Rakul stared down the Conclave vacantly as the Omeyns paused a moment in ominous silence before directing Rakul to continue with his current mission as stated and await further orders. This all suited Rakul well. Events were in full flood and the final outcome remained unclear. This left a great deal of scope for managing proceedings for his personal benefit. Rakul called Joe’s mobile phone and requested they meet for dinner, striking an indulgent tone in comparison with the simmering anger of his sisters. The dinner invitation referred to a geoposition in the ocean off the south-western coast of Africa, with a course vector of seventeen knots at thirty-seven degrees. The invitation was set for seven thirty, dress code smart casual.
Joe was intrigued at the tone and location of the dinner invitation despite his natural suspicion when it came to all things Spargar. He arranged to board Maria and fly to meet Rakul’s geoposition in the Indian Ocean. The weather was clear and the seas gentle off the east coast of Africa. As they approached the geoposition Joe smiled to see a giant white-painted cruise ship steaming on a north-easterly course in azure seas some distance from Maputo, Mozambique. Maria circled the cruise ship in stealth mode on arrival before settling on an approach to the rear of the great ship. A dining platform jutted from the highest deck over the blunt stern where a broad white wake streamed a mile back down their course. Rakul could be clearly seen seated at a large table set for two in the centre of the open-air deck with a long view down the wake. Maria drew close to the guard rail of the restaurant platform where a whimsical fibreglass statue of a passenger leant on the rail, permanently intrigued by the view of where the ship had come from. No one saw Maria’s landing ramp approach level with the rail top matching the ship’s motion precisely. They would have had to be looking straight down the throat of the landing ramp corridor to see into Maria directly. One passenger resting against a side rail did look up sharply at the moment Joe appeared as he jumped easily from the ramp over the rail to stand on the deck of the top dining platform. That passenger blinked and his mind overruled his eyes to say that the appearing figure must have been there at the edge of his vision all along; maybe he should take it a little easier on the aperitifs.
Rakul was less surprised at the sudden appearance of his dinner guest as Joe landed easily on the decking. “Hello Joe and welcome, so pleased you could join me, please take a seat and enjoy the view.” Rakul spoke in the high language of Gayan worders, Gayanne. The other guests dining or the people serving in the restaurant would not understand any of their conversation.
Joe smiled at the scene and Rakul’s fluency in Gayanne. He walked over and sat alongside Rakul. The dining table was large and square, set with gleaming silverware on a crisp white tablecloth. The table had one point against the rail so both men could sit and speak with an undisturbed view down the wake. Rakul was drinking a large cocktail. It was almost clear with lots of ice on top, darker towards the bowl of the glass. A slim Asian waitress appeared quietly. “Can I recommend this beverage they call a rhubarb and ginger gin and tonic, Joe? Most refreshing,” Rakul suggested.
“That would be good, Rakul.”
“Another gin and tonic, please, and a top-up for myself,” Rakul said, this time in English.
“Thank you, Mr Rakul.”
Joe noted the waitress actually winked with familiarity at Rakul as she went away to get their drinks.
Rakul looked most elegant in matching light cream linen jacket and trousers with walnut-coloured loafers and belt, a few shades darker than his natural skin colour. He wore no hat, which left his skull ridge and arching tattoos visible and dramatic. Joe was wearing his smartest chinos and polo shirt but still he felt irritatingly underdressed compared to his elegantly urbane enemy.
“I think you will enjoy the menu here,” Rakul said handing Joe a long card smartly decorated in black and gold. “I recommend the Pata Negra ham to start, followed by the lobster or Irish fillet, depending on your taste.”
There was nothing on the list that Joe did not like. The menu was not extensive but he really liked all of it. There was little chance for fine dining as a university graduate and Joe was salivating despite himself at the promise of such an exquisite dinner. The waitress returned with the aperitifs and Joe took a long draught of the spiced gin and bright tonic. It was delicious and so appropriate for the cruise location in the tropics. “This is very good,” Joe admitted to his host.
“I am pleased you like it here, Joe. I find it a great place to relax.”
“Do you stay aboard then, Rakul?”
“No of course not, but I maintain a first-class suite on this ship and this is currently my favourite dining room in the galaxy; superb compared to my normal campaign rations and the view is exceptional.”
“I am sure you are right. I have read about these boats and seen them on television but have never set foot on one before. They are a lot more impressive in reality,” Joe said.
The waitress returned and Joe ordered the ham and lobster. Rakul went for the smoked salmon medley followed by the steak. He chose a vintage bottle of Margaux for the meat courses and a Meursault to accompany the fish.
“I would have thought that you had to prove you were a resident on board to be able to eat here,” Joe observed, wondering about his precise status on board.
“That is true, but I pay a lot of money for my suite and the staff play a game of guessing my inclinations from the appearance of my dinner guests. If you don’t object they will be trying to work out our relationship right now. I find it useful as the staff are very respectful in general and certainly would never query one of my guests, especially one of the same sex.”
Joe said nothing. They were not alone on the outdoor deck though a large space had been cleared around their table in the prime position, central against the stern rail. On the starboard side of the deck three South African couples were tucking into their main courses. The men were very large and in some discomfort from being over smartly dressed in their opinion. Their wives had no such reluctance and were revealing rather too many curves partly contained by brightly coloured glittery dresses in rainbow hues. The group were clearly casting sidelong looks at Rakul and Joe and making comments about them among themselves. They were muttering quietly in Afrikaans, unaware that both Rakul and Joe could understand clearly everything they were saying.
The largest of the South African men observed that it was not right that such “queer okes” should get special treatment by staff in the restaurant.
Rakul paused in his conversation at that comment and said “Will you excuse me a moment?” He scraped his chair back slightly and sprang to his feet. In a split second he blurred across the deck and squatted behind the South African as he was still insulting them. Rakul pierced both sides of the bullneck of the large Afrikaner with clawed hands. The Afrikaner was shocked upright and then transfixed in sharp pain as blood trickled from Rakul’s fingernails buried in his flesh. Rakul deployed short hypodermics concealed in his finger ends into the Afrikaner’s transverse cervical nerves to paralyse him with exquisite agony.
“We would like to dine in peace!” Rakul hissed into his victim’s ear in bluntest Afrikaans. He paused a further moment but the Afrikaner was in no position to comment. Rakul stood slowly and returned to his seat in a relaxed stroll, carrying his bloodied fingernails away from his light trousers. He returned to his seat and wiped his fingers on a napkin. The waitress appeared immediately and removed the soiled napkin.
“Yes I like these big ships,” Rakul continued without referencing his foray at all. “It is like travelling in great luxury in a lost golden age. Just feel those engines pounding us along! So much more entertaining than a DMF star drive. It’s one thing reading about this kind of craft but how magnificent to board it and actually travel in such period style.”
“Yes I see that, like travelling in a working antique in its own time,” Joe replied.
“I really like this
Africa,” Rakul continued. He pronounced it ‘Aa-frik-aa’. His eyes went to the western horizon and Joe understood he was talking of being on the land of the wild continent. “I like the smell of the place. Like Jarlanka but fresh and new, not just dry and dusty. I like to hunt with my new lion brother and his pride, the wild chase of the Vilderbeyest, crashing through the bush in the dusk. We sink our teeth into the tough haunch of our still-twitching prey, my brother squatting alongside me. Then, when we allow the pride to take their turn, I look up into the clearest night skies on Earth where I can see the rings of Saturn and think of my sisters’ space station lurking there, spying on us.”
A change of tack crossed Rakul’s gaze. “You know my sisters are furious with you, Joe. If only they knew how we are meeting for dinner right now.” Rakul smiled to himself at the thought. “I expect the Conclave of the Omeyns to order me to reverse your initiatives. I will say to them I have to complete my mission. You and I will fetch the Omeyn you spirited away and we will release your captive in exchange. After that then you are on your own to battle it out with the Sisterhood.”
“And what of you in all this, Rakul?”
Rakul took a forkful of salmon in dill and mustard sauce. “Well I like it here. I think I will just hang around with my friends on the tip of Africa and turn a tin ear to my sisters. Maybe I will watch you both slog it out, keeping out of the way as far as I can.”
The waitress arrived at that moment and poured the wines with deferential skill. Joe knew that he had received the whole message Rakul was ready to give and that he would elicit no more information so he decided to enjoy this evening, whatever the future may hold for them both. He took a draught of the Margaux. It was excellent and the ideal temperature.
As the two alien enemies enjoyed their dinner a large red sun was setting behind and to the port side over the sea. The muffled beat of the massive propellers sent surging masses of cloudy bubbles far down the broad wake into the far distance of the Indian Ocean like a highway to the moon. As the sky darkened to velvety indigo the fiery sun turned molten and its base broadened and melted into its own reflection on the sea. Bioluminescence churned in the wake as the last of the daylight ebbed to soft night.
The two men chatted about all matters in the universe other than the conflict of their mighty empires. Eventually Joe took his leave and boarded Maria the way he had arrived. The following starship parted from the cruise liner and gently swept up and over the ship as it thundered on between the limpid equatorial seas and velvet night, resplendent with stars.
EXTRACT
Giki Galactic Encyclopaedia, Introduction to First Contact with the Star People
Contributor: Professor Kitteridge,
Cambridge University, Planet Earth
I am certain that they are keeping me alive to suit their purposes. At least until their formal arrival on Earth. They want to use me as their advocate and in fairness I want to stay alive long enough to see if we can rise above our petty politics and embrace the opportunities of alien technology, especially interstellar travel. My body is well past its useful life and would have failed months ago but for their advanced medicine. Daniel is their medical resource and his skill and other worldly potions are keeping me going and for that at least I am grateful. They tell me that I will join with them when I do pass on and for the first time in my life I believe my soul will continue, set free from the wasting disease that has made me a prisoner of this wheelchair for so long. I want to escape the bounds of my bodily prison and see the universe as they have promised me. Before all that I want to persist so that I can be there in person to greet our first official alien visitors.
I have spent my whole life secretly searching out alien presence on Earth. I positioned myself into one of the most obvious place to attract the heralds of races from other worlds, the Cosmology Department at Cambridge University. While officially Professor of Cosmology I could divert some scientific funding to seeking aliens out, for it would be beyond the pale for the University to invest directly in such a fanciful enterprise. I have waited and watched. I have examined all the alien stories I could access, interviewed the individuals who claimed close encounters. I have collated the data and analysed the behaviours of those I found who were most likely to be secret aliens. Using the most advanced supercomputers in the university I found these aliens embedded in our society, and they also sought me out. To my eternal excitement my vision of breaching the bounds of our own world and making the leap into the heavens seems to be happening. Just let them keep me alive for a few more months to make it so…
So what exactly is the background to the first widespread arrival of alien beings across planet Earth? The Milky Way galaxy is neither big nor small. It is both. It is a hundred billion billion stars, each attended by systems of a dozen or so major planets and a horde of space rocks enslaved by the binding gravity of their stars. The vault of the universe beyond the Milky Way seethes with as many galaxies again as there are stars in our own Milky Way. Beyond the edge of the universe jostle as many universes as there are galaxies in our universe, and on it seems to go, unending.
Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.
And the great fleas, themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.xiii
Dawn of Gaya are an advanced race of humans originating from the Earth-class planet Gaya in the constellation Pleiades. Their philosophy is to spread understanding and wisdom throughout the universe. They call this enlightenment ‘Esprit’. Dawn of Gaya benefit in return by growing their influence over friendly planetary human races in return for their help to further spread Esprit to new and emerging worlds. The Goldilocks Effect describes the serendipity whereby human life occasionally develops on rocky, water-soaked worlds like Earth according to the eternal rules of evolution plus the occasional nudge from Dawn of Gaya.
The wisest elders of Dawn are the Worders, believed to be the wisest beings in our spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy that contains both the Pleiades constellation, home to race Dawn, and the Solar System that is home to our own Planet Earth. The Worders operate a benign council of equals that progress human civilisations across many worlds bound together by belief in Esprit – the quest for spiritual and intellectual advancement to their mutual advantage and harmony for all human beings.
As emerging worlds with new races of humans are discovered, Travellers of Dawn are dispatched to offer spiritual and technological leadership. They operate a five-layered schooling process called Enlightenment to transfer Gayan knowledge to selected visionaries. These visionaries in turn provide thought leadership to the people of new cultures. This provides scientific advancement with accuracy and optimal pacing. The twin drivers of evolution and Gayan Enlightenment propel new races rapidly to the point they can ascend to join with the advanced races that span the stars. Of course the destructive sides of human nature can result in reversals and dead ends to progress but these can mostly be corrected by additional visits from Travellers of Dawn.
More than a billion planets in the Milky Way galaxy will develop to Earth-class conditions at some stage so Travellers of Dawn human resources are scant in comparison to the enormity of the task of finding and helping them all. Fortunately those billion planets are all in differing stages of development as their host stars wax and wane and humanity emerges only when conditions are briefly ideal. At any particular moment relatively few planets have developed human races that are ready to benefit from Gayan Esprit. This intermittency of emerging new human races on newly fertile planets has been described as the Christmas Tree Lights theory. A light that is on represents the emergence of a new human civilisation ready for interaction with other cultures and off when there is no civilisation sufficiently advanced to do so. Thus the cultures are like Christmas tree lights blinking on and
off very intermittently rather than all being constantly on. When a light blinks on that civilisation is mature and capable of reaching into space to contact others but for all the ages before and after this moment, their particular light is extinguished. This makes the search for new civilisations just about manageable for Dawn of Gaya though the scale of the search is astronomic. Travellers of Dawn missions are thereby infrequent and resources are scant, though planet Earth has benefitted much over recent millennia from their visits. Travellers of Dawn originally seeded the planet with DNA so humanity could emerge. Primitive society was helped along the way by Gayan visits so that planet Earth soon emerged as the next possible ally of the Gayan collection of worlds.
But Dawn of Gaya was not the only race seeking to influence or control the worlds of new human races. Where Dawn of Gaya is supportive of human nature, the race Spargar of Planet Spargan in the constellation Hyades are rigidly doctrinal and oppressive. Spargar of Spargan philosophy is to order the universe into a caste system subservient to their leader, Omeyn MuneMei.
Dawn of Gaya and Spargar of Spargan are the most advanced races of humans that dominate our local galactic neighbourhood. Both races survived ancient wars that threatened their empires and home worlds’ existence with conflagration when they collided forcibly with each other. This early conflict, in which both races narrowly escaped mutual destruction, petered into a cold war where political rather than martial crusades over new worlds became the order of the day. Outright military war was forbidden due to the clear threat of mutual annihilation. These threats included the potential for large-scale extinctions such as could be achieved by, say, redirecting large asteroids to collide with an unwanted world in an inconvenient location. This seriously unsettling event had actually occurred to a close ally of Gaya, the Baune people of planet Erce Singulus. Omeyn MuneMei had developed the capability to adjust the path of comets and asteroids in close orbit to her enemies and deflect their trajectories to intersect her opponents’ home worlds. This slight change to an asteroid’s orbit could be achieved clandestinely in deep space by attaching a small propulsion unit to the asteroid that could monitor and adjust the track of the rock so that it would home in on an enemy world from light years away in deep space. Omeyn MuneMei saw the emerging alliance of Gaya and Baune as threatening to the growth of her Spargan Empire and therefore directed a world killer asteroid at both Baune’s home world Erce and planet Gaya itself. Baune was impacted first leaving them just a smear of debris orbiting their home star; gravity would take millions of years to glue the pieces back together again. To this day only a very few Baune people survive and they were the ones that had been explorers and diplomats of Baune on Gayan Empire business away from their home world.
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