Chapter 2
As I lay in the white enclosure, I started thinking. I missed my home planet. I hoped I would see it again, but I knew deep in my remaining heart that I would never know any of the tribesmen again
Just then, a large android stepped into the room from a hidden door. It actually more rolled in than stepped, seeing as it had wheels instead of feet. It stared at me with cold, unfeeling eyes made of plastic. The eyes served no purpose, it used infrasonic pulses to detect its environment. They were just there for decoration.
The robot, still staring at me, now moved to deliver its message. It rolled over on its three small wheels, and then stopped about two feet from me.
“Greetings,” it said in its mechanical voice, which was carried over in the telepathic connection. “The crew of the ship would like to see you now. I will escort you.”
The machine attached my rope handcuffs to a hook on its arm. It told me to walk along next to it, so I did. This didn't seem like a good time to resist. It led me to the far side where it had originally been standing, stopped, and made a beeping noise. A concealed door slid open from the curved surface, and we stepped through. It led me down an immaculate white corridor towards an immense metal door. It had an alien looking word on it. I didn't know it, but the word was “bridge.”
Once we had gone through the door, the robot stopped and stood still. It was now just here to restrain me, no other reason.
Several humans were sitting in chairs typing things into their terminals, but four were not. One of them was the man that had shot me, another was the man I had originally tried to make a meal of. The third, who smelled very similar to the fourth, made a gesture to the fourth man, who tried to protest but then gave up and slumped over in a chair.
“Hello, my name is Paul,” said the third man through the telepathy system. “We must ask you some questions, please tell the truth. It won't help you if you lie, because the computer will pick it up,” he said in a reassuring way.
“Okay,” I said. “My name is Marloth. I do not intend to harm you or your people. I made an incorrect assumption that your species was some invasive herbivore that had been accidentally set loose into the Great Forest, as you broke the Taboo.”
“I am sorry I don't know and I probably sound naïve right now, but what is the Taboo?” inquired Paul.
“My planet is divided into two halves: The Outsider's Realm and the Great Forest. My people live in the Great Forrest, and the iron-makers from other planets live in the Outsider's Realm. They tried to kill the trees. Around twelve hundred years ago, an individual named Karnaraith voyaged to the Outsider's Realm, the first of our species to ever do so. He made an agreement with the Others that meant they would not come to our forests. He is long dead, but the agreement's basic premise is still enforced. We refer to it simply as the Taboo.”
“Interesting,” said Paul simply. “So, if you thought my crewmate was a prey animal, why did you not realize we were an intelligent species when Albert here pointed the gun at you?” he said, motioning to the man who shot me.
“What is a gun?” I asked, for I truly did not know. I assumed it was probably the thing that had knocked me out and stopped my heart, but I did not know its purpose.
Paul sighed and looked at Albert with an expression I did not know. He turned back to me and began to open his mouth to say something, but then stopped. At last, he said “It's a device meant to kill things.”
“Why were you trying to kill me? You seem to have enough food, most Others do,” I said, because in my and most Other cultures, killing things is only done for food.
“Oh, you stupid bloody animal! We weren't trying to get food, we just didn't want a damn tiger squid trying to eat us!” shouted Albert as if it were the most obvious thing ever. “Sure,” he said in a sarcastic tone, “Why don't we just let the big octopus make Wallace into supper. That would be lovely. Just let him make biscuits out of our idiot of a scientist. Splendid.”
I said nothing.
The inky blackness of space enveloped the Messenger like velvet as it drifted through the stars. A month had passed since the plasma boosters had been engaged. The ship, by the power of its rockets, had made it all the way to Jupiter. The radio reception had a lot of static here, mostly because of interference from the asteroid belt. Once they reached the Kuiper belt, the signal would be so poor that communication would be nearly impossible, and after they got through the Oort cloud it would be completely gone. Two more months would pass before they could finally use the warp drive to get to their destination planet.
Aboard the ship, Albert was arguing with the rest of the crew, as usual.
“Yes, yogurt is a dairy product!” yelled Cindy, one of the computer technicians.
“Do you call bread a vegetable? No! It's made from plants, but it's not a vegetable. Same goes for yogurt; it's made from milk, but it isn't milk,” he said. Albert could be very persuasive, but his arguments were always ridiculous.
“What, are you going to say that cheese isn't a dairy product either?” she said half rhetorically, half seriously.
“It isn't! It's been fermented, so it's not made of milk anymore. Do you consider wine fruit juice? No, even though
it's fermented grape juice.”
“You know what, forget it. I don't even care anymore.” Cindy finally said, thoroughly annoyed.
“So you admit it! I was right!” Albert boasted triumphantly.
Cindy simply sighed. This is how it was, and she and the rest of the crew had come to accept it.
***
Two Months Later
The radio crackled to life after being dormant for a few days.
“Today's the day, Messenger,” Dr. Lieberman said excitedly. “Today is our launch window. We're far enough away from anything that the gravity distortions from the wormhole won't affect anything, so you can finally warp out of the solar system.” His voice sounded calm, but he was full of anticipation.
“Roger, Houston, initiating the warping sequence,” Albert said. This is where he came in. He had designed the system, knew it a great deal better than the back of his hand, indeed better than he knew the front of his hand.
“Warping.” He said nonchalantly, as if he was saying 'yes, it is a nice day' or 'pass the salt, will you?'
A great tumultuous sound slowly became audible. It was like a jet engine starting up at first, with a dull whop whop whop whop at first, slowly escalating into a high pitched whine. The whine became a roar, and finally there was a flash of light, although no one saw it.
The warp drive, hence its name, warped and distorted space-time to its breaking point. The universe folded over on itself, and two points overlapped, forming a correspondence. One of these two points was right in front of the Messenger, and the other was somewhere near Betelgeuse. The wormhole opened immediately, swallowed up the ship, and then spat it back out at its destination.
Inside the ship, things were both strange and fantastic, bordering on absolutely bizarre. Energy crackled through the ship, four dimensional objects zoomed though the ship, colors morphed into shades and hues never before seen by the human eye, and time actually wobbled and bent, causing the crew members to irregularly move through it. They flashed back and forward through time, reliving portions of their lives and catching glimpses of the future.
Paul, during the warp, flashed back to the speech before liftoff. The reality around him seemed to shake and shudder under him like it was going to collapse.
“Good evening,” Dr. Lieberman said. “My team of engineers and I have worked tirelessly for years waiting for this day to arrive, and now it has. During this time we have been working on a a marvel of human endeavor; this moment will go down in history, for until this day we have had the tantalizing proof of extraterrestrial life, yet although we said 'we are not alone,' we truly were, for this other life had no idea we were here, because even at light speed it would take hundreds of years to reach even the nearest interstellar locations, and modern engines cant go a twentieth of that speed. However, once we had come up with the concept of how the warp drive was to work, we knew that we, humans, were truly not alone.”
The fuzzy flashback faded, and Paul now saw into the future, and it was nothing short of bizarre.
He looked upon what appeared to be his own face, and it was angry and confused. Paul's duplicate shouted, “What the hell is going on?”
Paul himself was just as shocked. The door to the starboard wing dormitories opened, and one of the androids came in, followed by something else. He couldn't tell exactly what it was, and just then the vision faded away, and he came back to the present.
When the temporal wobbling and strange visions finally subsided, Paul instinctively reached for the radio to tell Dr. Lieberman what he had experienced, tell someone, tell anyone, but then stopped. He couldn't contact Dr. Lieberman anymore. Dr. Lieberman was 640 lightyears away. Paul and all the other crew members were on their own.
I stood there, waiting. I still couldn't comprehend what the man had said. Partly because some of the words he had said didn't translate into my language because of all the strange phrases I didn't know, and partly because what I could understand didn't make sense. I was thinking about this in sort of a dazed stupor when Paul started talking to his younger doppelganger. I heard what they said, but I could not understand it because it was not directed at me.
“As I was saying,” he said, “I'm not really sure why this happened. It seems that—” He was interrupted by the metallic voice of the android.
“Should I take the alien back to its cell?” it queried monotonously.
“I have a name you know!” I growled.
Albert jolted up as if he had been slapped. The android ignored me, as it had been programmed to. Both Pauls looked at me with a strange expression. I just stood there.
“You're not in a position to talk back,” the older Paul said. Directing his intentions toward the android so it understood him, he ordered “Transport Marloth to the Galactic Council Headquarters on Mekaniizer B. The Council will further evaluate him there.”
“Yes captain,” said the android. It pulled out what looked similar to the “gun” Albert had shot me with, and I drew back in fear. He shot it, but it was not painful. Instead, I was sucked into a small sphere of darkness, and after that it was... hard to describe.
I felt as if I was dreaming, I saw images from my childhood, but also visions of things which had never happened. In one of these visions, I was standing before a man who looked vaguely familiar. I realized that he was one of the Others, of my own planet. He seemed surprised, and was about to speak, but then the vision faded.
I emerged from the black sphere in a large room made of metal, with a high, arching ceiling covered with small blueish lights. Many different people were walking through it, of all different species. A large, stocky humanoid came up to me.
“The Council is expecting you,” it said in a flat tone which sounded just slightly robotic. “Follow me,” it ordered.
I followed the humanoid into an orange corridor with green lighting. The air smelled of sulfur dioxide, and the ground was covered in orange sand which burned my feet as they touched it, like sand that has been heated by the noonday sun.
“What will become of me?” I asked the humanoid.
“I am not programmed to answer that question,” it said, proving to me that it was in fact an android.
***
The android and I eventually came to the end of the corridor, and the android touched the surface of a huge door made of a strange substance I couldn't identify. It opened with a creak, and we stepped through. Inside the room was a group of large, reptilian creatures. One of them contemplated me with narrowed green eyes, and then spoke.
“We have received word that your people are willing to be compliant with other races. Is this true?” it said.
“Yes, my culture has negotiated with others in the past, we shall do it again now,” I said confidently. In fact, I was extremely nervous.
“Good,” said the lizard, satisfied. “We have been thinking, and it seems that, in order to be able to fully understand your people's culture, the GA Echo, the ship that held you captive, needs a representative. Someone to advise them on what actions would be... the best for everyone. Would you be interested?”
I paused. I knew that if I said yes, I would be abandoning my life on Ukungu, but I also knew that if I said no, my planet might not be treated very well, perhaps what Albert said wasn't all lies.
“Yes, I will serve as a representative for my planet, but only on the condition that my planet will not be harmed.”
“Deal,” said the lizard.
Gender:
Points: 1142
Reviews: 4