Yngve, AR - Alien Beach Page 8

  "I recognize the frequency of those waves," he said, staring fascinated at the screen. "That's the ultraviolet and blue light, falling and sinking the glow flickered, but so fast the naked eye couldn't see it. These patterns... so complex!"

  Takeru nodded, and said: "Then consider the other readings we picked up later that night. In the excitement I almost forgot the mass spectrometer I had rigged up. I was going to examine the weather changes with it..."

  "And?"

  "Get this," Stone Pound interrupted. " Nothing . We were scanning the entire beach at the time. We used a battery of twenty photocells and lasers, enough to register a passing fart. Brilliant Japanese hardware that Takeru brought with him.

  "From the area around the Sirian antenna they registered all objects that crossed the beams, the numbers were fed into Takeru's computers, and crunched with the known spectra of objects on the beach. Us, the trees, the Sirians... even air pollution. Easy stuff for Takeru."

  Takeru, showing little of his pride, explained: "But we detected nothing at the source of the blue glow, except the Sirian antenna itself and the air. And the antenna was not emitting any significant energy when the blue glow appeared. It was almost cold - slightly above room temperature. If the antenna had emitted that blue glow, the tips would have become so hot we'd register it. But it didn't."

  Carl felt dizzy, and found a chair to slump down into. Stone served them some coffee.

  "Teleportation," Carl said finally. "That could be the answer. The Sirian antenna could be a teleportation receiver, not a transmitting device. Teleporting an energy signal from somewhere else in spacetime. Instantaneous communication."

  "You mean, instant messages from other Sirians?" Stone asked. "From their mothership, from their homeworld?"

  "Amazing," Takeru muttered to himself in Japanese.

  This invention could revolutionize the world if it came into human hands. He did not say it, but he was already thinking that his employers had to get the blueprints of the machine first. He would have to take X-ray photographs of the antenna contraption, and make copies for quick smuggling back to Japan. Takeru wasn't thinking of money, but of glory and a compelling sense of duty to his nation. Another part of him, a suppressed part, called him a corporate whore who betrayed his own scientific passion. Takeru shut his eyes hard for a moment, pushing that part deeper into his mind where it could be held in check.

  "Take a rest, Takeru," said Carl. "You deserve it, you've done great. The team needs you tomorrow, too."

  "Thank you," said a part of Takeru.

  DAY 57

  Bishop Edmund Soto of the South African Anglican Church, another famous face, waved goodbye to the crew of the U.S.S. Powell and the handful of civilian and official passengers.

  "God bless you all!" he boomed benevolently at them from the staircase.

  Then he stepped into his waiting motorboat and took off toward the nearby Alien Beach. The heavily built, very dark-skinned bishop wore light tropical clothes and a straw hat, and might have been a tourist - if it hadn't been for the crosier in his hand, and the single episcopal vestment draped over his large shoulders. A couple of suitcases at his feet contained his clothes and personal belongings.

  Soto sat down at the side of the boat's rail, opposite an American naval officer, who was to carry protocol when Carl Sayers received Soto into the ECT colony on the small island.

  "Are you nervous, sir?" the officer asked over the boat noise.

  Soto replied with a wide grin.

  "Absolutely terrified!" he laughed self-deprecatingly. "Is it true that these... Sirians are taller than humans?"

  "That's right, sir. A bit above two meters on the average. Haven't seen any children of theirs though."

  "Has anyone been allowed to meet them underwater yet - in their ship?"

  "No, sir - they haven't made much communication yet. We're sort of waiting for them to make the first move."

  "I see... but look at the bright side, man! The Sirians are neither black nor white - they are gray! At least I won't have to worry about racial prejudice!"

  They both laughed; Soto was well known for his sense of humor.

  Then the officer, still smiling, added: "They're not even another race. They're another thinking species. Should that make a difference?"

  "You mean, 'Can they have souls?' The churches are being torn apart over the issue as we speak. My position stands firm. If they can think, and dream, and have religious beliefs, then they are human and must have souls. It stands to reason."

  "But isn't faith more important to you than reason?"

  The bishop gave the man a disbelieving stare.

  "Faith without reason? What is your faith worth, if it hasn't been tested by reason... and has transcended it? If you haven't the mind or heart to test it - the capacity to doubt?"

  The officer turned away, grabbed the rail and pulled himself up to face the receding battleship.

  "Could the... could the Sirians have a faith, a different faith that is closer to God than ours?" he asked.

  Bishop Soto sat silent for a minute, squinting through his glasses out at the open sea. They would land on the beach in just a few moments. Finally he answered, in much weaker, graver voice.

  "I will talk to them. We shall see." Then, squinting up at the sky, he asked the officer: "What are those strange clouds above the lagoon?"

  The officer was too busy to answer, picking up the bishop's luggage and bracing himself for the landing. The stern of the small boat slid up onto the white beach and stopped. Bishop Soto looked about himself eagerly. But there were no aliens in sight; a group of people rapidly moved in on them from the barracks behind the palm-grooves. Soto climbed off the boat and set his feet onto - or rather into - the soft, fine sand. He made a sigh of relief, held the crucifix that hung around his neck and kissed it, and cast a brief humble glance up at the clouds.

  The officer put down his suitcases and waved hello at the approaching scientists. He asked Sayers to sign a clearance form, gave him some overseas mail, and walked back to push his waiting motorboat back into the waves.

  "Welcome to Alien Beach, Bishop Soto!" Carl called out from a distance. He came across and shook hands with the grinning bishop. "How should I address you - 'Your Eminence' or 'Father' or..."

  Soto made a mock-embarrassed face. "Please - we are all God's children here! I will not hear of any lofty titles as long as I stay on this island!"

  All the dozen scientists crowded to shake hands with the bishop; he put away his crozier and shook them all. Even among the devoutly atheistic among them, Soto instantly became a deeply needed beacon of integrity and optimism - they didn't openly tell him, but one could read it in their faces. Soto raised his arms to calm his new flock.

  "Thank you all for this fine welcoming!" he boomed. "I cannot even begin to tell you how grateful I am for this opportunity. During our stay here, I will attempt to repay for the honor of being among mankind's finest...

  "But - where are the Sirians?" Soto's questioning eyes wandered from face to face, seeing only confusion and awkwardness. "Do you have a telephone or radio link to them?"

  Silence.

  "But what have you been doing for the past few days?"

  Carl Sayers answered. "Well... we haven't had much actual communication after the first contact. The Sirians keep very much to themselves, in their ship out in the lagoon, that is. We have a lot of cameras and detectors out across the island, measuring their activities. From those results, we assume they are trying to acclimatize themselves to the new environment - underwater, that is..."

  Soto shook his head. "What is this?" he asked them, his tone rhetorically shocked, as if holding a sermon. "Are mankind's finest afraid? Afraid to take the first step toward genuine communication? Is that what I think I see?"

  Ann Meadbouré swallowed and said awkwardly: "It was they who came to us first... so it's natural to assume that..."

  She couldn't continue. Soto lowered his voice to a somber note.r />
  "It always grieves me when a fellow man willingly casts off the free will that was God's gift to him. The Sirians are keeping to themselves, ergo they expect you , their hosts, to take the initiative!"

  He began to shout in righteous indignation: "It is our planet and we should assume they respect that! Go to them! Talk to them! Or I will!"

  The scientists were too stunned to reply. Soto turned and marched off to the nearest storage barrack, where a few rubber dinghies lay unused under a canvas. He opened the barrack door, immediately saw the scuba diving gear gathering dust there, and pulled a set of equipment off the racks. Before the silent stares of the scientists, Soto proceeded back to the surf, putting on the scuba gear. They saw he had been wearing a bathing suit under his clothes all the time.

  "Is he joking?" Ann asked Carl who shook his head in reply, his eyes fixed on Soto.

  "No, no... he's right and I've wasted a whole month sitting on my thumb. Everybody listen! To the shack - gear up and check it's working! Ann is the diving expert - she'll help you get it on. Now move, move, move!"

  In a desperate hurry, the group took to following the bishop's spirited initiative. Ann and Takeru helped the inexperienced ones get their gear in order. At last the time of formalities was over.

  The warm azure waters of the lagoon enveloped the dozen divers; their diving-flippers lifted off the sand and they floated off ground, their bodies weightless as if in space. Ann took the lead, her legs paddling with experienced, steady movements. She grabbed the much fatter and slower bishop Soto by the wrist and pulled him along, both heading down toward the lights of the submerged shape at the bottom.

  Below, the Sirian lander vessel loomed, a silent manta-shape ninety meters long; slowly spinning spotlights shining from its sides... at a closer look, one could see the huge inflated balloons on which the ship was resting, like black pillows of some opaque alien substance.

  Ann Meadbouré and Edmund Soto swam closer to the hull's underside, between two of the support balloons. They came close enough to touch it, and the spotlights moved away from their gaze, pointing down toward the coral bed. The visitors were being noticed. Edmund reached out and touched the hull: it was perfectly smooth under his fingers, cold and dark, dull metal. (Was it really the same ship he had seen landing on the Moon on TV? It seemed so much more massive now.)

  Ann tugged at his arm and pointed down to the hull's underbelly: a round opening had irised out in it, brightly lit from inside. And a Sirian was floating down through the opening, gesticulating at the divers to enter up through it. She just couldn't wait for clearance from the world's leaders, or from Carl - she swam straight for the bright opening, leaving Edmund behind. The Sirian figure waited, and Ann recognized him as she was approaching. Oanss, breathing water without effort or visible aid. Wearing Bermuda shorts. Underwater, his eyes were opened much wider, pupils larger - an almost fishlike face. His skin hue was more blue-green than gray down here. She floated still, grasped the side of the opening to fight the faint current, and grinned through the visor of her breathing-mask. Oanss' lips widened in a smile, and a shiver ran down Ann's back.

  He leaned closer, his lips parted - he said something, and Ann actually heard his voice carried through the water, slightly warbled but recognizable Sirian-pidgin English: "Aaannn! Aaannn... Wee wwwaiiit foorr yyyou tweeelvve commme visiiitooor heeerrre..."

  Oanss stretched out his branching pseudo-hand tentacle for her. Ann hesitated, turned her head and peered outside. The others were rapidly gathering up around the opening, waving and grinning. Oanss waved back, urging them inside. She glimpsed Carl's gray-haired head with the breathing-mask on, looking her in the eyes. He nodded; she could go first.

  She trembled with fear, yet a tingling exhilaration filled Ann's body. She placed her hand in Oanss' narrow, outstretched palm and clasped it. He moved up into the light, pulling her with him through a bright shaft - suddenly, they were above water, inside the illuminated ship. The lighting inside was weaker than that from the spotlights, and blue-green instead of white, limited to two light-sources in a large blue dome.

  A dome? Rather a fake blue sky, with one bright pinprick sun - and a larger, blue-green sun. Ann blinked uncertainly, stepping from the pool of water up onto a metal ledge with rubbery handles. She took off her breathing-mask, and took in fresh, salty air. Then she looked down at the floor, and gasped - she saw no floor where the pool-ledge ended. They and the pool appeared to be floating in mid-air, high above a wide sea strewn with rocky islands, and plateaus rising high above the glittering waves. She must be dreaming - she stared up at the taller, upright Oanss, who had let go of her hand. His eyes and eyelids narrowed again, in this bright artificial light - but his face was calm, solemn even. Edmund and the other scientists gathered in the pool, climbing up, pulling off their masks, staring too. Carl was about to say something scientific to explain it all, but all of a sudden he couldn't word a sound.

  Oanss pointed out and around them, at the alien, rocky landscape below. The alien sea rumbled faintly, but there was no wind blowing - suddenly, a huge oblong shape hummed past their view - a vast, cigar-shaped airship, much larger than the lander itself, carrying a transparent gondola with waving Sirians looking at them. It was a kind of motion picture.

  "Ssee... Pictuures oof myy woorlld... beefore, siixx thhousannd yearrs befooore. Pictures buillt thhen tiime."

  Carl shuffled his feet in small circles to follow the 360-degree view, until he became dizzy - and had to support himself on Stone Pound to avoid falling over. There was too much information to take in one sitting. Images faded over into each other, with dates superimposed in English - six thousand years of history compressed to six minutes. Yet, there was a pattern to the events, and an obvious editing of the films. The fantastic images had a bland, censored quality, like a televised travel magazine, showing only happy Sirians doing nothing in particular, nothing that could be described as overly strange or obscene.

  Many images were from under the sea. A pregnant Sirian female swam past the towers of a bustling, illuminated city that was partly underwater, with a small infant in tow...

  Enlarged by microphotography to the size of a horse, a silvery robot no larger than an ameba moved inside the red veins of an old Sirian, mending the membranes of his lungs by sowing threads of tissue through them...

  A near-still image faded in, which the scientists could recognize from the first black-and-white transmissions: The Sirians' giant solar-sail floating in outer space, near Mars. The view zoomed out from the center of the immense, slightly curved disk and onward to the passenger habitats. These consisted of cylinders clustered along a high, spindly boom standing at the center of the disk; the central boom might have been several hundred meters high, but as the view zoomed out, the tower came to resemble a puny tip on the upside of a huge umbrella... Takeru took it all in, but his eyes refused to believe the sheer scale - his brain interpreted it as a small model, not life-size. He took as many pictures as he could with a waterproof digital camera; the Sirians did not seem to mind.

  Then rows of computer text lined up in vertical rows, in several Sirian alphabets, the symbols of which resembled little waves on an electrocardiogram one scientist, a linguist, started filming frantically with his portable camcorder. No Sirian tried to stop them from recording what they saw.

  They stood gazing at the moving holograms for a long while, until the images finally faded off to be replaced by a blank metal dome and flat floor. Through a round doorway, Ranmotanii and Namonnae came to the group, greeting them welcome to the lander craft. A set of blob-like silver robots moved in to form a circle of seats, where humans and Sirians could sit facing each other. Takeru took the seat next to Namonnae, and tried to look her in the eyes; she avoided his gaze.

  Carl caught his breath and said to Ranmotanii: "We have a new man in our group. That is, instead of a man who was too sick to stay on Alien Beach. We brought the new visitor here. His name is Edmund Soto. A... a priest, he is."
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br />   The formalities and mutual staring were quickly done away with; Soto had seen and heard Sirians on TV by now, and the awe was not as great as during the first man-to-alien encounters. He told himself not to be intimidated by their height. Then, facing the newcomer, the aged, wrinkled Oanorrn asked him what the word "priest" meant; he explained he had come across the concept in many TV broadcasts, but never clearly understood it.

  Soto answered proudly, slowly: "A priest talks to God... and God talks to the priest... and other humans talk to God through the priest."

  The Sirians seemed puzzled. A robot served them some freshly caught, flapping small fish and crabs, which they casually devoured. Oanss offered Ann a barely dead fish, which she politely refused. Oanorrn leaned forward and closer to bishop Soto, and peered wonderingly at his dark-brown, round, jovial face. Soto looked back, unflinching, with even greater wonder in his face. Apart from Lazar Mahfouz, Soto was the only dark-skinned human in the ECT team.

  Then Oanorrn asked something entirely unexpected, in a sharp, clear voice - a question aimed solely at Soto. "Doo yyou taalk too thhe Ancestorrrs?"

  Soto swallowed, and mustered all his mental might to avoid wincing before the old alien's searing, large eyes. "No. I talk to God. God is not an ancestor."

  Oanorrn did something with his face that might have been a frown, but it wrinkled in an alien manner. "Whhat is... God?"

  "God is what created the world and the humans. Us. You. All living things."

  "Whhat is... a liviing thhing?"

  Chapter Nine

  Carl experienced a sensation not unlike falling. Here it comes, the moment I feared and anticipated; all our familiar notions about the universe, thrown out the window like a bucket of garbage.

  Soto wasn't discouraged now - he was prepared. This was his moment, his cosmic catechism. His faith would be tested, and win. He knew it. There was no doubt in his voice, no tremble or stutter.

  "A stone... is not a living thing. This ship... is not a living thing. But you... you are a living thing. And I am. That fish..." Soto held up one little fish that had just stopped flapping. "This fish was living, until it died. Now it is like a stone... not living."