《Cosmosis》1.22 Arrival

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Arrival

The question that had been on my mind was, ‘do alien otters have satellites?’.

I asked.

We’d been on the road for hours, and the snowy mountains were disappearing over the horizon. Our vehicle was rolling through flatlands now. The snow was only six or eight inches deep, as opposed to several feet. And we hadn’t seen another vehicle yet.

I retorted.

<…w ould work back on Earth. >he said, just as easily, < But for all we know, this planet’s clouds might be opaque through that portion of the spectrum.>

I frowned.

<’Ha Satan’ is Hebrew for ‘the accuser’. Like, the devil’s advocate? Wait, what am I saying? I only know that because you already know that. Why is that piece of trivia floating around your head?>

The conversation died off for a few moments while I tried not to think about home more. The truck rolled along over the snowy road, and I stared up at the cloudy sky, trying to make sense of what I was caught in the middle of.

I insisted.

I said,

<’Imperialist?’ Taking a few liberties, are we?>

I started humming the Imperial March to press the point.

Hearing even a bit about Daniel’s life before being abducted caught my interest.

I’d just thought to try to avoid thinking about Earth.

I decried.

I confessed,

Daniel said.

He started humming a few short measures from a handful of songs. I didn’t recognize them.

I gave a conservative nod. Daniel’s state was… fragile. I didn’t want to do anything to risk it that wasn’t absolutely necessary. He could probably pick up on my sensitivity to the topic, but that was unavoidable when we were sharing headspace.

We understood each other.

It was why I felt comfortable admitting this,

I protested.

We had no way of knowing exactly how long we’d spent on the spaceship before being delivered into Vorak clutches. I was ball parking about three weeks, but there were some complicating factors that made it impossible to know.

That was a disturbing implication. I had been reading pretty far ahead in my AP Physics class, and I’d been exposed to enough sci-fi to have a vague idea about time dilation. Even assuming this planet and its star were the closest ones possible to Earth, we’d still shattered the speed of light.

If Daniel was right…

I gave a shiver and clamped down on that line of thinking. There was nothing worth thinking about there. I had enough worries.

Focusing on the rest of the conversation would help me get my mind off the possibility.

I said,

Daniel agreed. < But then again, you don’t really know much about relativity beyond the name.>

He was right about that. I’d read a few diagrams in the textbook about lightspeed being constant irrespective of… something. I wasn’t Einstein.

I said.

I said, pressing on,

< Should be early to mid-November back home .>

I concluded,

< Hmm.> Daniel hummed,

he noticed.

Daniel said.

I thought he might have been dodging the question, but he continued, < But, I don’t think it’s bad. Home isn’t perfect, but we’re still going miss it. Even the bad parts. We can’t help it. >

·····

Talking with Daniel about home was harsh in a healthy way. Painful, in the same way it hurt to peel bandages off to change the dressing on a wound.

But there was only so much emotional energy I felt willing to consume on the topic.

We were still on the road, and I had questions.

It was a small wonder to me, still, that Nemuleki could drive at these speeds while the road was still snowed over. Eight inches back on Earth would have stopped school for at least a day, maybe three.

We’d come far enough from the mountains that no new snow was falling, but it was cold enough that I didn’t think anything would melt any time soon. It was probably past midday now, and that meant the temperature would slowly start dropping.

Last night, several feet of snow had accumulated in just a few hours. Would that happen again tonight? Assuming Nai stayed conscious, then we’d have three drivers. We wouldn’t have to stop, even if it got dark.

There was already some snow piled up in the corners of the truck bed, and on a whim, I stuck my bare hand into the snow. My hand, the same one that should have been blasted to hamburger, didn’t feel cold, even when I started packing it into a ball.

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It was so very odd holding the snowball in my hands. I let it melt to nothing in my hand over almost ten minutes. My hand still didn’t feel numb in the slightest.

I rolled up my sleeve and held snow against my forearm. The icy cold became intolerable after less than a minute.

I experimented, holding some snow in one hand, tossing it, and then with my other hand, feeling the palm that had just carried snow. It felt completely ordinary. Not any colder than my other hand. My hands didn’t seem to be bothered by the freezing cold.

Why just my hands?

I thought. My hands should have been frostbitten meat after climbing up the building. I’d even noticed that they hadn’t felt numb, but I’d been preoccupied with trying to help Tasser.

I stared at my impossibly tough hand. It didn’t feel any different. But I could tell it was. If I rolled up my sleeves, there were cuts and bruises galore all up and down my forearms, but my palms and fingers were unblemished. Reinforced from damage somehow.

The backs of hands were still vulnerable though. The hand I’d shoved down panther-hound no.3’s throat had a pattern in the seemingly sunburnt skin. That really was what it resembled. The back of my hand was burned and swollen, but there was a clean even line running toward my wrist, like I was wearing a glove that had shielded the rest of my hand from the blast.

Daniel asked.

I thought hard about it, inspecting my fingers. There were a few tiny old scars from years ago, but there had to be some more recent injuries.

I said, finding a faded bruise, almost completely invisible now, on the outside of my left pinky knuckle. I didn’t like recalling the moment. Seeing the aftermath, knowing that every person inside them had died.

Images of the other abductees suffocating inside pitch black metal boxes would haunt me forever.

Daniel said, giving me a mental poke .

<…I thought it might have been possible for us to have become Enumius back on Earth, before we were abducted.>

I said frankly.

Daniel pointed out, adept as ever at finding the counter point.

His question indicated something to me; he thought whatever had strengthened my hands was related to being Enumius .

he said, surprised.

I said, exhausted.

Actually… Daniel was right. Technically it had been Daniel doing the making—I hadn’t known I could do it too—but the tiny slip of metal had been the first thing the aliens had seen ‘me’ create.

They probably hadn’t known I could any more than I had.

But… I recalled,

I conceded. It felt like far less of a leap to connect the two phenomenon if there was a common link somewhere in my body.

he said. < Because I think this might be another case of ‘predicting otters’.>

No one, in a million years would have predicted otter aliens. Daniel meant that imagining we could have any idea of what we’d find would only set us up to be blindsided by something else we had no chance of guessing.

I said,

<’Now children, as you get older your bodies will undergo some confusing changes’.> Daniel joked, his voice like he was narrating an old-fashioned public health video.

I had to bite back my uncomfortable laughter. Tasser and Nai didn’t seem to like when I just started reacting to nothing.

Daniel said, < I think we’re getting better at not bleeding as much between us.>

I said, trying to focus on the phantom sensations I was torturing myself with,

<…No, it was. A tiny bit.> I said, unwilling to give any more satisfaction. Much as it irked me, he was right. The abject terror of waking up in the Vorak cell, hallucinating the only human I’d spoken to in weeks, knowing I killed them?

Nothing would ever be worse than that. Even finding Daniel’s body, and receiving confirmation that everything I feared was real. Those long hours of terrible impossibility had been worse.

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I said.

Daniel said,

Daniel said simply,

I thought.

He broke his act after a spell and chuckled inside my head. Laughter from someone else was an odd thing to have in your head.

He said,

Silence lingered for a while. I could almost sense the gears turning in Daniel’s corner of my mind. He’d latched onto a thought.

He took his time, but I knew he had something he needed to say. So, I waited.

I said.

he complained, < I just want you to ‘focus on the positive interpretation': that I want to make sure you’re prepared.>

This was the trouble with pushing back against someone in my own head. There was no winning. There didn’t need to be winners or losers. Cooperation wasn’t just necessary; there was no option otherwise. We were in this together in a way that no two human beings in history had experienced before.

I did understand why he wanted to make sure I had every advantage.

I’d killed him, and the guilt of it still ate me up if I let myself think about the sight of his body for even a moment.

Daniel hadn’t really been my friend, even though I’d known him on the spaceship for a whole month. We’d been unwilling acquaintances with a problem in common.

But even if he hadn’t been my friend, he had been the most important person in my life—because he’d been the only person still in my life at all.

And I’d let the only person in my life down, in the most permanent way possible.

I knew exactly why Daniel still wanted to help me. He knew exactly how I felt about letting him down. He didn’t want to let me down, for both of our sakes.

The best way for him to do that right now was to look the truth in the eye.

I said,

<…I have an idea, but you’re not going to like it.>

I took a deep breath, trying to prepare myself.

The subject matter of the conversation was heavy, so I’d tried to steel myself in anticipation. My gut wrenched at his implication.

Me.

My family had lost me .

<…You’re… a cold bastard .> I accused.

I said.

< That’s stuff she was already doing before you were gone. What’s changed? How do you want her to react? >

I said.

As I projected the words into my own mind, I felt something about myself come into focus.

Daniel said, confused.

I admitted. I knew they would, and I was fine with that. Sadness when you lost a family member, especially a child, was unavoidable.

Daniel noticed.

I said bitterly.

I said.

Daniel said.

I said.

Daniel said.

·····

An hour later, Daniel and I were trying to make a mental mp3 player, but every time we tried to have it make sound, nothing rang out in my head. Considering how easily Daniel and I seemed to ‘talk’ in my head, I’d expected sounds to be simple to replicate.

It wasn’t the case.

We didn’t get to focus on our mental music project any more because Tasser prodded me to make sure I was awake. We were apparently approaching something, because he was splitting his attention back and forth between me and the road ahead of us.

While he scanned the snowy landscape, Tasser threw the last tarp over me and gestured his humongous palm at me, gesturing for me to get out of sight.

“Mamor samam.”

Mamor; ‘stay’. Samam… I wasn’t sure. Maybe it meant ‘hidden’? This tarp wasn’t as large as the one I’d lost against Courser’s hounds, so it wasn’t possible for me to become completely invisible under it. I ended up leaning against the back of the cabin and pulling the tarp around me like a big cloak.

I was doing my best to appear as an innocuous alien stranger, just lounging in the back of an alien truck. Nothing to see here.

<’Fly casual, Chewie’ .> Daniel quoted.

I asked.

He replied simply.

I did appreciate Daniel’s love for older sci fi. Not many of my classmates had watched anything older than the Matrix. But Daniel was ready to talk anything from the Next Generation to the Original Trilogy.

Part of me wondered if he was cribbing from my own mind to keep pace on the topic.

Daniel’s commentary aside though, since I couldn’t stay out of sight as well in this vehicle, I ended up seeing more of our surroundings this time too. As we progressed, the implication that I shouldn’t be seen made me a little nervous.

If we ran across the wrong Vorak, who’d heard the right radio broadcast…

My heart pounded as the snow thinned on the road, and over the course of just a few dozen feet we went from several inches of snow to clear pavement.

Daniel observed. There was still a thick covering of snow to either side of the road, but not even one frozen drop on the ground. A heating system under the pavement?

There were other sights to go with the first signs of civilization. We rolled over the crest of a hill and sitting atop it was a small shack on the side of the road.

As our truck rolled closer, a Casti wearing a black poncho like Tasser’s emerged from the shack. It shouted something, giving a wave of some kind. It must have been a hand signal, because Nemuleki stopped the vehicle well short of the shack and poked their head out.

I was mostly staying out of sight, but this Casti wore the same uniform. They must have been part of the same organization.

It was further proof this was a Casti planet and the Vorak were invaders.

Tasser ended up being the only one to stay with me in the back of the truck. Nemuleki and Nai both ended up following the Casti inside the shack. From the distance our truck was stopped at, it was impossible to hear what was going on.

I was surprised the uniformed Casti was alone though. The small shack on a hill gave me a ‘lookout’ or ‘watchtower’ vibe. And what good was something like that if there was only one sentry?

My suspicion proved correct, when a second Casti stood up from where it had been hidden on the rooftop. It had a long rifle in its hands, and it had probably been trained on me the whole time. It wasn’t the same weapon as Tasser’s bolt-rifle, but it was almost as large.

The first Casti emerged from the shack and waved the truck closer.

Tasser hopped out of the back and slipped behind the sticks of the truck. He beckoned me to get in the cabin too, indicating for me to stay on the far side of the truck.

For the first time, I got to ride in the cabin of the truck. It was not much of an improvement: the missing window ruined any chance that it might be any warmer than the back of the truck.

Tasser fussed a bit more, making sure I was as obscured as possible under the tarp. Nothing above my knees was directly visible, save for the thinnest gap that I peeked through.

With my body that obscured, and in the cabin to boot, these Casti might not have even been able to see I was human.

Daniel and I realized simultaneously.

Tasser drove the vehicle closer to the shack, where I got a fleeting glimpse of Nai speaking into a mouthpiece, probably a radio of some kind.

They were talking to somebody, presumably somebody wearing the same black poncho uniform.

Daniel said,

Tasser pointed at the far side of the hill where a sprawling city sat under a dusting of snow. Nai spent five more minutes in the shack before finally coming back out and hopping in the back of the truck with Nemuleki.

One of the outpost Casti talked to Tasser one last time, and he nodded.

The truck started rolling again, and I looked behind us where I was sure Vorak still had to be coming.

But we’d finally gotten somewhere worth going, and in a few minutes, Tasser drove the truck into the Casti city.

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