Startoucher

by C. J. Odle

  The president of the United States looked out over the immaculate lawn from a balcony of the White House, taking a minute before returning to the Oval Office. Despite a marathon morning session, his team still hadn’t surmounted the blocks and arguments against putting their bill through Congress. It wasn’t enough to prove a bill would be good for the country, because what was proof to the average radio talk show? It was a question of building support little by little, both in the country and in the legislature. Meetings and more meetings, press conferences and promises.

  He gazed up at the cloudy sky. He briefly wondered if there were there other worlds out there. And if so, did they have press conferences?

  “Mr. President,” his press secretary said, “I think we have some better wording for the speech to Mothers of America this afternoon.”

  “Let’s hear it,” the president said. He looked at the lawn again, taking one last moment to appreciate the simplicity of it before returning to endless complication.

  In that moment, light surrounded him, and he disappeared.

  Professor Helen Allen marked papers in her office in one of the deeper recesses of Oxford’s corridors. Papers written by first-year students who had chosen philosophy as their discipline but who hadn’t yet mastered the ethical implications of copying most of their answers from the internet. Or who simply churned out the same references to Hobbes, Locke, Nietzsche, and Bentham, predictable and uninspired.

  “An interesting moral problem,” she said aloud. “If my students are producing identikit answers, does the weight of moral responsibility rest on me or them?”

  And if so, should it affect the marks? She didn’t have enough time to get to the bottom of it, because at that moment, she found herself plucked away from her office and rendered neatly unconscious.

  Dr. Nils Gardener was monitoring the collision of two superdense particles at CERN toward the end of a long day when the light came for him. He was possibly the only person on the planet in a position to appreciate the beautiful efficiency of Sirius’s made-to-order wormhole effect when applied to the transportation of a human being. Under other circumstances, seeing it firsthand might even have sparked vital advances in long-range transportation.

  Unfortunately, as the light came down over him, he was concentrating on the data flow from the Large Hadron Collider, absolutely determined to disprove Labousier’s latest theories and stop them clogging up the stream of his research funding. As such, by the time the tunnel enveloped him, he had fallen fast asleep.

  When the light came for the pope, he didn’t think it an act of God. Afterward, he would feel quite guilty about that. He was kneeling on increasingly arthritic knees with his hands clasped in prayer before the stained glass of one of the Vatican’s many chapels. Yet when the light came down, he didn’t for an instant assume his prayers had been answered. Instead, the cardinals with him went on to report (though only in private) his last words before disappearing had been perfectly clear. Exactly what they meant theologically, or about the Vatican’s knowledge of the wider universe, went on to be quite hotly debated.

  “Oh,” he said, “alieni.”

  Amita was wiping the dinner dishes and worrying about her son Ravi when Sirius’s pod arrived. She spent a lot of time worrying about Ravi. His brother, Sanjay, was a good boy, a clever boy, who worked hard every day in the markets and went to school in the afternoons. Sanjay would probably find work in an office somewhere, a good job. Ravi hung out with the rough guys in the back streets of Kolkata, or played cricket on the maidan when he should be studying. Amita had no idea what would become of Ravi once she was gone.

  And then, suddenly, she was.

  The president of China skimmed over the summaries on his desk as the clock on the wall showed ten minutes before midnight. Most of the reports were economic, disclosing the rate at which factories scaled up their production amid the latest growth trends. A few concerned the activities of dissidents, but he pushed those to the side. If he had as little to fear from the more ambitious members of his own party as he did from the average dissident, his life would be a lot easier.

  He reached for his coffee and settled into reading a report on slowing economic growth in the rare earth metals mining industry, and as a result was almost grateful when the tunnel of light came down to snatch him up.

  He had to admit, even by the standards of his enemies, this approach was impressive.

  The native shaman lay in a hammock strung between trees in the middle of a vision when Sirius came for him. He’d been alone in the Brazilian rainforest for three days; such isolation proved increasingly rare with the number of loggers and coffee planters moving in.

  After gradually working himself into the right space to speak with the local spirits, he’d received dreams and visions in return. What the spirits revealed concerned him. Omens of judgment and destruction. He initially thought they had something to do with the men in suits who sometimes came to his village to persuade them to move, or with the increasing devotion of the young in his tribe to football and city life rather than the old ways.

  When the light came for him, though, he knew.

  Paige had been making banners after breakfast when the tunnel of light snatched her. She always made more banners and placards than she needed to for protests, partly because there were always people who showed up without them, and partly because she didn’t find it easy to confine her thoughts to just a single expression. There was an art in making something big enough and colorful enough to catch the eye of passersby to leave no doubt about the importance of the threat to the planet. The main trick was making them in her room without her parents complaining about the space they took up.

  “I’m sixteen!” she would say. “I can do what I like with my room!”

  And then they’d make her tidy it anyway, which was simply unfair. This time, though, she would make a difference, regardless of who it upset.

  It probably said a lot about Paige that when Sirius abducted her, she assumed it was either the government or big business trying to silence her. It was the kind of thing they did, after all.

  Back in the control room, Jake and Vega watched the screens as the shaft of light beamed Paige aboard Sirius’s pod. She crumpled to the floor in the landing bay.

  Vega waved a hand and the screens became transparent. “All eight witnesses are safely in position.”

  Just eight witnesses representing billions… It didn’t seem enough, Jake thought. “Do we at least get to appeal to this… Supreme?” he pulsed.

  “If the Supreme evaluates that either of us is making a biased case, it will adjust accordingly,” Vega sent.

  “You shouldn’t have let Sirius pick all the witnesses,” Jake pulsed. “Trust me, I know when a witness list is being stacked. Our president is hardly a shining example of the best mankind has to offer.”

  “Sirius is a scientist, interested in the truth.” Vega threw its hands in the air. “You do not need to worry, Jake. It is not your role.”

  Jake sighed and shook his head. It was too much to take in, even with the cosmic plasma inside his brain. His mind was completely scrambled, and when he scanned around the control room, he felt trapped in the middle of a surreal nightmare and longed to wake up.

  Except this wasn’t a dream.

  “Jake,” Vega sent softly, its tone conveying concern. “I know this is difficult to process all at once. But the fact that you were the first to respond to our signal shows you have the ability to adapt. There are only twenty-seven Earth hours remaining before the start of the trial at noon tomorrow. You must go soon and find a female and convince her to come with you, and be back here two hours before the trial begins. Can you do that?”

  Jake put his hands on his hips and looked into the pools of Vega’s large black eyes, and his head began to swim. He tore his gaze away and strode out of the room, feeling better as the telepathic connection with the alien began to recede. He turned right and walked back to his room, the neurons below the
surface of the crystalline tube flickering softly as he passed.

  The door to the rounded room slid open silently, and the bed flowed from the wall. Jake sat down and breathed deeply. It felt safe here. Perhaps this was what prisoners sometimes felt in their cells, shut snuggly inside their tiny corners of the world.

  Jake gradually began to feel calmer, and he leaned back against the softly shining wall and tried to make sense of the last few hours. Life on Earth was an experiment, and humans a second phase of that original project. Now the alien creators of humanity had come back to check on the results and decide whether or not to allow his species to continue.

  Was it so hard to believe? Scientists on Earth already used genetic engineering to create new forms of life, and each year space travel and colonization of other planets seemed less like science fiction. Given enough time, mankind would probably have similar Startoucher-like experiments…

  Could the military take out the aliens? Back in the control room, Sirius and Vega had promised swift reprisals if any attacks were made. Jake wondered if that was a bluff to head it off… But the alien technology was so superior, it would be unthinkable if they weren’t capable of dealing with the weapons of his world. Jake estimated that Sirius had gathered all eight witnesses in less than ninety minutes. What kind of power source would permit a small space pod to travel that fast? Any attempt to bring in the military would surely backfire.

  He briefly considered the trial and the possible outcomes. If humanity lost, he could elect to go down with the sinking ship and refuse to join the aliens in the Pleiades to play happy family. He guessed they would select someone else, or even force him to go. Besides, though sobering to admit, his survival instinct was too strong not to go, even if billions of others did perish.

  Jake was left staring at the one question he’d tried to avoid: Sarah… would she go to the Pleiades with him? Cosmic plasma or not, that was going to be the hardest conversation of his life. Chances were she would turn him down, since she’d be crazy to believe him, and even if she did, she’d be crazier to actually go. But if he could just convince her to come to the trial, maybe humanity would win, and then they could stay together on Earth. Except the aliens had told him his memory of the last two weeks would be wiped, and he imagined the same thing would happen to her and the eight witnesses.

  Jake got up, and the door opened silently. The future he could deal with another time.

  Right now, he had to find Sarah.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Jake’s here, I can feel it,” Marina said, hands on the wheel of her vintage Subaru. She loved its maroon color and rear-end spoiler, and usually took the driver’s seat because she felt safer. The guys had an unfortunate tendency to get distracted. She’d once caught Billy trying to hack his way into the Starbucks ordering system with his phone while cruising down the middle of the freeway.

  Gemini sat in the back, and Joni Mitchell blasted out of the sound system. As Marina lowered the volume, Billy took his fingers out of his ears. It had been a predictable journey up until this point. Hours of actual driving, despite leaving early and initially being stuck in typical LA traffic. It was hard to see what Jake would want all the way out here on Kelso Dunes Road.

  Marina scanned the scrubby sand on either side of the road, and Adam had a GPS receiver attached to his laptop to record the coordinates. Before driving into the desert, they’d stopped for gas twice as a pretext to ask if anyone had seen Jake. No one had.

  “Are you sure about this?” Billy asked, frowning. “No disrespect, but the psychic stuff is… a bit dodgy.”

  “He’s somewhere out there.”

  In a movie, Marina might have slammed on the brakes or skidded off onto the sand. Instead, she looked for a safe spot to pull over. Adam looked faintly disappointed she wasn’t being more dramatic about it as she gestured to the right.

  “Somewhere out there?” Gemini looked at the mixture of desert brush and finer sand and then turned back to gaze at the dunes in the distance. The day had yet to really heat up, but as the sun rose, the temperature would increase rapidly.

  “Could you be a little more specific?” Adam said, smiling.

  “That way,” Marina said, pointing across the desert.

  Billy looked over at her grumpily. “Well? Go on, then.”

  “I’m not driving up onto the sand, Billy,” Marina said. “It isn’t allowed.”

  “Why not?” He didn’t look impressed.

  Neither did Adam. “We scoff at rules!”

  “So it isn’t you who runs upstairs to put plates in the dishwasher because your mom insists?” Marina countered. “Anyway, we’re not doing it.”

  “We have to walk?” Billy asked.

  “That’s right,” Marina said. She got out and grabbed her wide-brimmed hat and a small backpack from the passenger seat. Even with the heat of the day not cranked up as high as it could be, the sun’s rays baked the ground.

  “I still don’t know why we have to do this,” Adam said, hiding his laptop under the front seat before climbing out. “He’s just some guy we met at a con. If we’re going to go looking for people we’ve met, couldn’t we go try to find those sisters who—”

  Marina stopped him with a look. “Adam, I’ve been seeing visions of him since we met him.”

  “Well, I’ve been seeing visions of those sisters since—”

  “Adam.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, adjusting the baseball cap on his short Afro. “You know, if we ever do meet aliens, and it turns out they’re bent on world domination or something, we should probably just deploy you to talk to them. I’m pretty sure they’d run for home.”

  Marina ignored him and peered toward a small boulder a hundred feet ahead. “We need to start searching.”

  Billy put on wraparound sunglasses before finally getting out of the car.

  Marina had a flash of sand followed by clean walls, of Jake and someone definitely not human. It passed as quickly as it arrived, the kind of flash she normally found annoying because it didn’t tell her anything useful. Except this one did—an inescapable sense of the direction.

  “OK, guys,” Marina said. “Back in the car, it’s straight ahead.”

  Billy and Adam groaned in unison and rolled their eyes before climbing back in. Marina drove half a mile farther up Kelso Dunes Road and then slowed as they passed the main parking area on the right. A group of early-morning hikers could be seen returning from the main dunes trail, but she ignored them and the trail to continue driving. A mile later, they reached the end of the road and pulled into one of the two small parking areas. She quickly got out and then motioned for Gemini to join her.

  Marina gazed at the desert from underneath her hat as another vision flashed through her mind.

  “This way,” she said and then charged across the scrubby sand in her short leather boots and purple skirt.

  Adam grinned at Billy as he put on his John Lennon sunglasses and followed her. Billy bent down to tie the laces on his white sneakers and then trudged behind Adam.

  It was hard walking on the undulating surface of the western edge of the dunes, so it was just as well that Marina had brought three twelve-ounce bottles of water in her backpack. The dunes might have made a good place to trek and sandboard, but people who enjoyed those pursuits were typically more athletic than Gemini and Marina. Adam’s dark skin gave him an advantage, but only a little. The oppressive heat made them all want to run back to the Subaru and blast the air-con.

  As they summited a small dune, their feet dislodged sand that flowed downward in waves, releasing an eerie sound like the booming of a Tibetan monastery trumpet.

  “What’s that noise?” asked Adam, stopping and taking off his sunglasses to gaze at the waves of sand in front of him.

  “That’s freaky!” added Billy, holding out his phone to film it.

  “It’s why they’re called the singing dunes,” said Marina, continuing to plow ahead. “It’s nothing to be afraid
of. Just some kind of natural phenomenon.”

  For well over an hour, they struggled on, each carrying the backpack in turn, exhausted from lack of sleep and the relentless heat. Adam and Billy were close to collapse when Marina stopped in her tracks in the throes of another vision.

  “Come on,” Marina said and then led them down a small slope to an open patch of firmer sand. “Jake isn’t far now.”

  Jake found his Porsche waiting outside the spaceship, as pristine and perfect as the day he’d bought it. The aliens had obviously moved the car from the site of the crash and had managed to fix it while he’d been in their ship. Even compared to his recent experiences, it was impressive. Something tangible, human scaled. Jake hadn’t known of the existence of the universal consciousness before the aliens had shown it to him, but he knew exactly how much time and effort it normally took to repair a car like his.

  Jake scanned the horizon and discovered he stood at the very edge of the dunes. There appeared to be a dirt-track road in the distance, and he got into the car to drive toward it. His watch glinted on top of the dashboard, and he slipped it on his wrist, a fitting symbol for leaving the timelessness of the ship. He studied the dial: 10:23 a.m. on Friday. It had been three days since he’d driven out to the desert on Tuesday night.

  Even after adjusting the suspension and gearing on his SUV, it still proved challenging to drive on the scrubby sand, and it wouldn’t have looked very elegant. The noise of the engine was far too loud against the silence of the dunes, while the wheels slipped and spun, refusing to grip the unstable surface.

  Ahead, the air shimmered faintly, visible in a way that it hadn’t been at night. Vega had told him that two of the ship’s three shields would be lowered, leaving just the camouflage screening, which he could drive through. A flicker of energy emanated from the shimmering air, and Jake could feel it like a feather at the back of his mind. That must be the remaining shield.