A.R.Yngve
ALIEN BEACH

Chapter Thirty-Two

DAY 125

A young U.S. naval officer, unarmed and carrying a suitcase, came off the supply boat and asked a passing scientist for Carl Sayers.

"I think he's over there," said Takeru, pointing the way to the giant lander vessel a hundred meters further in.

The officer went pale under his suntan, but resolutely walked that way. In the shadow of the mighty alien ship's supporting pontoon balloons, he soon found Carl, next to a Sirian machine that resembled a giant silver egg. The scientist was examining the pod with another, small instrument of alien origin - it resembled a miniature telescope.

"Mr. Sayers?"

Carl looked up, recognizing the officer from previous visits. "Hi again! Did the fleet suffer any damage in the storm?"

"A few scratches, nothing to worry about. Say, that's an impressive-looking ship."

"Did you know that each and every one of their machines is made out of metal cells?" Carl mused absent-mindedly. "That possess a kind of pseudo-life? Even that big ship has a mind of sorts. Only, it doesn't rebel against its passengers. Isn't that amazing?"

The officer was too amazed to answer.

"But I assume you came to gather some information for your superiors in the Pentagon," Carl added, with no audible malice.

"I beg your pardon?"

"These are our terms: the castaways are not prisoners. They are to be picked up by civilian ships as soon as they reach the three-mile perimeter. No military prisoners are to be taken from this island. Any attempt to take prisoners will lead to a protest from the amphibian representative Ranmotanii. You can ask him yourself. Tell that to General Harrod's successor."

"There isn't exactly a successor, sir."

"Who, then?"

"Admiral Boswell, commander of the U.S.S. Powell, has taken over transitional leadership of the Alien Beach Security Committee, while they try to find a replacement. To tell you the truth, nobody wants the job now."

"Why?"

The officer lowered his voice, as if it would make a difference. "They're afraid. I know this sounds stupid - the top brass in the intelligence community, Pentagon, CIA, the NSA, you name it - all the talk about those Sirian Ancestors has scared the living daylights out of them. Their entire concept of secrecy is coming down."

"I think I understand what you mean. Was there anything else I could help you with today?"

"In fact, yes - I was ordered to look for a member of the unarmed platoon. He went missing during the evacuation, and our patrol boats haven't managed to find his body."

The officer gave Carl a photograph of the missing person. The man on the picture was that soldier, all right - but when Carl had last seen him among the Sirians, the soldier had looked at least ten years older and had a bulging ridge running along the top of his head. Carl thought about it. What would a Sirian have said?

"Lieutenant, you are not yet in the position to understand the information I possess about the missing soldier. Later, when you are wiser, I will tell you more. Can I keep this picture for now?"

"I... yes, sir. I'll come back in a week or so then. P... please call us if you find anything."

The officer gave Carl a last baffled glance, and retreated back to his boat - trying not to give away his hurry to get off the island. The sight made Carl grin. Then he looked at the photograph again, and understood a little more of what was going on.

He touched the huge metal egg and said: "Send this message to Ranmotanii: 'Carl Sayers wants to meet Ranmotanii and his new guest this evening, in Carl's house.'" Silently, the machine instantly transmitted the message.

Not only Ranmotanii and the soldier, but also Oanorrn and Namonnae came to meet Carl that evening.

"I think I have a right to know why you are here," Carl explained to the soldier. "It's not too soon to tell me."

"It was just yesterday that you agreed not to ask too much too soon."

"That was yesterday, and now I know more; thus I will understand better now. The fact is - you are mutating. Why?"

Carl pointed straight at the soldier's forehead bulge. The prematurely aging soldier gave Carl an excusing grin.

"I've been asking myself that for quite a while, Mr. Sayers. Maybe... maybe the chemical exposure I underwent during the war, altered my brain so that I became receptive to Ancestor communication. This is not the work of the Sirians you see before you; they have no plans to mutate us into their own kind."

"I wasn't accusing them of -" Carl's voice died away. Well, maybe he was accusing them.

The soldier said, not without humor: "The idea has a certain charm to it, I admit - instead of replacing mankind or killing us off, they could let loose a mutating technology and turn us into their own kind. A soft invasion."

And Carl saw the childishness of the idea - it was like taken straight out of a 1950s B-movie. Neither the amphibians nor the Ancestors needed to make that effort, when they had an infinity of worlds to choose from. Why bother with one that was already occupied, polluted, being used up?

"I'm sorry," he said. "You know how self-centered our species is - we always thought we were the center of the universe. Tell me, is it the Ancestors who are changing you?"

"Yes, I think so."

"When did this begin?"

"It's not certain. Maybe even before the first contact with the amphibians - their Ancestors have an entirely different perception of time and space. It began -"

The soldier had to stop - he began to laugh nervously, his head felt light and he got tears in his eyes.

"I just realized - this is the first time I talk to another human - another land-human - about my experience, and he's actually listening. I was so afraid of being called a lunatic, you wouldn't believe it -"

"After what I've been through, you sound sane enough," Carl replied gravely. "Go on, this is important."

With eyes that had become imperceptibly different from human eyes, the soldier gave Oanorrn a questioning stare - and the old amphibian nodded.

"It began with the first vision, about four months ago..."

As the soldier strained to recount the many visions that had lodged themselves in his changing brain, they fell into place. The thing that had communicated itself to him, the sum of its messages, could finally take the form of human speech. The soldier was no longer all himself, but partly composed of the memories and experiences of that "other."

And the other spoke through the soldier...

"I was among the first ones to become an Ancestor. This was long before Ranmotanii's group journeyed from Sirius to this planet. At the time when I was transformed into the nether state, our homeworld was still orbiting its original sun. The homeworld was the most beautiful planet known to us - it still is, as my descendants propel it from star to star with their great machines.

"When I was born, in the northern ocean of the homeworld, our population had grown to the limit of the star system's capacity.

"Yet, this was not why we decided to leave our sun and seek out new space.

"At the time when I grew up to be a young infant, I learned - like so many other children - that our civilization was built upon the remnants of a dead one, that had lived exclusively on land. Perhaps this dead culture had once created us, to allow intelligent life to survive what catastrophe destroyed them; no one knows. So I always knew that our culture must move or die.

"Yet, this was not why we decided to leave our sun and seek out new space.

"Movement is in our nature. I remember as a child living mostly underwater, asking why the bubbles always strive upward to the sun. And my mother said it was the way of things - like the bubble striving to become part of the greater ocean of air, I was going to feel the pull toward the greater ocean above. She was right; and it did not end there.

Once we had come to explore all land, we were attracted to go further upward, into the biggest ocean, that you call 'outer space'.

"Yet, this was not why we decided to leave our sun and seek out new space.

"For as long as our species had existed, we had firmly believed that the Pull, the urge to soar upward, would always continue without interruption. My own, really dead ancestors thought their minds would soar into the star-filled sky when their bodies died. I recall the sight of my own old relatives dying physically... their corpses were carried to a hilltop and burned.

"As the smoke was carried upward, we sang for their safe ascent into the greater ocean. Every star, we were told by our elders, was the home of an ancestor spirit...

"Yet, this was not why we decided to leave our sun and seek out new space.

"As the land-living part of our culture had developed, partly by learning to use the many machines left behind by the previous species, we had learned the way of thinking you call 'science'. Many, many generations before my birth, scientists had learned to use telescopes to map out the skies.

"When I had grown old enough to spend most of my days on land and work there, our people largely knew the terrible truth: our dying minds did not soar into space. The faith in the Pull was rapidly breaking down, and everyone was stricken by a sense of lost purpose. The universe was no longer the place we had assumed it to be.

"Once I had fully accepted the futility of burning my dead relatives, I overcame my despair and decided to become a scientist. I reasoned with my friends thus: we had to find a way to complete the ascension of our people, restore the Pull - or our people would be doomed.

"One thing our species has never lacked, is courage - within my earthly lifetime, a third of our homeworld's resources had been directed toward this goal.

"This was why we decided to leave our sun and seek out new space - to keep the Pull going forever. Once our astronomers learned of the disaster that would eventually befall our solar system, the great work began to move our entire people to new stars.

"But there was still one great fear that held us back from spaceflight - the fear of the emptiness of space. No air to breathe; no soothing water to sleep in, and this caused an innate panic in us, which runs very deep.

"The challenge seemed too great, until one of us constructed the machines that made the Ancestors real things. With the Ancestors there ahead of us, our fear of empty space was alleviated.

"I became one of the first, real Ancestors - the risk of failure was high, and several volunteers had died in previous attempts to become transformed. At the time of my turn, I was so old that I had come to live exclusively on land, and my body was frail. To lessen my fear of real death, I took to repeat some of the funeral proceedings of the old faith, just before the transformation process could begin. These proceedings came to live on in the new tradition.

"As was the ancient custom of our old and dying, I stood upon my home beach, where countless generations had stood before me, and shouted the ritual words: 'Ancestors - I am ready!' Though it might have seemed a mockery then, it made me more confident - I spoke not to the previous ancestors, but those who were to come after me.

"How do I describe the transformation process? The amount of energy involved is considerable - this energy is used to break down time and distance, the illusions that the real things create when they dance. I ceased to be in time and distance, and became... real.

"Since real Ancestors are not in time and distance, it is as if they all are present... everywhere and nowhere. All who have ever been transformed are together, generation after successive generation. From the first one, to the last one that ever was transformed at the end of my people's time."

"Once this process had begun with me and my friends, it was to continue. From an early stage it was understood, that one could not be born an Ancestor, but first had to grow into maturity. Our children cannot walk on land until they have grown appropriately.

"Finally, inspired by the apparitions of real Ancestors in the sky, my people could make the mass exodus from their home star with confidence.

"Like so, the pattern is unbroken; the Pull is forever. Even among Ancestors, the Pull exists in some form; I cannot describe it, but it must go on - forever higher. The energy I use to speak through this being should not be continued... it would damage him."

The soldier's eyelids fluttered; he woke up from what he perceived as a trance. He could recall most of what had been said, but some limit of nature must have been reached - the memory of the Ancestor's message was already fading. His head began to ache again.

Carl, Oanorrn, and Namonnae were too stunned to speak or react. None of them seemed prepared for this.

Finally, Namonnae said slowly: "I doo nnot knoow iif thhis iis aa reaal Aancestor tallking. Laand-humaans aare nnot reeeliablle."

And in the eyes of Carl and the soldier, she was being perfectly honest. Oanorrn's face turned sunken and sad. He talked to her in their own tongue, slower than usual - she replied in terse, clipped phrases.

"They are arguing," the soldier told Carl. "Something about her being mistaken and immature. He says she has not understood her own kind as related to land-humans. She could be his daughter, but I'm not sure if that's what they mean. Namonnae dislikes... land-humans."

Carl hushed the soldier, took him aside, and let the two amphibians argue in private. "So what are your plans then? When their year is up, the amphibians will return the island to its native owners. Will you go back to America with us?"

"I cannot answer yet. There is something I need to stay here to get done, before the year is up."

The soldier pointed at his own growing forehead ridge, and explained: "This is going to continue - it's the Pull in me, it has been so strong and now it's finally being released - but it needs time to grow. No one ever became an adult from the moment he was born. It could be of good to others, but who can tell now? Just let it happen."

Carl didn't quite know what he ought to be thinking. "Okay. Okay. Just one thing - I found this the other day. You'll need it."

Carl gave the soldier Stone's baseball cap. "So people won't stare at your head."

When they parted ways and Carl returned to his other duties, he recalled the cheap paperback novels of his youth, which brought him escape from growing up in the rough streets of New York. In those books, the hero traveled to other worlds and met fantastic creatures - some of them beautiful women.

The hero of his favorite novel had teleported himself to another planet by merely wishing it so; Carl had, as a naïve, yearning ten-year-old tried to wish himself into space, with no result. He had grown up and eventually accepted, that one doesn't get something for nothing.

And yet - here was that soldier, that nobody, coming closer to aliens than anyone else, without any technical equipment at all... as if his wishing it so was all it took... Carl shook his head, recalling a quote: We are all born in the gutter; but some of us look to the stars.

He found himself longing for his wife's love and support, so much so that it hurt.

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