Stories.

Aleph tried to grasp what it was like to only have stories of what the visitors might be. Murmured distant tales told and retold. Passed on by ghosts and spirits as much as living voices. Mutated and distorted in the telling. Only the voices of ancestors carrying what time had turned to dust and smoke.

But in light of the visitors the stories shined with a hint of perhaps holding grains of truth.

So Aleph sought out the stories, Not because omega told her too, Omega had only mentioned such things in passing. This was something Aleph dug deeper into on her own time.

She learned the stories.

Before she was born there had been a time when the people of Terra had only had these stories. Tales of horror coming from the dark beyond the rim walls. From beyond forever.

Some of those stories seemed almost heroic, of capturing the terrible outer beasts and riding them into conquest and paradise.

Some were tragic, daughters and sons lost to the void never to return. Slain by the beasts they had sought to tame. Then there were worse stories. Stories of terrible catastrophic ends. Stories of Terra forsaking them, of buildings and trees thrown into the sky never to return.

Sometimes the stories came all intertwined. Jaws of outer beasts opening across the sky that blotted out the sun. Gaping so it could swallow the hapless thrown into their hungering mouths.

Horrible things too terrible to even evoke the slimmest whispers in word that scraped away the cities of old and any who did not flee into cliffs and crannies. Grasping arms longer than mountains and yet branching endlessly in terrible profusion. Each branch with a single hand to snatch those less hidden then their peers.

There were stories of sirens and angels, majestic creatures who settled briefly upon the surface of terra bestowing terrible wishes and curses.

There were stories who warned to never trust the strangers.

There were stories who warned to never turn them away.

There were stories with morality plays tied into the encounters for civilizations and morals that had been lost but for the telling of those tales. But again and again stories warned. Outside beyond Terra lurked danger.

Wondrous though it might be.

Aleph sighed and put the latest whispered words out of her mind. Focusing her spirit to the here and now instead of distant pasts and ancestors. She turned her attention to the current events. More recent recollections. Pulling on her talisman to fill her inner sight with the endless stream of eyewitness encounters with Visitors.

There had been, at the start a misconception that the type of Visitors would be categorizable to some extent and mythic beast designations would suffice. That lasted ten years before everyone gave up and many people got very upset.

Now the Visitors were assigned dry numbers, individual sub entries.

V-78.

Initial contact at range had gone very well. Everyone seemed to be friendly. Initial plans had been to load them with a dozen active colonists and related berths and the stored colonist contingent of over a million souls. Discussion had progressed well and their deceleration burn was visible.

Then apparently the crew of V-78 learned ‘something’ about their world. And the vessel turned away, all attempts to contact them afterwards was returned with silence and the ship proceeded to burn with extensive exhaust light at extreme acceleration away from them.

It was not until V-79 that any explanation was forthcoming.

V-79 arrived in a vessel that was almost boring. A single white cylinder two thousand meters by four hundred, perfectly smooth with a knife like edge at each end. It drifted into docking position. It then proceeded to produce signals to request trade goods. V-79 was crewed by beings that were always behind featureless black spheres when observed. They gave no identifications to themselves and communicated only with wide waveforms of light.

Each sphere was notable for being five meters in diameter and highly reflective. When finally asked by a curious diplomat the crew of V-79 had candidly answered.

Apparently V-78 had tried to have the entirety of Terra and surrounding space ‘quarantined’ and even requested sterilization approval from a ‘tribune’ of trade ships. The request was however sanctioned. It was stated by them that the crew of V-78 were extremely Molysmophobic and assured that it should not concern the people of Terra.

“Cooler Minds Shall Prevail”

Was the best translation they could manage of the final statement.

Little else was learned about V-79 beyond what could be observed, the interior of their ship was reported to be completely black by those that went aboard, no lighting was provided to guide the crews that were supposed to help set up the berth and when attempts were made to illuminate the space it utterly failed to reflect on any surface. The Black Orbs seemed to also be much stingier then other traders, only interested in taking on a single berth with four active individuals and a mere ten thousand souls of stored colonists.

However they did also promise to spread word of what precisely had upset V-78 to the rest of the traders to prevent a repeat of the situation. Whatever was done apparently worked (or the precise phobia that triggered the reaction was rare).

There was never another encounter of the kind. There also was no corroborative reports of strange cylinder ships with featureless black orbs as crew. Apparently no trader since had ever met anything like them before. Not in the dozen or so reports Aleph was skimming to try and find out about them.

Nope.

No more!

She had been binging on dry and flatly spoken reports and dissertations on ancient mythology since lunch! She had tried to cram as much of it through her resonance connection as possible to make up for the limited time before supper and Omega’s next drill.

However the intense concentration of so much in so short a period took its toll. Aleph’s head felt like it was going to burst and her spine ached from over-pulling on Resonance. How Omega could do over a hundred fold this kind of flow was beyond her. Maybe she was still too new to the whole thing and would grow into it?

Maybe there were exercises that helped? She just decided to lay there aching and slightly singed feeling inside. She wondered if the crew that took her and Omega would be as strange as the Black Orbs. Or maybe something more like the myths of old, Enigmatic wish granters or strange and beautiful sirens and nymphs.

Apparently they were already in contact with them via long distance resonance but so far they just had confirmations of schedule and preliminary docking arrangements settled. The ship could not be properly resolved on any of the telescopes they had available facing off that side of the rim-wall.

That suggested it was possibly one of the feather ships.

It was at least one commonality that had been reported. There was a kind of vessel that showed up more often than not. Although precisely why had yet to be determined. They tended to trade heavily in information and technology in exchange for relatively high intake of processed meat, oils and water.

Also in the majority Feather ships were good bets for taking on the Colonist Contract. And if word amongst visitors could be trusted such ships were some kind of living animal creature. Like a pack animal that could drag you across the heavens!

It could be one of those. Or it could be one of the other dozen strange and bizzare flukes that no one even expected. It could be one of the strange featureless cylinders. Come back after their journey to the colony twenty five years ago.

Those times matched up right?

Aleph hoped they would get something unexpected and new. Even though she also knew by all rights that was the most dangerous and risky of missions that her and Omega could end up on. She hoped V-176 was memorable for something other than being the last of the first great colony expeditions from Terra.