “They were terrified. They had no knowledge of us. In our absence, the Earth residents disavowed their heritage completely; eithe
r due to resentment over their abandonment, or simply because everyone with living memory of us had died off. The Earth residents were little more than primitives at that point. Some were mystified by our presence, but had no comprehension of spaceflight or technology.” Dev pauses for a moment. “I understand your archeologists found cave drawings of people in rockets and space helmets.” He adds, “We were the ancient astronauts.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “So, we left . . . to give them more time. That’s pretty much how the Recon missions got started; to watch for signs we could eventually reacquaint our people. We thought we had our chance during, what you call, the dawn of civilization. Philosophy, mathematics, intelligence . . . all finally began peaceably taking root.” Dev looks at Earth and shakes his head. “But the Recon missions had unintended consequences.”

  “Like what?”

  Dev leans his arm over the top of the couch. “The ancient Greeks ended up deifying us; something we didn’t exactly wish to promote, but that’s what happens when you touch down on Mt. Olympus in plain sight of the locals.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, see, back then, the Admiralty would send entire teams of Observers; people tasked with particular specialties. Zeus, Ares, Hermes, they were real guys.”

  “Oh my God!”

  “Half the team went to Athens, half went to Rome. Same result. That’s why you find Roman counterparts to the Greek gods. The Romans were a bit autocratic. The Greeks, however, showed the most promise. Humanity’s best hope of reconciliation was nestled within the simplest philosophical question of the day: what if?” Dev continues, “But Greece was conquered by the Romans, and a lot of historical progress disappeared with them. What the Greeks knew to be true, became mythology. Then, the Roman Empire eventually fell, and more was lost. It was eventually decided, after a series of cross-cultural fiascos, Recon missions would be conducted, well, quietly.”