The Filter Trap (41 page)

When the environment flourished, the technology of the tall ones hid beneath and between it. Everything, including the soaring transports, relied on automated flight paths, which failed when satellites vanished. Reaching another city after their Event required hiking the great forests for hundreds or thousands of miles. Few wanted to make the journey, and those who did rarely came back.

The humans were spellbound by the story unfolding in their visual cortexes. They watched what may be their own future. Absent from the story so far, was an answer to the question everyone on Earth worked hard to quash, for fear of what it might be: who or what moved these planets? Humanity was not alone in its displacement, but they were no closer to finding the perpetrator, only more victims of the same God.

The tall ones had also suffered in their galactic move, but only that of consequence, of relying too much on space-bound technology. The confirmation that the tall ones experienced their own Event showed at least Earth’s abduction to be no random quirk of physics. It was not a celestial event; the Event held intent. However, the purpose remained unknown, unless the tall ones were to reveal it in another memory. Given they still lived underground, an answer seemed unlikely.

It was hard to see the real world and the vivid images pushed into the human minds at the same time. Gradually, the humans became aware that they were alone in the room.

“She’s not sending this,” Jill whispered.

“Telekinetic television,” Kam said.

“Another reason the images are so much clearer than before. These aren’t thoughts, this is recorded history, played back in the mind with no misremembering,” Jill surmised as the visions continued.

The chaos that snared the Earth in the Event separated the species. The tall ones, already living in harmony with the environment and far from the tidal forces, suffered little catastrophe. Instead, they waited. Mechanically-minded tall ones worked arduously on repairs, restoring manual controls to technology, recreating radios and magnetic compass location derivation.

Focusing on their own problems, the tall ones were caught off-guard when the aliens arrived in towering black ships with invisible anchors in the heavens. At first the aliens were content to harvest water, sucking it up and sending it home. They paid little attention to the statues peeking above the treetops far inland, remnants of an assumed long-dead culture.

Until a band of tall ones attacked one of the black towers. Despite the tall ones’ technological prowess, the aliens remained many steps ahead and the mission failed. The worst part revealed itself later when the aliens returned with even larger ships to abduct the tall ones.

The tall ones knew the risk, and retooled their technology for war, but generations of peacemaking left them ill-equipped to fight a culture bred for it. Quickly bested, millions were captured and enslaved on the alien freighters. Remaining tall ones slunk into the shadows beneath high temple walls, never to venture into the sunlight again.

For generations the tall ones labored to create an underground society where the aliens could not find them, living in relative peace and harmony, eschewing the technology that failed them.

“And now they may have tracked you here,” the mind-tongue spoke as she entered the room again. “What this foretells for our fate and yours is up to the council of elders.”

“Will you take us there now?” the Amanda asked eagerly.

“I’m afraid what you seek, you shall not find,” the mind-tongue answered.

“Then we are stranded here,” Amanda said wistfully.

“It may be worse than that, if they’ve followed you,” the tall one reminded her harshly.

“There are no warriors allowed in the great hall,” she added, looking at Jill and Kam.

They looked at each other, not sure if this was a responsibility they welcomed. The soldiers looked at them with contempt. Their fates would be decided on the basis of the thoughts of the scientists once again.

“What have you been keeping from us?” Lee asked.

The tall one’s eyes flicked back and forth, her mouth slightly ajar.

“And you
are
keeping something,” Amanda reiterated. “We all felt it.”

“There are things I am not allowed to share with those not of our blood,” the tall one recovered and explained. She flashed images of babies being born and whispers of the mind that could not be read by the humans. “You have your own secrets unknown to us,” she added.

‘Then we
can
protect our thoughts,’ Amanda realized.

“Yes, but we see more than you know,” the tall one said only in Amanda’s mind before addressing the group. “Your fate will be decided in accordance with our law.”

“I have a feeling their ‘law’ isn’t kind to grunts,” a soldier said lowly.

The tall one did not respond to the statement; instead, she offered her thin-fingered hands to Jill and Kam. “Are you ready?” she asked only in their minds.

“I have only asked if your friends are ready to attend to the council of elders,” she mind-touched them all. “You are free to explore the greenhouse complex until their return.”

The tall one led Kam and Jill out of the greenhouse as a parent might accompany small children, bending forward just to keep hold of their raised hands.

“How can we trust those scientists to do the right thing?” a soldier pleaded to Amanda.

“Do you have such little faith in your own species?” the tall one asked in return. “If you cannot trust your own, what hope do you have of earning ours?”

“I’m not sure we want it,” Lee said. “I see pacifists. We’re stuck hiding with the Frenchies in an interplanetary war.”

“You know what else they didn’t share?” Amanda realized. “The locations of all that tricked-out military tech they used in their own attacks.”

“They probably destroyed it,” Lee said with dismay. “Maybe that’s what they’re hiding, that they’re impotent to fight back.”

The hallways leading to the council were dark as night; again the humans were spirited up into the arms of the tall ones. No thoughts were broadcast by their carriers, only sparing emotional outbursts of worry and apprehension.

They came to a door outlined by the emergence of light glowing around the frame. Once opened, light showed the door was made of petrified wood, painted white and gleaming with the reflections of mirror basins inside the atrium it secured. Inside the atrium sat the elder council, resting long legs on something hidden behind ornate silver and gold robes. They appeared to hover in place at varying heights.

The open and voluminous architecture in lower gravity allowed wide vaulted ceilings dwarfing the achievements of Rome’s engineers. Mirrors placed around the room between, under, and over the floating delegates of the council reflected light pouring from a mirror aperture above, similar to the greenhouse. Several tall plants that adorned the walls curved inward toward the skylight, growing vines covering part of a carved historical diorama.

Jill wondered if the censorship the vines afforded the carving related to the facts the mind-tongues withheld.

“You wish to know?” asked one of the aged beings floating before them, mind to mind.

“As scientists, that is our only occupation, sir,” Kam replied. “To discover knowledge.”

“Besides,” Jill added, “our lives are now in your hands. It is up to your best judgment to share with us what you’d entrust one who you may let still live after our meeting.”

The elder ones nodded at each other, surely talking amongst themselves.

Kam and Jill realized they were deaf to the chattering of the judges deciding their fate. As before, the beings reached in and took hold of this thought.

“You may have much to fear, it is true,” a very old one whispered. She motioned to one of her peers. The elder one closest to the carvings stepped to the floor and stretched up high to pull a swath of vine off of the covered image.

Horror gripped the two humans as they studied the revealed stone rendering. In high relief it looked at first like any ancient culture’s celebratory dedications, a great feast, but the food on the table included something peculiar. Smaller skulls, with close-set eyes on a bilateral face with a wide jaw, sprouted from charred flesh hanging off their bodies. The artisans who carved the magnificent picture made permanent what looked remarkably like a meal of primates. Of humans!

“No, not humans, not from your ‘Earth,’” an elder corrected the thought. “Closer to our genes than yours. We were barbarous once, like you, eating those close to our own flesh. We pray the Age of Gray Heavens will never come again.”

“You were cannibals?” Jill asked, horrified.

“Not so,” another elder corrected, angry that the shameful depiction had been uncovered. “We know you eat whale and dolphin, two animals closer in intellect to yourselves than these—” the images of the Neanderthal-looking primates flashed, the tall ones having no word for them anymore “—were to us.”

Jill frowned. “Some among us do not understand the sorrow they reap among the creatures of our planet. Please allow us the opportunity to correct our mistakes, as you have.”

The tall ones silently conferred.

“We have received news of the ‘bearantulas’ searching the ruins above, though there are not many.”

Kam and Jill thought then of the battle in the Mojave, and the great many furry aliens that lay dying or dead in the sand.

This temporarily delighted and excited the elder ones.

“You can bring death?”

“We have, but at great expense,” Kam answered. “We, like you, are generations behind in technology.”

The elder ones silently argued again.

“You will not fight them?” the eldest asked.

“We are but a few,” Jill answered. “We need
your
help.”

“We have none to give,” the eldest said, holding up a gaunt, slender hand.

“So like those on the freighter, you are pacifists?” Jill asked.

“War is what is brought upon us, not what we bring upon ourselves,” an elder answered.

“It is this way that was connected to our blighted and broken history,” another added.

“That way is murder, pain, suffering, and early death,” still another stated.

“Is there nothing you will do?” Kam shouted.

The elders had a lengthy muted argument again. When resolved, the eldest looked at the two humans. “You must leave.”

He motioned for the tall ones standing outside the tall doors to join the atrium. They grabbed the humans again to walk into the dark.

“Wait!” Jill shouted. “At least tell us how you prevented them from coming back. All this time they never returned, unable to until our planet appeared. Why?”

The elders looked at her, their silence indicating either anger or another discussion.

“It is the source of our second greatest shame,” one confirmed.

Images followed, often too fast for the two frail human minds to follow. Great oratories delivered without speech echoed in the halls of the elders long ago. Fantastic debates took place in the underground safe houses all across the planet. The tall ones had the same question as Jill, not just how to stop future attacks, but whether they should. Any solution, even outright interplanetary genocide, would safeguard their planet, but doom their friends and family who were abducted.

Since learning how to communicate in the mind-tongue and rebroadcast via satellite, the tall ones had never been cut off from their own. First, they were separated by forest and ocean when their technology failed, now they were separated by the gulf of space between planets.

Though Earth did not sit in the gap, the bearantulas spent months harvesting water to fill it with orbits of manufactured comets.

It was decided, with great pain, that the best recourse involved severing the ties, not killing. All planetary resources were pooled and devoted to a single rocket launch. The rocket carried smaller drones, specifically engineered to unbalance approaching asteroids.

The race against time succeeded, knocking nearly all of the closer ice balls into a final descent toward the Sun. The bearantulas were cut off, having already exhausted their own water for the push to get to the tall ones’ world, and unable to access all they’d stolen from it.

Though ostensibly marooning from their kin, the tall ones could still point observatories at Tau’Goagh. Over the ensuing centuries the bearantulas fought great battles, presumably over their dwindling resources. The returning slaves verified these observations with their own memories, transferred forward over time. Billions of bearantulas died of thirst or died in battle, such was the choice they were offered by their regional lords. Through it all, the tall ones tended their wounds and buried the dead, receiving only enough sustenance to keep from teetering into the graves themselves. In fact, many lines of tall ones were bred specifically for food as traditional crops struggled to root and even greenhouses ached for a Sun covered in smog.

Then a blue ball appeared in their telescopes, and the bearantulas, like the tall ones, and now the humans too, united for one purpose: stay alive. At that, the story ended.

“As you saw, we left our own to die at the hands of those beasts,” an elder admitted painfully. “If we had done more, they could not have reached your own planet. For that we are also sorry, as it will be our own undoing as well.”