Colonization (Alien Invasion Book 3) (16 page)

“Not consciously,” Gloria said, seeing Piper’s discomfort. “But below the surface, maybe? The accounts I’ve heard and read — both from the ‘lesser abductees,’ as they’re called, and from people who know the viceroys — all point to a feeling like an itch. Each of the Nine traveled to a place that is now a capital and waited for contact. But if you ask me, it wasn’t that these people saw the Astrals coming. I believe the Astrals
saw them.”

Piper sat up straighter.

Gloria nodded toward the computers, to the scientist working at his bench under the rolltop. Thelonius — Franklin, apparently — had wandered over to stand beside Gloria’s plush chair. The abbess nodded, and he brought over a stool then sat atop it to form a rough circle.

“This is a
rational
church,” he said. “I taught high school science before coming here. I’ve never been a religious person, or even believed in God.” The monk pointed at the ceiling. “But I do believe in
them.”

“The Astrals?”

He nodded. “Gloria will tell you that a higher spiritual being watches over us all. I’d say it was a bunch of alien ships. There’s room for both our beliefs, but there’s no question we’ve been observed from the start, as if by Gloria’s god. Because they’ve been here before, you know.”

Piper nodded, knowing that particular theory from her time in Moab.

“Many people — especially now, given what’s happened — believe that some of what ancient people thought of as gods were actually alien visitors. Beings who ‘descended from the sky in chariots’ and did remarkable things that seemed like magic. They built colossal, impossible structures. They wielded fire and light. They could fly and communicate by thought. To ancient people, they must have seemed
plenty
godlike. It raises questions about so many of the old stories. Maybe the biblical flood was caused by ancient aliens. Maybe there was a real-life Noah’s Ark that’s nothing like we’ve imagined before. We can only guess. All we know for sure is that this isn’t their first time here. And if they were once interested in us, it makes sense that they’d want to keep an eye on us.”

“Which is why there are UFO sightings, right?” Piper was still unsure where this might be going.

“Some, I imagine,” said the monk. “Some of those are probably wackos, like everyone’s always assumed. But that’s not what I’m referring to.”

“What then?”

Gloria looked at Thelonius and said, “Go ahead. This is your stuff, not mine.”

The monk turned back to Piper, wobbling a bit on his stool. “Look, I could go into a lot of stuff that would bore the hell out of you, but for now let’s just say that quantum physics tells us a few things about the universe that are as confusing as they are amazing. Just one of those crazy things is that our world is made up of more than the three spatial dimensions we know: length, width, and height.”

“What else is there?” said Piper.

“The math says there are probably seven more. Maybe twenty-three. It’s either ten or twenty-six dimensions total, but the point is there are more than we think. We can’t access those extra dimensions because they’re rolled up too tightly … but maybe the Astrals can. It would explain how they arrived at Jupiter without us ever having seen them out there before. Maybe they appeared from somewhere else after traveling through one of those higher dimensions. What might commonly be called a wormhole.”

He waved his hand like a conversational eraser.

“That’s not even my point. To what Gloria was saying, we think the Astrals can’t only
travel
through those compressed dimensions. We think they might be able to
see
through them as well.”

“See through them?” The words made Piper’s skin crawl. She felt watched by an invisible voyeur.

“We argue about this,” said Gloria, patting Thelonius companionably on the leg. “But at this point, our rational contingent hits a wall because the next step has to be a leap of faith.”

“I don’t know about that,” Thelonius said.

“It’s okay, Franklin,” Gloria replied, clearly enjoying the scientist’s predicament. “I do, and some day you will, too.”

Piper looked from one to the other. “What are you talking about?”

“Even their science holds many things that seem almost spiritual,” the abbess explained.

“I wouldn’t say it’s — ”

Gloria cut him off. “His quantum physics basically says that energy responds to intention and thought. That sounds
spiritual
to me. The universe behaving like a giant hologram? Also
spiritual
to my ears.”

“The math is more than — ”

“You go on, Franklin. Keep trying to calculate my soul.” She turned and took Piper’s hand in hers. “Honey, they’ve told me stories about supercolliders being used to smash things together to try and find the universe’s secrets — to open up that tight little ball of something they can’t understand. But there aren’t any of those machines around anymore — and still we know those holes in space are opening today.”

“How?”

The abbess tapped her head. “Thought.” She eyed Thelonius. “
Prayer
.”

“Meditation,” the monk added, his word like a correction. “Altered states of consciousness.”

“I hate to admit it,” Gloria said, “but it does seem like there’s a shortcut to spirit.”

“What?”

“Drugs,” said Thelonius.

“Not drugs.”

“Drugs,”
the monk repeated. “Not just anything. Most drugs just fu — ” He cut himself off, seeming to remember he was a monk in a church. “ — just screw you up,” he finished. “But of the abductees who’ve returned, a surprising number report having felt their abductors before, in drug trips. The strongest connections seem to have come from a plant-based hallucinogen called — ”

“Ayahuasca,” Piper finished. Something she knew all about. Knew her husband’s fascination with. Knew how driven and purposeful he felt after those hallucinogenic sessions, and how the aftermath made him do strange things — like purchase unremarkable land in the Colorado mountains and build an end-of-the-world bunker beneath it.

Thelonius nodded. “Precisely.”

“They’ve been watching us,” said Gloria. “They’ve been peeking through the eyes of people like your husband. Maybe through people who are deeply connected without substances, too, like monks.” She looked over at the man beside her. “
Real
monks, I mean.”

“They know everything then,” Piper said, thinking again of the information she’d taken from Meyer’s computer and what it might mean. What would the people in this room make of what was on the slip drive? What would Benjamin make of it, if they could, in fact, get it to him? The idea that the Astrals had been peeking over humanity’s shoulder filled her with a sinking sense of futility. Organizations like this church were playing rebellion. There was no way to evade an enemy who knew you as well as you knew yourself.

“They don’t know
everything
.” Impossibly, there was a tiny smirk in the corner of the monk’s mouth. He looked at Gloria, who gave him an indecipherable look.

Piper watched them both. “What?”

“The Astrals have come to Earth many times before,” Gloria said. “From what we can figure — and from what people like Benjamin Bannister tell us — they’ve done so when instruments they left behind to guide us have nudged our social evolution forward to a point of critical mass. The Egyptians, the Mayans, the Incas — all cultures who were highly spiritual, highly connected at the level of mind or soul. Cultures who Benjamin thinks were able to call to the Astrals through the combined force of their minds, albeit without realizing they were doing so. But this time, we’re different. For the first time, they seem to have arrived and been surprised by what they found.”

“Surprised how?” Piper asked.

“This time,” said Thelonius, “we’ve formed a rational society instead of a spiritual one. We’ve built our own magic devices and a highly advanced technological culture — contrary to past cycles, in which we’d developed more mental connection rather than gadgets, and had
those
tricks to show them when they appeared to check on us.”

“So what?”

“Diverting toward technology — and away from mental or spiritual development — has thrown our visitors for a loop,” said the monk. “We don’t have the group mind they expected — and might need in order to fully understand us. That’s why they spent so much time building a network of stones: to fill in the blanks. But it’s only partially working. So far, they can’t quite comprehend the way modern humans have chosen to store and utilize their collective consciousness. Our current group consciousness is too new — too totally foreign to them.”

“What are you talking about?” Piper asked.

The monk smiled. “The Internet,” he said.

C
HAPTER
19

Trevor stood at the door to his father’s study, wondering if he should dare to follow his instincts.

The computer was right there.
Right friggin’ there
, not ten feet away. Trevor had been in this room plenty of times, to grab books from the shelves or look something up in the home’s digital library, which was clunky to access anywhere other than at the main console.

He had no business on the computer now. But that could, if he was discovered, be explained. There were no Titans in this part of the house; they were all closer to the dining room, helping to prepare for the evening banquet. Reptars didn’t enter the house. The human kiss-asses who did his father’s bidding had mostly gone home for the day. Only members of his family might find him tinkering. Trevor could make up excuses for them — maybe say the catalog interface was acting funny. He’d just hopped over for a second. And so on.

Trevor stared at the thin screen, still leaning rather conspicuously in the doorway. Whatever made Piper run had come from inside. It might
still
be there. He’d passed his father earlier and seen him agitated, mumbling about folks sticking their noses into things that didn’t concern them. Surely, he’d have known what she’d taken. And it’s not like computers were filing cabinets. You copied files, then only deleted them if you had a good reason and knew how to do it without alerting anyone. Piper would have had neither.

Trevor could go to the computer now, poke around, and maybe discover what Piper had found.
Maybe.
It felt worth a stupid, foolish, futile shot, given his current inner turmoil over his missing stepmother. If Trevor got caught? Well, he could play dumb. Nobody would assume he’d intentionally done anything wrong.

Except maybe for Raj.

Trevor’s palms were sweating. Not good for secret agents trying to get in and out undetected. He was about to leave, thinking himself a coward, when his father brushed by him to enter the study.

“Hey, Dad,” he said, his voice almost breaking with nerves.

“Hey, kid.” Meyer opened one of his desk drawers and began rifling, glancing up just once.

Those two simple words felt like a sigh. Only after he’d felt himself relax did Trevor realize how strange his father had seemed lately. He’d tried getting used to the new Meyer Dempsey and convincing himself that nothing had changed. Yes, he seemed to be mentally connected to Earth’s invaders, but what father didn’t have his eccentricities? Meyer had been powerful and arrogant before, same as today. No biggie.

But hearing him greet Trevor so casually now made Trevor realize how odd that simple greeting sounded. Meyer sounded like Trevor’s dad … which made Trevor think of how he
hadn’t
seemed like his father for much of the past two years.

It doesn’t matter. Either way, he’s becoming his old self again.

A second voice inside Trevor contradicted the first:
Or maybe you’re finally getting used to his new self
.

“I was going to grab a book,” Trevor said, realizing he should probably explain his presence.

Meyer looked around at the study’s dusty old volumes. “One of
these?
Why don’t you download one on your Vellum?”

“I don’t feel like running down to the public library.”

“The download sites are back up. You didn’t know?”

Oh. Right. Trevor did know. The net had been coming up little by little — progress always being made in the land of the viceroy.

“Oh. Yeah, I forgot.”

His father opened another drawer and searched anew.

“So,” Trevor said, “that dinner thing tonight.”

“Yes?” Meyer closed one drawer and opened another. His tone was short, sliding downhill from where it had been when he’d entered.

“Do I have to go?”

“I told you. Yes. Everyone needs to go. There will be press for at least an hour at the start. You can go when they go.”

“Do I have to dress up?”

Meyer slammed the last drawer, his face frustrated.

“What?” Trevor asked.

“I can’t find my signet cufflinks.”

“Do you need them?”

“For an official dinner, yes, I should wear the seal. God
dammit.”
He said the last syllable to his desk, as if it had wronged him.

“Maybe they’re in your bedroom.”

“They’re not in the bedroom.”

“Did you check in Piper’s — ”