A.R.Yngve
ALIEN BEACH

Chapter Fourteen

DAY 77

"Patty. Are you asleep?"

"Hmm?"

"Patty... tell me more about yourself. I mean, I've been here such a long time and I still barely know you."

"I did not truly live until I joined Ranmotanii's flock. As you see me know, you know the real me."

"Okay... but what was it like before?"

"You really need to know?"

"Yes. It... could help me enlist more adepts."

"Soldier... you must tell no one else. Outside influences are a diversion from the true path."

"Of course."

"I... I was raised by rich parents. My mom was a big movie star in her youth, then she married her director. He's a rich Hollywood producer now. They groomed me to become a star. Dad cast me in his new TV series. I had it all... lovers to pick and choose, a new nose, new breasts, expensive clothes, fashionable drugs, five cars, my own Beverly Hills apartment..."

"Did they treat you badly?"

"My life had no spiritual bearings. My parents meant well, but they were blinded by material success. Then, when Dad started to plan a TV series and a movie about the Sirians, he invited the Regional Elder from the new Church of Ranmotani as a consultant... and the Regional Elder showed me the true path of life. I soon left my old life to join his flock."

"Didn't your parents intervene?"

"Oh, they tried. They almost lured me from the true path with promises of money, fame, a starring role in Dad's next movie... but I rejected their false ways. I'm happy now. Don't think of it."

"Don't you miss them sometimes?"

"No, not at all... Did you leave anyone to join us?"

"Didn't have much of a life to leave. Patty, there's something I must tell you about. When the Sirians first made themselves known to us, I had these sudden visions..."

"You should talk to an Elder about it. We are not allowed to discuss individual experiences in private."

"But -"

"Talk to an Elder."

"Okay."

DAY 78

Cannes, France.

Mats Jonsson made a phone call to Carl, from Alien Beach.

"It's time for your physical check-up again. Please drop by the nearest hospital and get a quick scan of all of you, Sirians excluded."

"Can do. E-mail the specs, will you?"

"Check your laptop, it's there already. Just tell the hospital to send their results straight to me without analysis. I need your full-body X-rays, CAT scans, blood samples, urine..."

"I think we can get it for you, Mats. Thanks for the reminder."

"How is the group doing so far?"

"You mean us, or the...?"

"Both."

"Our visitors are fine I think, but the 'land-humans' are a bit tense. Ann had a small nervous breakdown in Rome, and I'm getting worried about Lazar. He's using his Sirian thought-recorder every night, he claims it helps him in his work. But he's been acting strange the last few days..."

"Strange?"

"Sort of... distant, not quite there."

"Have you tried asking him to stay off that device?"

"He won't listen, and what can I do? Until he also cracks up, I cannot interfere with his work... and somehow I trust him. But the ones left on Alien Beach, how is their health? Any alien infections showing up yet?"

"No. We've had a few upset stomachs and headaches, but it turned out to be stress symptoms, no alien bacteria at all. In fact our crew is healthier now, than when they arrived! And those pesky sand flies have all but disappeared. Can I blame it on the Sirian machinery on the island?"

"Ask them if they are actively keeping germs and pests off the island. It might be they are protecting themselves and accidentally keeping you clean as well."

"Will do. When will your team return?"

"Can't really say. Weeks... months... it's up to them now."

"Okay, see you then. Take care."

"Thanks. See ya."

Carl put down his phone and felt at his chest. His heart was beating steadily, and he didn't feel anything to be wrong with him. One day, as the doctors had warned him, his cancer would return and finish him off. Carl wanted another lifetime, three more lifetimes with the amphibians... and all he had been granted by the U.N. was this one, measly year. His heart began to pound harder.

DAY 79

Lascaux, France.

The group was allowed deep into the painted caves, where images of ancient life adorned the walls; bison, deer, mammoths and smaller animals. Oanss was fascinated, even more so than the other amphibians.

"Thiss was nnnot ooon the iimages froom the oold Sirriann expeditionn!" he exclaimed to Ann, who was standing next to him in the lamplight. "Thiss is ollder thaan sso..."

"Do you like the painted images?"

"Caannot sayyy... hhhow I like the paiinted imagess. Like soo... I amm..."

Oanss seemed to fall into a trance. Without warning, he tried to reach out past the handrail and touch the cave walls.

"Stop, Oanss!"

Unthinkingly, Ann grabbed hold of Oanss' upper arm and stopped it. She jerked still, swallowed - for one moment afraid of his response.

"The images are too old, they will be destroyed if you touch them," she explained. The taller amphibian made a formal nod and shrank back from the wall, turning away from her gaze.

"Correect, yess... I amm sorrry Aaann... Oanorrn ssays land-huumaan imageees arrre baad ffor ouur braains."

"We need them in order to live. We call them 'art'."

"Expllain thee woord... 'aart?'"

"Art is... Lazar? Help me out. I think you know the answer?"

"Oh yes, I understand what you're getting at. Oanss, 'art' is what we land-humans have instead of your machines that record and play dreams. You see what I mean? Instead of actually knowing what we think, we make art to try and show our thoughts to each other."

"Yesss... yees... I thhink sommethiing sstrange noow. Iff I couuld nnot rrecord annd plaay mmy thooughts, I wwould doo painteed imagess iinstead?"

"Yes!"

Ann giggled. She couldn't recall seeing any Sirian do anything artistic, except song, simple flute-playing, and that ritual dance on the island. She looked at the amphibian, and she was intensely curious to follow his thread of thoughts.

"Oanss. A question: if you painted an image of what you were thinking, on this wall, what would you paint?"

Oanss'e eyelids fluttered rapidly; he looked from Ann to Lazar to the cave paintings, with visible and growing confusion.

"I doo not understaaand," he told them, voice rising to what might or might not be a wail of inner turmoil. "I doo noot understaaand!"

Oanss suddenly walked away from them, back up to the cave entrance, ignoring their shouts and gestures.

"What... what did I do?" Ann asked Lazar. "How could it be so hard for him to imagine that, with all his knowledge..."

"Plato's cave," Lazar muttered. "Plato's cave."

"Let's go back up. Explain yourself."

They ascended toward the surface, ducking down in places where the roof came down low. Lazar did the talking, while Ann helped him tread his steps through the ill-lit passage.

"Do you remember from school textbooks, that ancient philosopher Plato... who wanted to abolish all artists from his imagined 'perfect state'? Well, the Sirians have finally reached that 'perfection' themselves. At first, I didn't know if they were hiding their culture, to avoid making too much of an impression on primitive mankind."

Ann shook her head dazedly; Lazar went on.

"Of course they must've had 'art' at some point in the past, while they were yet developing. But now... they have reached all their dreamed goals. And whenever they feel like sharing their thoughts and yearnings with a fellow amphibian, their technology can handle that.

"So there is no need for art as a creative outlet, or to channel your inner secrets to the community. Hence the blandness of their culture..."

When they reached the exit, Lazar was sweaty from the exertion, his voice hoarser than usual.

"I've come to these conclusions in the last few weeks... but I decided to not talk about them... until my final report is delivered at the end of the Sirian visit..."

Ann stared at the wrinkled, sweaty light-brown face of Lazar. He was smiling at her, as if he hadn't noticed the incoherence of his last sentence, and casually wiped his own brow with a handkerchief. She looked away reflexively, yet knowing that he was oblivious to her reaction. As if... as if he... she refused to finish the thought.

"Let's see where Oanss went," she said abruptly, avoiding Lazar's strange, contented gaze.

DAY 80

"Brother Soldier, for the last time: reject these false visions! Your mind has been clouded by the mental pollution of a materialist society!"

"But Elder Tanii, they meant something. Just help me think this through -"

"Don't think! Unthink these false visions! You must let nothing obscure the true path to Sirian enlightenment!"

"Yes, Elder."

"Chant with us, brother Soldier. Chant the praise of Sirius!"

A disturbing mixture of sweat-inducing panic and ecstatic joy filled the soldier. The chanting, ever louder, sounded like the roar of the ocean to him. He began to vacantly stare out at the nearby Pacific Ocean.

"Yes... Such beautiful song... now I truly hear the meaning of the chant..."

He thought his head was aching, but he wasn't sure. It was all so fuzzy.

DAY 81

Berlin, Germany.

The group took the bus straight through the city. The Sirians asked for some postcards. They said very little, even to each other. Carl and the scientists sensed a new ambience from the silent, watchful amphibians - something akin to tension, without an apparent reason. Carl dared not ask what was bothering them - he was afraid of what their answer might be, and recalled the fate of Bruno Heinzhof. How much did the Sirians know of mankind's history? Still, they came here of their free will... why?

In the evening, Carl became too confused to think or see clearly. He felt incredibly weak and inadequate, a mere child trying to make sense of a too large world. They were incomprehensible to him. Perhaps they would always be. There had to be some factor he was overlooking... some vital clue...

Lazar felt ill. He wanted to leave the city. It had to be his age showing.

"This is an evil place," Takeru said to himself.

"What?" Carl asked.

"I just realized that I missed the chance this year, to see the blossoming of the cherry-trees in Tokyo," Takeru told him. "A very important festival back home."

"I wonder why the Sirians did not ask to see Japan when they were in the Pacific Region," Carl said. "Takeru?"

"Why don't you ask them?"

Carl did so; their answer alarmed him. He hurried to tell Takeru in private.

"They have equipment that's measuring the tensions in the planet's crust... and they expect a major earthquake in Japan."

"When?" Takeru asked.

"They couldn't tell for sure. But we ought to warn the Japanese government."

"Yes, yes. Why didn't Ranmotanii warn us, until we asked them - by - by pure coincidence?"

"I really don't know. I thought I had them figured out, but -"

Both men were speechless. At least, a great loss of lives could be averted - but how many other waiting catastrophes did the amphibians already know how to predict?

There was something on the soldier's mind, a thought struggling to take shape... but his near-constant hunger and the constant work schedule made it hard to think. He needed more food than they allowed his group. The downtown marketplace? He had no money, and he ranked too low in the church to be trusted with any.

To steal, then.

When the opportunity came, he opted to join a small group on an errand to the marketplace; the group's overseer followed and watched them. The overseer's name was Patty. The soldier waited, tense, until the moment Patty looked another way - and snatched a can of corned-beef from a market-stand. He was in a crowd and the shopkeeper didn't see the theft. The soldier's stomach rumbled more painfully, but he kept the can hidden the whole day.

Later, he found the time to eat the stolen food. He ate too quickly, and his stomach reacted violently after having been adapted to rice and lentils. Pale and sweaty with nausea, the soldier excused himself from his group and went to rest in his tent. Yet a few hours passed; he felt a little better.

DAY 82

Stonehenge, England.

The site had been evacuated just an hour earlier. British troops had forced the regular tourists away, before the Sirians were allowed to enter the open hill with the stone circle in daylight.

The Sirians were excited and happy, examining the tall, ancient megaliths, stroking their surfaces with reverence, using their metal instruments on the gray rock. And for once, they eagerly told the scientists why: the previous Sirian visit by an automatic probe - 6,000 years ago - had surveyed and recorded the site while it was being actively used by humans. The old Sirian records matched the location perfectly, confirming their reliability.

The British linguist of the team asked permission to see the recordings of Stonehenge from circa 4,000 B.C. The Sirians surprised the scientists by accepting at once. They set up a small device, and projected a hologram onto the surface of one of the megaliths, for everyone to see.

Moving 3-D images at natural speed appeared, showing primitive people at work and in rituals, dressed in skins, furs, and woven clothing - more and finer clothing than one usually associated with the "Stone Age". There were few surprises in the images, except that they were taken at such close range. The Sirians explained that the observations were made by a camouflaged, remote-controlled probe that the natives mistook for a bird. In these moving images, Stonehenge had not yet taken its present form. The circle of stones was familiar in size and position; but the stones themselves were much smaller, less impressive and more irregularly shaped.

This made sense to the scientists. It was a well-known historical fact that new religions often built their ritual grounds on the sites of older, dying ones. Tents and wooden structures, an entire provisory village, surrounded the outskirts of the open height of the central site.

Then followed images that shocked the team. A priest tied up and sacrificed animals to the sun god, on the central altar of the Stonehenge. First tame dogs, then a wild boar, then a deer, then a bear... then an adult man, then a woman... and finally a little child. There were even recorded sounds, coming from small loudspeakers in the Sirians' wearable machinery that the group could hear. The animals screeched and so did the little child, as the grave priest slit their throats. Only the adults died without protest, and the primitive crowds cheered the slaughter.

Lazar thought: It must feel peculiar to look at the human race's history from outside, and see the patterns we don't see...

Carl said almost nothing during the rest of the day. He could barely make himself speak over the phone, even when his wife called.

DAY 83

With his full mental capacity slowly returning, herding and stealing all kinds of food in secret, the soldier could finally find the strength to realize what had been nagging him.

He was still unhappy.

Not just because he was shaven bald, owned nothing (even his shabby robe and sandals belonged to the Church of Ranmotani), and his life now consisted mainly of hard labor and chanting. As if for the first time, he saw his entire past life, and saw that he had always been unhappy - with himself, with what he could expect of his life, with being human, not even a very bright human at that. Why had he wasted so many years of his life acting like an overgrown teenager? In hindsight, his joining the army had been nothing but a desperate attempt to break with adolescence and become a grown-up, once and for all. His army years, he saw now, had been an immense disappointment; the war had shattered his aspirations to improve himself, to belong to a purpose. He had proved incapable of following the basic purposes of any army: to kill in combat, and to obey orders without question.

The soldier felt moved by a sudden, skewed gratitude toward the cult. The half-starvation it had put him through, must have cleansed his system of all the alcohol and dope he had been destroying his brain with, ever since he dropped out of the military. Finally he was cured of his addictions. With the poisons sweated out, he could no longer escape himself and his past. So, the soldier asked himself as he was sweeping the open place before the main stage, what should he be doing now? What about the aliens on nearby Alien Beach, he wondered. Had they really anything to do with his visions...

He had not yet decided if the cult actually was in touch with the Sirians - there was still some mental block that stopped him from doubting the cult's leaders. For now, he had to assume the visions were an individual experience. And they were about alien life, about life in a totally different culture. He could not have made the visions up himself; they were too detailed, too vivid. And there was a pattern to them; each vision had felt like coming from the one, same alien. Sampled experiences from a life.

The soldier recalled the TV broadcast from the first Sirian landing on the Moon, when that astronaut had received a gift. What was it again? A device that records and plays thoughts, wasn't that what Ranmotanii had called it on TV? There had been no further news of that detail - the government had of course classified it.

You idiot, the soldier thought, how could you have missed such an obvious lead! They have the technology to record and play thoughts, and I'm the living proof. This is some kind of experiment they're doing... First they contacted us with television, because they wanted to meet us on our own level. But then they'll start to try and communicate in the way that feels natural to them. But how? And why me? Shouldn't there be others receiving visions as well? Others in this cult?

Out of the corner of his eye, the soldier glimpsed Tanii, the Regional Elder, coming his way across the dusty field. The fat bearded man moved closely surrounded by his robed officers, bodyguards, and his accountant from the church's American headquarters. The soldier stepped aside, and they passed by like he didn't exist. The Regional Elder had discarded the soldier's hallucinations as mere delusions. But if Tanii was in telepathic contact with the Sirians, as he always claimed, why didn't he also read the soldier's thoughts now?

Screw you, you fat bastard, the soldier thought, glowering at The Regional Elder's neck. The Regional Elder didn't even slow down his pace. The soldier frowned with newfound insight. He had been indoctrinated. And he had been too weak, too addicted, to desperate for acceptance to resist. But after curing his drug addiction, the cult could be of no more help. It was getting to be time to leave, when the opportunity came.

A few days before, two cult members had tried to escape on a boat leaving the island; one of them made it, but returned back on his own a day after - so strong was the pull of the cult. The soldier could admit to himself now, that he too had grown afraid of the outside world which might condemn him as an insignificant lunatic among others. With that insight came great shame.

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