The path that led up and around the mountain was slightly misty, and the higher he got, the more stars appeared beyond the forest canopy above him. By the time Zahn reached the peak, the last traces of orange had left the sky, and the world was embraced in the darkest blues of the night.
Despite the warm season, the environment on the peak was much cooler than below, and when he arrived Zahn made a small fire to keep warm. Once the fire was going, he rolled out a sleeping pad over the bare rock and looked out over the archipelago to behold the breathtaking view. Below, he could see the mountain curve down sharply and level off to reveal thick forest until it became silvery beaches that met with the ocean. Tonight, the ocean appeared in a blue that was almost black.
To the northern edge of the island, he could see his village glowing like a million fireflies. And to the west and beyond, Zahn could just make out the outlines of some other islands on the horizon, a few of which had tiny dots of light emanating from them.
Sometimes the dark shapes played with Zahn’s imagination. In fact, if he squinted his eyes, he could almost imagine that, instead of being ordinary islands, they were gargantuan sea creatures with huge crystalline eyes that only came to the surface at night when the light of Avani’s moon shone brightly over the calm ocean.
Zahn enjoyed visualizing scenes like this. It helped him add a sense of wonder into his life and feel like he was still on the island he grew up on. Sometimes even stranger ideas would come into his mind. Sometimes, he had dreams that, not only was his mother still alive, but that she had been plucked off of Avani itself and taken to a far-off place. After all, they had never even found a trace of her.
When she disappeared, every airboat available had made dozens of high-altitude, and then low-altitude, passes over the entire archipelago. Yet even with the most sensitive instruments, they had found no trace of her. It was unthinkable, unimaginable, and inexplicable.
He looked out over the waters and turned his mind to the memory of the night his world came crashing down.
The logs showed that Zahn’s mother was working in the lower level of the Ashraya Observatory one moment, and then was completely gone a moment later.
Zahn recalled how the rescue team reported her as ‘vanished, presumed kidnapped’, and the report itself still made him suspicious. He had lost his mother, and his family was never the same again. After that day, the entire island changed for him. The home he once knew never felt whole again. Even after twelve long years, walking along the shore never failed to remind him of the times he would walk beside his mother on those early autumn evenings.
Now, it was autumn again. It was on clear nights like this, when he could see thousands and thousands of stars, that Zahn would look up into the sky and speak to her from atop Zikhara Peak. He would close his eyes and imagine his mother was there, somewhere just above him.
“Mom,” Zahn began. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but doing this gives me some taste of peace. I know Dad hasn’t been up here for a few years, but don’t take it personally. I know he still loves you. He’s just…”
Zahn paused to clarify his thoughts.
“…holding onto the possibility that you could still be alive is too much for him now. He hasn’t told me, but I don’t think he has nightmares about you like I do.”
Zahn closed his eyes.
“What can I do to make these nightmares stop, Mom? How do I find peace when I don’t know what really happened to you?”
Zahn looked up at the sky for a while in thought. The sight of thousands upon thousands of stars was magnificent, and he knew that it was only a tiny fraction of the whole. He considered the size of the galaxy and tried to imagine the trillion stars it contained. After all, in a galaxy so vast, why couldn’t Avani be visited by life from another world? His mother had vanished in the space of a second. Who else could make someone disappear without a trace?
He stopped himself. Even if there was life beyond Avani, and even if it was intelligent, he didn’t have any idea why anything would take his mother.
As it was, he had no proof to support his theory, but there was also nothing that could firmly disprove his theory, either. Up here, above everything he’d ever known, Zahn thought of the sky and imagined what life might exist on other worlds whirling around other fiery stars.
He closed his eyes again and centered his focus.
“Creator of All, if you can hear me, or if my mother can hear me, let me know. Give me a chance to find the truth. Please.”
Zahn sat in silence for some time, listening to the breeze, and soon fell asleep.
Glowing shapes filled his mind. Sacred geometries drifted around in his dreams, and for the first time in days, Zahn slept peacefully. Exactly how long, he was never sure, because after what felt like only a few minutes, a sound like a million thunders shattered his slumber.
He bolted up and saw a light high in the sky heading toward him through the clouds. In a flash, he stood up and watched it rapidly descend to the ground.
Its glowing tail flew past a nearby peak and down toward the beach. The forest obscured his view of the beach below, but that didn’t stop him from hearing what happened. Just a fraction of a second later, he heard a thud sound that was so deep that he could almost feel it with his feet.
Zahn knew he had to get down there as soon as possible.
He quickly compressed his sleeping pad, threw it in his pack, and raced down the trail. Gravity was on Zahn’s side, and soon he was back behind his house.
The darkness of night gave the forest a feeling of heightened mystery, and he ran around to the front which provided a good view of the beach below, now bathed in faint moonlight. Yet to Zahn’s surprise, he saw nothing and ran down to the beach to take a closer look.
Nothing was unusual at all.
For a moment, Zahn wondered if he had dreamt the whole thing, and he headed southward, down the beach.
Perhaps, I’ve finally lost my grip on reality, he thought. What if I really do need a mental advisor?
Zahn shook his head.
No, I know what I saw, and I’m certain I was wide awake. After all, why else would I have come down here in such a hurry?
He looked up at the sky and struggled to remember what he’d been dreaming about. When his eyes looked back onto the sand, he thought he saw a dark patch far ahead. Perhaps this was the crater he was looking for, and it was nearly in his front yard.
He ran over to it, his eyes widening as he grew closer. It appeared as though a bowl-shaped indentation had been carved into the beach sand, and in the center of it were flecks of a strange, pale light.
Zahn took a few steps into the crater. When he went to touch one of the glowing flecks of light, he moved some sand off of the source of the light, revealing part of an object beneath the sand. With the utmost care, he brushed the sand off of the glowing object, soon realizing that it was a triangular plate of some kind. He touched it, and it was cool, which surprised him. After entering the atmosphere at such a speed, almost any material would have still been hot to the touch.
Very slowly, he removed it from the sand it was embedded in and carefully examined it. It was thin, about the size of his hand, and he noticed that the moonlight seemed to slide off of it at certain angles. There was a faint pattern of lines on it, but if he hadn’t looked closely, he wouldn’t have noticed. Most of its edges were frayed, like it had been torn off of something.
Zahn wondered if it might be a fragment of something larger. He put some pressure on it, and it seemed strong, especially for its thickness. What in the world was this object? And what if it wasn’t from this world, at all?
The significance of what was happening began to dawn on Zahn in a powerful way. This was certainly not an ordinary meteorite. From a purely scientific standpoint, he had to admit that it seemed more artificial than natural. As an observer, he couldn’t see this object being part of any natural process. He had to admit that it appeared to be intelligently made.
“Perhaps I should tell someone… But if I do that, I might never even see it again. Scientists will be scanning it and prodding it from now until nova day.”
Zahn realized he was talking to himself now and sat in the small crater for a few moments while he considered his options. His mind drifted to the soothing sounds of the waves nearby, the cool silvery sand beneath him, and how stunning all of it had looked from up on Zikhara Peak.
He pulled himself back to the present.
“If this is what I think it is, there will be a lot of publicity around it. Around me. Around everyone close to me. It could be one of the biggest discoveries ever made on Avani.”
He picked at it with his fingernail. It seemed battle-hardened.
“But what if it isn’t what I think it is? What if it’s a Taskaran spy probe or something that’s been in low orbit for years, only to lose its stability and crash on Ashraya now?”
Zahn studied the fragment with cold eyes and thought about how the Taskarans hadn’t been heard from in decades. He knew what he had to do. He had to examine this on his own before he showed it to anyone. Who would believe his story, anyway? He had to be careful about how he handled this situation.
Now he was convinced. He knew he had to do his own tests on the fragment. Only then could he be sure if it really was from beyond Avani.
CHAPTER 6
ASLEEP UNDER A TREE
Zahn had to be very quiet when reentering the house. It was just a few hours before dawn, and his father was still fast asleep. Quietly, he walked up the hall to his room and hid the fragment, which was no longer glowing, at the bottom of a wooden chest where he kept some of his clothes.
The moon bathed his room in cool light, and in minutes he was fast asleep.
The following day, Zahn realized just how difficult it would be to sneak the fragment into the observatory without anyone knowing. All of the equipment was shared, and he was surprised that their stringent record-keeping procedures had slipped his mind during the previous night. Every subject, every scientist, and even every drop of rain was recorded for future reference and analysis. Zahn wondered if this was life’s way of saying that perhaps he wasn’t meant to find the fragment in the first place. After all, if this turned out to be from another world, why did he deserve to be the one to discover it?
Yet by the end of the day, the routine at the observatory regained its place as the foremost subject on Zahn’s mind, which gave him some relaxation since the more he thought about the fragment, the more he felt unsure about what to do about it.
On the second day, he consciously decided to push the thought of the fragment out of his mind whenever it occurred to him. Sometimes he would tell himself, “I’ll deal with it later.” And other times he would say, “A solution will come. I just need to wait a few days.”
By the third day, Zahn knew he had a problem. Everything in his life somehow seemed stale. He realized that he couldn’t continue to keep this secret, perhaps the largest secret Avani had ever known, to himself.
Even worse, he knew that despite the fragment’s small size, it was still possible that someone from the observatory had detected the fragment during its descent and was going to start combing the beach any day now. He had tried to find out if anyone had noticed it, but soon discovered that he lacked the authority to perform a system query of such breadth and depth.
All of these thoughts made Zahn feel physically ill. After he returned home from the observatory that day, he walked down to the beach and followed the beachside path which weaved in and out of the forest. And then, Zahn did something he hadn’t done in years: he talked to the trees.
After making sure no one was in the vicinity, he told them all about the fragment and about what it might mean. He also told them about his difficulty in sneaking it into the observatory, and how each day he had been pushing the thought of it out of his mind. The blue-leaved trees wafted in the wind, almost seeming to say, “We hear you, but your obstacle is within yourself.”
Once he’d found a spot where there was a good view of the bay through the leaves, he sat down with a tree to his back and closed his eyes. He was exhausted from the day. Exhausted from keeping the secret.
Even though the sun was still a few hours above the horizon, Zahn fell asleep under the trees. As he slept, light filtered through the leaves above him, bathing the path and Zahn’s face in a slightly bluish hue. In his slumber he dreamed once more, but this dream was stranger than the last.
At first, he was back at NearSky base, a small outpost not far from Ashraya. It was a rather popular place to visit, and dozens of towering cliffs made it an ideal place to glide from. In the dream, Zahn was standing on a cliff, wearing a glider. He looked down at the sheer drop below, and from behind him he heard a familiar voice.
“Jump, Zahn!” he heard his mother say.
But he was afraid.
“Zahn, You’re ready! Everything’s prepared.”
Hearing his mother’s voice gave him confidence, and he jumped. Air filled the glider’s wings, and he soared over the radiantly blue forest hundreds of meters below. Then he looked up and saw something that shouldn’t have been there. He saw the faint outline of a pyramid in the blue haze of the sky. But how could that be possible? Zahn had never seen a pyramid fly before, and he saw no reason why they should start flying now.
First, he saw a beam of light strike the pyramid, and then the pyramid plunged toward the horizon. Was it falling? Zahn realized he should be looking ahead instead of above, and he turned his head just in time to see a tree branch right before he crashed into it.
The jolt of smashing into the dream tree woke him up.
He blinked his eyes and looked around. It was nearly pitch black. He felt the dirt below him and the tree to his back. How had he fallen asleep at the base of a tree?
Then it came back to him. He had been talking to the trees.
And to his mother.
Zahn thought about what his mother had said in the dream.
“Jump, Zahn,” he thought.
For the first time, Zahn accepted what he’d been suspecting all day: keeping the secret was making him miserable. He had to show someone, and he decided that someone would be his father.
When Zahn opened the door, his father was putting on his shoes and looked up in a sigh of relief.
“Zahn! Where’ve you been? I was just heading out to go look for you.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I was out walking. It’s been an exhausting last few days, and… this might sound strange, but I just fell asleep under a tree.”
“A tree?” Vivek said.
“Yeah,” Zahn said. “But that’s not the point. Dad, there’s something important I’ve got to show you. It’s extremely important, actually.”
“What is it? Did you rescue an injured sea creature on one of your walks again?”
“No, Dad. It’s nothing like that. Hold on; I’ll get it. And I warn you, this is a lot weirder than I could ever explain in words.”
Zahn raced up to his room, removed the fragment from the chest, and ran back into the dining area.
Slowly, he set it onto the dining table.
“Before you say anything, let me tell you where I found it.”
He told his father how he’d been woken by the meteor, discovered a small crater on the beach, and had found the strange fragment within the sand.
His father’s eyes widened.
“Zahn, this is unbelievable.”
“I know.”
“Could it be a part of a satellite? And are you even sure this object is safe to hold? What if it emits harmful radiation?”
“I thought of that, Dad, which is why I wrapped it in my shielded lab jacket in the chest in my room. The jacket hasn’t detected harmful radiation, and I’ve limited my exposure to it as much as possible.”
“So you haven’t brought it to the observatory for analysis?”
Zahn winced. “No. I didn’t want…” His voice trailed off and his eyes drifted back to
ward the fragment that was still lying on the table. “I wanted to do my own research. I know that if I scan this with the observatory’s computers, it will get marked for review because of how strange it is. If it’s what I think it is, they’ll send it far away for analysis, and then I’ll never see it again. I can’t let that happen.”
Zahn gazed at the fragment intensely for a moment.
“Dad, I don’t think this was made on Avani.”
All of the sound seemed to get sucked out of the room, and both Vivek and Zahn stared back at the otherworldly fragment lying in front of them. For the first time, his father picked it up and felt its smooth texture. Zahn looked directly into his father’s eyes, and his father met his gaze. Then he glanced down at the fragment again and furrowed his eyebrows.
“I don’t know, Zahn. That’s a pretty fantastical idea, and fantastical ideas require compelling evidence to support them.” He set the fragment back down onto the table.
“What do you think I should do?”
“I’m not sure, but I do know that we don’t know if this object is dangerous or not. We don’t even know where it’s from, so we should be careful. Put it back for now, and be sure to wrap it in that shielded jacket. I think it would be better if we both slept on this and decided in the morning.”
“All right. Sleep well, Dad.”
Zahn gave his father a hug, took the fragment, and walked back up to his room. Behind him, he thought he heard his dad say, “Wrap it carefully, Zahn.”
After Zahn had closed the chest, he walked over to the lattice wall and looked out over the forest. The sky was clear, revealing thousands of stars above, and a half moon hung high in the sky, faintly illuminating the tops of the trees below.
He walked over to a small, round window and looked out to see the path which led behind the house and then up to Zikhara Peak. As the leaves moved in the breeze, the moonlight patterns on the ground slowly changed.
Epic of Aravinda 1: The Truth Beyond the Sky Page 3