City Without Suns (17 page)

Chapter 37

Many nights passed as they lost count of time on Beta.  Preoccupied with the emissions from the Dawdler, Webster was no longer marking the tree.  The nights became longer and the days shorter.  The late afternoons brought tolerable temperatures, but the evenings were colder, and a sheet of ice formed on the lake.

It did not stop the Dawdler from making his daily appearance.  Easily breaking any ice in its way, the creature would appear on the shore every morning.  The coloring was unique on that one.  On the top of its body there was a distinct pattern, a dark blemish with round shape.  Webster protected the creature from the people and was convinced it was intelligent.  More would sometimes appear on the south shore, but their behavior was dissimilar from the one that had become a human companion.  Webster called him Relay, a name descriptive of its habit of mimicking patterns of light shined in its direction.

While Webster made his study, sometimes all the way up by the ship where everyone had learned to accept the presence of the creature, more people became ill.  Four more had passed away.  Standing in the cold by the gravesites, several of the forty-one survivors watched as the seventh stake was driven into the ground, including the one to commemorate the loss of Elisa.  In the distance Enric drove the alien wood into the ground with one of the shovels retrieved from the wreckage. 

Only forty-one voyagers remained.  There was some scattered mental arithmetic in which they had been there a little over a half of one earth year, and already seven were dead.  Any simple-minded projection gave them three years to live, during which time there would surely be births, but the babies would perish if nobody remained to take care of them.  A few were optimistic, hoping at least the strongest would survive.  That was their new home, awaited for two hundred and fifty years, but the trend was not in their favor as something undetected was poisoning the air.

After the funerals, Webster was standing at the threshold of the entry door with Enric blocking the way.  Next to Webster was a large mass, which he understood seemed out of place to most everyone. It was Relay, the lake creature, placidly lying with its gelatinous body on the ground, massive limbs relaxed and spread over the ground in a disorganized mess.  If they did not know better, the alien among them would have seemed dead.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Enric asked.

“There’s equipment I need inside.  This animal is trying to tell us something.  I am sure of it.  I think we can communicate if I can develop a translator.  Come on, Enric, I’m not hurting anything.  Let us in,” Webster appealed to no avail.

“I promise you, there is no way you’re coming in here with that,” Enric said.  “I was there when Elisa was attacked along the river on the way back from Gambler.  It’s not safe.  If you don’t take it out of here right now, I’m going to kill it, much less invite it into the lander.  It’s bad enough that you’ve been bringing it this close.”

Webster tried to move Enric out of the way and was quickly thrown to the ground.  Webster tried in vain to roll the Enric off of him.  He was met with blows to the face, and in seconds went limp while Enric violently beat him before anyone tried to intervene.  The sharp fins on Enric’s back stood out, flexed and stiff. 

Nikolaj ran screaming, bounding out from the lander, and met Enric with a lowered shoulder.  They passed over Webster and went to the ground.  Enric threw off his assailant and stood.

“Get out of here!” Nikolaj commanded from his knees. 

“This thing is not going inside,” Enric said while pointing at Relay.

“Not for you to decide.  Leave!” Nikolaj drew a gun. Without losing eye contact, Enric walked right past the drawn gun and back into the lander as if that was where he was going anyway, not because of any command issued by the assumed leader.

Nikolaj crawled toward Webster to see how badly he was hurt.  Still aware of his surroundings but barely conscious to feel the blood dripping from his nose and the swelling around his cheeks, Webster looked up through squinting eyes. 

There was a noise behind Nikolaj. Webster looked past him to see that Relay had propped himself up on two of his limbs.  Another of his limbs reached high and down to wrap itself under Webster’s shoulder.  The alien effortlessly lifted the still body of his human companion to a sitting position and held him there.  Webster marveled at how the creature with no eyes could see.

Webster opened his eyes fully as Nikolaj sat by his side to help hold him up.  Nikolaj pushed Relay’s arm attempting to move it out of the way, but it did not budge. The creature seemed to take the cue and drew back voluntarily.

“What happened?” asked Webster.  “How did I get here? Relay! Enric…”

“He hit you,” responded Nikolaj.  “Wait here.”

Nikolaj returned with a block of ice from outside.  He put it over Webster’s injured eye.  Webster flinched at the cold, took the ice from Nikolaj, and held it himself.  Returning to his feet, he looked down at Relay and then to Nikolaj.

“I really need to take him inside,” he petitioned.  “I can’t move what I need out here.  The equipment is fixed in place.”

Nikolaj nodded his head while looking down at Relay.  He seemed to think there was something different about this one.  The social behavior it displayed was not evidenced by any of the others. Relay slithered through the door, making himself small enough to fit and followed Webster through the corridor.

Chapter 38

Eva had spent many days in a delirious state, in and out of consciousness while Quasar tended to her with water and food.  She awoke one day to the sounds of music coming from the lab and followed the noise with a blanket wrapped around her body, very weak and groggy.  She crept in silence to the threshold of the makeshift lab and peered around the door undetected.  Webster was lost in thought, with all concentration on Relay.

The creature was on the floor next to a table in the dimly lit room.  Cameras were focused on him from different angles.  Webster sat in front of a screen.  In different parts of the room, instrumentation unrecognizable by Eva lay torn apart, disassembled for their lasers and lights of various colors.  They shined and flickered intermittently as Webster looked back and forth between Relay and the screen in front of him. 

Still pictures showed on another screen.  Eva recognized them as teaching aids from the Ward, more recent in her memory than for any of the others.  With every passing image, Webster would speak the word and waited for Relay to acknowledge that he understood.  Eva wanted to step in, but she was still afraid of the strange animal so was content to watch from the hall in secret.

Seeing the table in the room triggered an unpleasant memory, one that was not her own.  She felt the pain like it had happened to her but knew it was a remnant of an experience that belonged to her clone long ago.  It had to be. Eva remembered being on a table like that one as if the subject of an experiment.  The shady recollections were coming more frequently.  In this one, she had tubes down her throat. She wondered what had happened and what reason there could have been for her torture.

Eva refocused when Webster joined her out in the hall. “Welcome back to the land of the living, little Eva.”

She was too tired to object to the thought that she was little.  Before she had a chance, Webster put his hand on her head, gave her an affectionate pat, and closed the door obstructing the view and locking her out. 

From behind the door, Eva heard, “Wait, she can see like Quasar…” 

To her surprise, Webster reopened the door and did not tell Eva to leave.  Overcoming her trepidation with curiosity, she accepted the implicit invitation and entered the room.

“No talking, okay?” Webster instructed.  She sat on the floor back against the wall and kept her distance from Relay.

It did not appear to breathe as it lay completely still.  It might have appeared dead to someone that had not seen it before.  It also did not react to the sounds, but the pictures invoked colorful responses that Eva could see without aid from any of the equipment.  She likewise sat motionless trying to make sense of what she was seeing as she watched the creature trying to communicate.

Webster was trying to associate his spoken language with patterns of light.  He pulled a crudely assembled box from the bench.  It had blinking lights on one end and a speaker on the other.  Webster had designed it himself.

He carefully placed the makeshift gadget on the tabletop right next to Relay’s head, assuming the center of its mass was the closest thing it had to a compartment for some kind of brain.  Besides the extensive branches emanating from it, there were no other parts of his body.  Whatever brain it had must have been in there.  It was the only thing that made sense, and where there was a brain, there must have been eyes, but there were none detectable.

The lights in the device faced away from where Eva was sitting, but she could see their reflection off the shiny skin of the beast.  Webster designed the lights to react to sounds in the room.  A very slight glimmer shined when Webster shuffled two steps back to his seat.  Then he tested his device.

“I am Webster,” he stated simply.  Lights on the device played a short orchestra corresponding to the sound.  Almost immediately, the same pattern appeared again, but this time it was emitted from the skin cells in the creature.

“I am Webster,” came the noise from the speaker in the device.  It was a near perfect replica of Webster’s voice, replayed by the creature according to the light pattern that it saw. 

“A translator?” Eva whispered to herself.

Instead of talking more, Webster moved the box over facing away from Relay’s head and toward one of its arms.

“This is Eva,” Webster spoke while pointing to me.  The same result occurred.  From its arm, the creature generated a pattern of light.

“This is Eva,” the sound was echoed back through the speaker.  An unintelligible phrase was appended to the repeated cue.  Webster did not take the time to figure that out before he moved the translator to different locations, demonstrating that the sea animal had eyes all over its body.  But there were no eyes.  Every cell in its skin appeared to be both a receptacle to the surrounding light and a light generator.

Webster smiled at Eva. She could tell he wanted to share his excitement with somebody, one who would appreciate his accomplishment without talking about it prematurely to the others.  She was the perfect candidate because she was not completely sure of what they had seen.  Maybe he knew that when he let her in to watch.  Maybe his discovery would have been less satisfying if it was unshared.  Eva kept her promise and did not say anything or ask any questions about what was going on.

He clapped his hands a couple of times to vent his enthusiasm as he turned his attention back to the creature.  From the speaker, the clap was echoed by the repetition of the corresponding light pattern.

Webster continued his study for the entire day.  He showed pictures on the screens while speaking the words.  It did not take long before Relay was able to speak the words prompted only by the picture without the cue from Webster.  They continued long after Eva had slipped out of the room.

…

Hours after sunrise days later, Eva watched Webster and Relay sitting on the beach like old friends, oblivious and indifferent to whether anyone watched.  Relay had continued to emerge from the water to join Webster every day.  Webster strapped his box onto one of Relay’s arms, and Relay carried it around proudly holding it above the ground with one of its many spare limbs.  It learned at an incredible pace.  They were having one of their conversations, which disturbed many in the group who viewed the Dawdlers as foes rather than friends.  In the opinion of most, survival did not depend on the pursuit of communication with those amphibious aliens.  Although not unanimous, many resented Webster being a companion to one of the indigenous, even though there was probably little productive he could have done otherwise in his spare time.

“Where you came?” Relay inquired with grammar close enough to be understood.  The audio flowed from the translator, demodulated from the light emitted from the alien’s skin.  Seeming to need no more than one example to learn a word, Relay emitted patterns it had previously observed from the translator. 

“A different planet, Earth.  We came on the ship Gambler that crashed over in the mountains.” Webster pointed as he spoke to the objects he was referencing. “We travelled the final distance down to the ground on this vessel, Taurus.”

“Taurus.  Gambler.  Why you came?” Relay repeated some sounds and followed with another simple question.

Webster stopped to ponder and said, “People just wanted to find new places to live.  They thought Earth would eventually die.”

“Repeat?” Relay spoke the word he learned to say when he did not understand.

“We could not live there.  We had to find another home,” Webster tried to simplify through an absolute statement not reflective of the uncertain reality.

“We have home. There,” Relay said while motioning one of his long arms toward the lake.

“Yes, I know.  You live there.”

“Taurus home.  We live home too,” reiterated Relay.

Webster paused to absorb what the creature was telling him.  Was he saying there was a structure under the water where they live? A construction that constitutes their home?

“What is home?” Webster probed.

“Like Taurus,” Relay said.

“How deep?”

“Repeat?”

Webster sighed not knowing how to express his question.

“How far?”

“Just under.  Not far,” Relay expressed ambiguously. “Come see.  We want you to see.”

Even Webster treated what he heard with caution.  Was what he just heard an invitation to come under the water to see where they lived?  And what did he mean by
we
?  The two groups were not exactly friends despite the regular communication with his unlikely acquaintance.  There was no way for him to submerge anyway.  He had nothing resembling a submarine or breathing apparatus.

Relay slithered back into the water surrounded by the broken ice he shattered earlier.  Webster remained, sitting on the sand with his arms folded around his knees and looking pensively over the lake surface.