Across The Universe With A Giant Housecat (The Blue) (13 page)

“Like fifty years,” I said slowly. “Why would they make a place that takes away your memories?”

“It wasn’t meant to be used for fifty years. It was meant to be used a few months per person, that’s all. That’s all they would need, then they could go home, healed and refreshed.”

“Samantha, if M and the other aliens really are the crew of the
Lifeblood
…”

“They’ve been here for fifty years. That’s enough for the obelisk to paint over all their memories with calm blankness. And their bodies have slowed down over that time, as human bodies will with age, only to be rebuilt with alien flesh.”

“Then they really
are
human.” I wasn’t sure whether to rejoice or not.
 

“Don’t you see? That’s a good thing! The whole time during dinner I was worried we were eating with murderers. This is much better.”

“Do they know at all?”

“They wouldn’t. Not more than vague memories at this point. I doubt they even remember their lives before they came here.”

I sat down on a cushion.
 

“Should we tell them?” she asked.

“Yes. I would want to know the truth if I was in their position.”

She nodded. “I wonder why the aliens who built this place abandoned it. It still works. Clearly.”

“Maybe they realized their own people were getting addicted to it. It is a paradise, after all. If you have had a rough life, you could come here and it all washes away.”

“Maybe. More likely, they all died out. Which is sad.”

“But they were advanced enough to build this! Surely they can’t all be dead.”

“Alan, we don’t know how old this thing is. We know it has been working for at least the last fifty years—why not longer than that? Why not two or three hundred? There are certainly trees here that look old enough. The obelisk could be thousands of years old.”

“Then we have to decide when to tell them about it at all.” I said to Samantha.

She nodded. “Not now. I don’t want to think about it yet. Baby and I are tired.”

“All right. We’ll talk more tomorrow.” I left her hut and made my way to my own hut. The suns had set, and our hosts had lit tiki torches all around the village. Or had they? Maybe the torches just sprang to life every night, another feature of the alien paradise?

I tried not to think about it yet.

#

After breakfast the next morning, as Samantha was giving the aliens a scientific explanation of where babies come from, I packed a sack full of fruit and set off for the wreck of the
Lifeblood
again. Leo trotted happily at my side.

We reached the wreck and I flung open its hatch. I still had some questions about the
Lifeblood
.

Inside, I faced once again the terrifying jumble of buttons and switches. If the inside of the
Dragontooth
had looked like this, I would probably have been too afraid to even turn on the engines.
 

But I wasn’t here to gawk at the controls. No, the
Lifeblood
had something else I wanted far more.

The ship’s log.

Before I had left the alien village, I had removed the small power cell that powered the fire kit and taken it with me. It would be a simple matter to hook it up to the
Lifeblood’s
computer and get it powered up enough to access the log.

With the power cell in one hand, I set to work, Leo curling up on the deck to watch me.

Hooking up the power cell turned out to be a slightly less than simple matter, but after two hours of frustration, I was rewarded by the sound of the computer booting up.
 

I went over to the monitor, paused for a moment to inspect the computer’s quaint interface, and got to work locating the ship’s log.

It was a series of audio files, arranged by dates. I picked one that I assumed would be several days after the
Lifeblood
lost contact, vanishing into the vacuum of space.

I settled in to listen as Maura’s voice, only slightly different from M’s, began to speak.

“I’m not sure why I’m still making log entries. The others tell me it is pointless. We have lost all contact with home base. We’re going so fast, faster than any ship in the history of humanity. In any other situation, I’d be ecstatic. Genesis tells me that we’ve stopped speeding up, but that there isn’t a way to slow down or stop, either.
 

“We’ve only got a few weeks’ worth of food and water left. So that’s how long we have to live. It’s strange to know that. To know that every time I fill my hungry belly, that’s one less meal later. One meal closer to death. That eventually, all that will be left will be ten hungry humans trapped in a tube flying through space, watching each other die. I wonder which one of us will be the last to go?

“I’m sure no one will ever hear this log entry. The
Lifeblood
will be lost to space far before humanity’s technology catches up enough to reach us. I’ll never see my sister and brothers again. One of my brothers has a wife that is pregnant. I wonder what the little one will look like? Maybe they’ll tell him, when he is much older, about his brave aunt who went to space and never came back.”

The log entry ended. Saddened by the hopelessness in Maura’s words, I nonetheless selected a later entry to hear.
 

“We’re nearing a planet. We’ve passed a few so far. Maybe in the future they could be colonies. I could have been looking at the future when I looked out the window and saw them. There’s a bit of a thrill when you look out the window and see something no other human, other than the rest of the crew, might see for generations.

“Helm control has been dead for weeks, but Jennifer has been working on it. She thinks she might be able to steer us a little closer to the planet when we approach it. Maybe if we get close enough, the gravity can swing us around. I don’t have much hope for that, but its cheered up some of the others. Only time will tell. Not much time, though, as we’ll be in range in less than an hour. I suspect that if Jennifer’s plan doesn’t work, one of two things will happen. First, we could keep going. Or second, we could turn the ship just enough for the planet’s gravity to pull us in and make us crash. I’m oddly calm about the second option. We’re dangerously low on food and water. Slow starvation or a quick death by collision? Give me the quick death any day. Though I have to admit everyone’s optimism is starting to rub off on me. I must resist. If this doesn’t work, it will make us all that much more disappointed.”

That was the third to last entry. Two more. I selected the next one.

“Jennifer was able to turn the helm a very small amount. It wouldn’t have been enough to matter, but there was something around the planet. Some energy field, almost like a grav clamp, but far stronger. We can’t seem to be able to escape it, so maybe this is my last entry. But I’m hoping it will all work in my favor and we will swing around the planet, the
Lifeblood
pointed back towards known space. If this works, we might make it home.”

One more entry, the very last record of Maura Meriwether. I listened as it began to play.

“It’s a miracle. It has to be. We crashed, yes, damaging the ship. I knew we would. We will never get the
Lifeblood
in working order again. But I don’t think we’re going to die. The planet we crashed on—it’s a paradise. A swath of oasis as far as the eye can see, filled with fruiting trees and running water. There are even huts here, already built. Some of the others have gone out exploring already, but no one has seen anybody else here, despite the huts. The place is deserted. Karen went walking yesterday and told us that the oasis ends and the rest of the planet is a bare world. But the oasis is at least several miles across, big enough for us. Nearly everybody thinks we should stay here. Not that we have much of a choice. But living trapped in paradise is much better than dying in space.”

The log entry ended. I sat back, contemplating Maura’s words.

So it was true. The aliens had started out as humans, trapped here.
 

Maura had said an energy field had pulled them in towards the planet Coriolanus. And then, as I knew, the
Lifeblood
had crashed here.

Had the same energy field that made the
Lifeblood
crash also made the
Indomitable
crash?

I had never known what had caused the
Indomitable
to crash. Samantha and I had been tucked away in our training room, away from the action on the bridge. This had saved our lives, but it had also meant that we had no idea what had happened to cause the crash.

What if the
Indomitable
had hit the same energy field? And how had the crew of the
Lifeblood
survived while the crew of the
Indomitable
lay dead in the wreckage?
 

Maybe there was a connection between the energy field outside the planet and this place. Maybe the aliens who had built this place abandoned it because the energy field was malfunctioning.

I listed the possibilities in my head. Perhaps the energy field was put there as a feature to help ships coming here. An autopilot or grav clamp, of sorts? But it had to slow down the ships as they got near the oasis, at least enough to survive when the ship crashed.

I couldn’t wait to share this new information with Samantha.

#

Samantha was appropriately surprised.

“An energy field?” she repeated. “There’s something around this planet that messes up the ships that go too close?”

“That’s my only guess. And guesses are all we have now, unless you found more runes to read.”

She shook her head.

I paced the room, fretting. “I should tell the aliens. They ought to know what we’ve found out. Samantha, if you could have heard Maura’s voice…”

“Alan,” she said softly, her expression suddenly somber.

“Yes?”
 

“We’re stuck here.”

“What do you mean? The rescue ships—”

“—will be caught in the same energy field that destroyed the
Indomitable
and the
Lifeblood
. They’re coming to rescue us and they won’t return. We’ve beckoned them to their deaths.”

Chapter 20

Her words hit me like cold water. I hadn’t thought of that at all.

“I want to see the
Lifeblood
,” said Samantha.
 

“All right, but why?”

“Maybe I can help you go through the log entry files. I might be able to find something that can help us.”

“All right. I’ll take you there tomorrow morning. Pack a bag of food for yourself in case you get hungry.”

“I’m always hungry these days.”

#

As I promised, the next day I took Samantha to see the hulk of the
Lifeblood
. Despite her lack of experience in space, she was intrigued by all the old technology, especially the science lab.

“There’s a lot of good stuff in here,” she said. She held up a silver pellet. “These pellets here can be snapped in two and they emit light for hours. And that over there is a miniature field version of a microscope. Sure, a lot of this stuff is old, but it still works great.”

Her enthusiasm for her discoveries was infectious, and I felt my mood lighten. Leaving her to ransack the science lab further, I left the ship to go get some air and check on Leo.
 

The kvyat was in the happy throes of another sand bath. I sat down nearby to watch him and think.

If we were stuck here, it wouldn’t be so bad. There were worse places to be stranded forever than this paradise and among these kindly aliens who had once been human.

Just a few yards away, the oasis ended, giving way to the sharp bare rock of the rest of the planet. I looked out towards it. If we stayed here forever, our entire world would be within the boundaries of this oasis.
 

I gazed up at a rocky hill in the far distance. Atop it I could see a smaller rock, quite narrow, jutting up into the sky. I studied it, focusing on the angles. The color was different, too. Darker than the rocks around it. There was something about it…

Springing to my feet fast enough to startle Leo, I bolted into the ship again.

Samantha was muttering to herself and trying to undo a tangle of equipment.

“Samantha! Where is your pocket computer?”

She pointed with her elbow.

Snatching up the computer, I raced back outside and pointed its scanner in the direction of the rock I had seen. The computer, seeing the landscape through its camera lens, began to analyze.

A moment later, my suspicions were confirmed when a message popped up on the computer screen: the funny-looking rock was highlighted in red.

Artificial structure detected.

The rock was a second obelisk.

#

 
A second obelisk, nearly identical to the one in the center of our alien paradise, stood proudly in the barren wasteland.

I zoomed in the computer image further.

There was one noticeable difference from our obelisk, though: the one among the rocks had been broken, its top half snapped off, leaving the edges jagged.

I heard Samantha come up behind me. “Is something wrong?”

I handed her the computer. “Look at this.”

She complied, and I heard her suck in her breath as she laid eyes on the image of the ruined obelisk. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Looks like it to me.”

“But the aliens said this was the only oasis on the planet!”

“That still could be true. There’s no oasis around that obelisk. It’s broken.”

She stared for a little while longer, then handed the computer back to me. “What is that place? We have to find out. We have to go there.”

I nodded. “Yes. I’ll go.”

She opened her mouth to protest.

“Please,” I said. “You should stay. Those rocks don’t look like an easy climb, and I don’t want you to hurt the little one.”

She inclined her head slightly in agreement. “All right. But take Leo with you in case you get hurt. Take my computer so it can analyze things for you and take some photos of whatever you find. And stay in contact with me. They gave me a wrist communicator too, you know.”