Across The Universe With A Giant Housecat (The Blue) (15 page)

Chapter 23

“It’s a computer. There is a computer deep underground that controls the obelisk—all the obelisks. There’s supposed to be a full ring of them around the planet’s equator. This whole planet used to be oasis.”

I was sitting up now. “But I didn’t see anything there. There wasn’t a computer interface of any sort.”

“I know. I’m checking that out. There’s a few directions on the obelisk, but not much.” She frowned, studying the computer. “It only got a partial reading of the runes. You’ve got to go slower when you scan them in. It did get one word at least, though: ‘ships’ and
 

“What?
Ships
?” I was on my feet now, somehow. “As in, spaceships? That could take us somewhere?”

She shrugged. “Could be. That is what it seems to confirm.”

I was already pulling on my socks and shoving my feet into my boots. “I’m going back there. I have to find out what it says. I’ll scan it again. Slower, like you said. We have to find out what the runes say.”

She watched me as I got ready. “Don’t go alone,” she said quietly.

“I won’t. I’ll have Leo, too.”

“Take one of the aliens.”

“Why?”

“Because you and I don’t know what you’ll find. Maybe this will help with jogging one of their memories. And it’s safer to go in numbers.”

“All right. Who do you want to wake up and ask to come along?” The suns were already beginning to turn the sky pink at the edges, so we wouldn’t be waking the aliens up too early, at least.

“I’m already awake,” said M, poking her head in through the doorway. “I’ll go with you.”

“Good,” said Samantha, sounding satisfied as she crossed her arms over her round belly. “Finish getting ready, and I’ll go get some sacks of food for you.”

She turned to do that, and I saw that two more aliens, C and J, had come up behind her. They were holding sacks of food and containers of water.

“We’ve already done so,” said C.

“We want to help, any way we can,” said J.

I felt a smile spreading over my face as I saw the rest of the aliens standing behind them. Everyone was awake, somehow.

In a few minutes, I was ready. Armed with food for the day and Samantha’s computer, M and I set off for the broken obelisk, Leo at my side.

M kept up a good pace, for which I was grateful.
 

After about a half an hour of walking in silence, M spoke up. “I want to be called Maura again.”

“Really? But you don’t even remember being Maura.”

“Maybe not, but it was my name all the same. I want to use it again, not just the one letter I haven’t forgotten.”

“All right. Maura it is.”

“There’s more. The others want to be called by their full names again, too. We were talking about it last night, after you went to bed.”

“I can do that.” I knew I would have to look at the name tags again as soon as I got back to the village—I hadn’t memorized everyone’s human names yet. But I was glad they wanted to use them again.

#

By the time we reached the broken obelisk, the sun had climbed high in the sky. While Leo went to sniff rocks and Maura looked around, I busied myself finding the rune Samantha had pointed out earlier, the one that supposedly meant
ship
. It was the only rune on its side of the obelisk, though all the other sides were covered with runic writing. That was odd. Why hadn’t I noticed that before?

“I’ve found your
ship
rune. I’m scanning it again,” I said to Samantha, via my wrist communicator, as I slid the computer’s scanner over the rune.

“Good,” she said in return. I could almost picture her sitting in her hut in the village, eager to take notes on my findings.

I waited while the computer processed the scan, which happily took much less time than the first time.

“It just says
ship
,” I informed Samantha. “Nothing else. The computer isn’t picking up anything else.”

“Perhaps you should scan it again. Just to be sure. There has to be something else—why would they just have a single word?”

“There are other runes on other sides.”

“We scanned those. They don’t say anything about ships. It’s got to be on that side! Some clue, something!”

“There’s nothing else, I promise!
Ship
! That is the only word!” My frustration mounting, I reached up towards the rune. Maybe the obelisk was dirty and there were more words there, obscured by dirt?

Ferociously, I rubbed at the surface of the obelisk around the
ship
rune. It was useless, of course. The obelisk was clean. There simply were no other runes there. It was a dead end.

Annoyance mounting, I pounded the surface of the obelisk with the end of my fist—and felt something. The rune for
ship
was loose somehow.
 

Looking closer, I felt the rune with my fingertips. There was no doubt—the rune was a separate piece that had been placed ingeniously into the obelisk. I could wiggle it back and forth and even press it in.

What was the point of that?

I heard Maura gasp behind me. “Alan! Look!” she exclaimed.

Turning around, I saw what I had thought had been a natural rock face splitting cleanly down the middle—as if there had been an unseen seam there—and the two halves drawing apart, revealing a huge, dark opening.

“What is that?” she wondered.

“I don’t know!”

“What did you do?”

“I… I pressed the ‘ship’ rune in,” I said slowly. Had I just opened a secret door?

The halves of the rock had stopped sliding apart, leaving an opening wide enough to fly the
Dragontooth
into.

I reached into my pack and pulled out a flashlight. “I’m going in there to investigate,” I said, hoisting the pack again.

“Then I’ll go with you,” said Maura.

She followed as I strode towards the dark opening.

Though I set my jaw and my steps were solid, I was more than a little daunted at the prospect of marching into a dark cave that, for all I knew, hadn’t been opened for hundreds of years. Thousands, maybe.

Pressing the ship rune had opened it. Did that mean there was a ship hidden in here? I had to find out, no matter how much my better judgment was screaming against my heading into an unfamiliar cave.

To her credit, Maura didn’t seem perturbed in the least. She walked alongside me, not behind me. I shone the flashlight ahead, where I could see a wide path had been smoothed down in the rock. Leo sniffed it with suspicion.

I headed down the path, Maura at my side.

The cave was dark, and the flashlight seemed pathetic.
 

“It feels big in here,” commented Maura.

I shone the flashlight up above us—she was right. The ceiling was far overhead.

Maura had located something attached to a wall and was fingering it. Just as I was about to warn her against touching anything unfamiliar, the cave was flooded with light.

“Oh,” said Maura. “So that was a light switch I just touched.”

I looked around at the chamber, now lit fully by the overhead light Maura had just found. I was amazed it still functioned after all of these years.

As I stared at what lay around us, my heart sank a little. There were no ships. Just what looked like computer terminals and other hardware. Had this been some kind of lab?

Maura walked over to one of the screens and touched its smooth surface. It blinked to life.

“This computer still works!” she exclaimed. “Alan, look at this!”

Approaching, I could see that the screen was covered with runes. Lifting Samantha’s computer, I allowed it to translate the runes for us.

While the computer translated, Maura wandered around, exploring the lab.

“Alan, look at this!” She had walked over to a table. Suspended above the table was a sphere. “This looks like the planet.” She leaned closer. “Yes, it’s some kind of model of the planet. Look at these!” She pointed to a row of black markings spanning the planet’s equator all the way around the planet. “If this is the planet, what are these?”

Leaving my post in front of the alien computer screen, I walked over to the table.
 

The sphere was definitely a model of the planet.
 
The black markings, upon closer inspection, looked very familiar.

“Could these be the obelisks?” I wondered aloud. “Did they really have this many of them, all around the planet like that?”

Samantha’s computer beeped, signaling the completion of the translation from the alien computer terminal. I read the translation aloud to Maura.

Project Log, Entry 598478.

The Project has failed. This planet is starting to break down the paradise we have built. The terraforming is collapsing. Soon, this place and its decades of work will be nothing but a bare rock again, the same as when we found it. There is nothing we can do—we have tried everything. As of now, our terraforming technology is no match for this planet. The change we tried to make was too drastic: a bare rock into a lush paradise, dripping with fruit.
 

I and the other researchers on the Project are considering abandoning these facilities and returning everyone to Homeworld. The idea of a planet for recovering trauma victims was a good one, but ultimately was a failure. We have had several cases of patients refusing to leave when their treatments were over, forcing us to return them to their families by force. Also, a few dozen of the underground support staff have reported problems with memory, which has led us to believe the memory-suppressors being used on the surface are stronger than we anticipated.

Lastly, the space anomaly in the atmosphere is getting worse. Ships coming here are reporting issues with landing and losing control. We fear these issues will escalate until it is impossible to land safely here.

We have had success with some of our trauma patients, but the risks are too great to continue. We are making plans to relocate the Project onto another world, a smaller one with a natural climate more similar to the one we are trying to achieve. We are also making changes to our terraforming formulae to make the results more permanent.

“They had problems with terraforming, too,” I murmured, remembering my own home planet. A year ago, my home planet, a colony which had been terraformed to support life, had been lost to an environmental storm. The storm had killed everyone on the colony, including my parents. Even now, thinking about it made a lump form in my throat.
 

“Is that the last entry?” Maura asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “There’s nothing else.”

“So that was it?” she wondered. “They just left, just like that? They didn’t even pack this place up and take it with them?”

I stared at the sphere hanging above the table. In addition to the black markings, there were several color-coded areas around the planet, the most intense colors being directly around the black markings. “They must have been tracking how well the terraforming was holding up. Look at all of this. I think all the colored areas were where the terraforming held on the strongest. They were watching it slip away, little by little.”

Maura had gone back over by the computer terminals and was busying herself trying to turn rest of the ancient alien computers on.

“Alan, most of these are dead,” she said in dismay upon finding screen after screen remaining stubbornly blank.

“They can’t all be dead,” I said. “The first one still works.”

“That appears to be the only one.”

Pocketing Samantha’s computer, I joined her in trying to coax the alien computers back to life. There were twenty computers in all. The first one we had encountered, the one with the Project Log on it, was the only one that still worked, despite our best efforts. We eventually gave up on the remaining computers. However, Maura discovered something else.

“Look at this. It’s an alien tablet computer, and it still works! I found it on a table over there, by a bunch of maps of the planet.” She handed it to me.

The tablet computer contained at least a paragraph of alien text, which I lost no time in feeding into Samantha’s computer for translation.

Mere moments later, the translation was complete. Samantha’s computer was getting faster and faster at learning the alien language.

I read the translation to Maura.

Project Log, Entry 598479.

Something terrible has happened. Somehow, the word got out to the patients here that we are closing down this place. We never realized until now how many of them are addicted to its effects—our news has caused a violent uprising. We are leaving. We have to. This place is too strong. Maybe with time, the addicting effects will die away, but for now, this place is dangerous.
 

I hear screaming outside. One of the Researchers has already been killed in the uprising. It won’t be long until the patients find out how to get inside this place.
 

This will be the last Project Log entry. I have sent word to the other Control Centers around the planet. The other Researchers are already aboard the ships. We are fleeing for our lives, returning home in shame. I never expected it to end like this. Never.
 

I finished reading and looked up at Maura. Her eyes were wide.

“That’s why everything is still here,” she said softly. “They had to flee.”

“Ships. The Researcher who wrote this mentioned ships.” Despite the grim Project Log entry I had just read, I felt hope rising in my chest. “They could have left some behind. All we have to do is find them. And pray they still work.”
 

Maura nodded.

We explored the rest of the lab—the Control Center. That was what the Researcher had called it. It was a big place. The alien Researchers had monitored every facet of the planet from here, even the atmosphere. They had a whole support staff down here, making sure everything was perfect for the patients living above.

I was glad I had taken Maura and Leo with me, even though Leo had done little but remain at my side the whole time. There was no doubt this place would have sent chills up my spine if I had been alone.