The Fellowship for Alien Detection (36 page)

“Okay, that's what I'll do.”

“It's going to take too long,” whispered AJ worriedly.

“Let me see that,” said Haley. She took the metal piece and ran her finger across the symbols. Her eyes snapped up to the Alto. “Your bracelet!” she said. “That symbol!”

The Alto slipped the bracelet off his wrist and handed it to Haley. She flicked to one of the charms and held it out beside the other symbols. “This one,” said Haley, showing Dodger the charm. “Maybe this is it.” She looked back at the Alto. “Why else would you have it?”

The Alto shrugged. Then he glanced over his shoulder. “I hope you're right.”

Dodger followed his gaze. “Uh-oh.”

They'd been found. A group was running out onto the catwalk. It was One, Two, and a couple of the other agents they'd seen in Roswell. Behind them were at least ten small people in orange jumpsuits and hard hats. “Stop right there!” One called.

“Hurry,” said the Alto. “I'll cover you.” He stepped in front of the group and dropped into his fighting stance.

Dodger studied the symbol carefully. “Okay.” He turned and slid back into the interface. In the medium of light, he found the code again. He searched the bank of symbols. There it was. . . .

F
RANCIS
.

The Director. Dodger quickly selected the symbol, moving it—

I
T'S TIME FOR US TO TALK
.

Dodger heard another voice, distantly, saying “Dodger, hurry—”

And then as if on a cosmic wind, energy seemed to snatch him, dragging him fully into the interface, body and all. Dodger saw orange, felt the full possibility of the universe, and traveled.

Juliette, AZ, April 25th, 8:36 p.m.

The Alto was a blur of attacking limbs, but there were too many of them. Two was crumpled on the catwalk, and a couple of the tiny aliens had been tossed over the side, but now the Alto was down. Two of the little workers were grabbing at AJ. Suza was fighting off another.

One was pushing through the fray, right toward Haley. She turned, a hand already on Dodger's arm, and placed the other on his shoulder, getting as close as she could to his glowing ear. “Dodger, hurry—” she started to say—

Only then she was yanked violently forward, and she was flying, moving and it felt like she was coming apart, like she was a dandelion blown in the wind, seeds carried off, up, out, and far, far away.

Approximately six hundred light-years east of Vega

“Hello, Dodger.”

She was tall and weirdly slender, like a being made of tree branches. She seemed to have many fingers, flicking on the end of her reedy arms. Her skin was translucent, the vessels inside visible by their incandescent orange glow. Her brain was a neon tangle behind a foggy glass skull, and her eyes were voluminous, reflectionless, black.

Dodger looked down and saw that he was whole and standing on a metal floor. They were no longer in the interface. They were beyond it, standing on the deck of a starship, its walls and consoles made of the iridescent metal with its oily rainbow texture.

Dodger also saw that he was no longer merely himself. His insides were glowing orange in the feathery patterns of his blood vessels, as if he literally had crystal in his blood.

“Congratulations to you both for disabling Juliette's time loop. We will, however, have it up and running again in short order.”

Dodger turned and was surprised to find Haley. She wasn't glowing. She was instead looking terrified. Dodger felt something more calm. Like his shock at being suddenly far out in space was tempered by a warm certainty from inside, like from his blood and cells and from his very genes. A feeling . . .

Like he was home.

He sensed that he was still connected to the interface. It was somewhere back behind his consciousness, and somewhere beyond that, very far from here, was Earth.

The Director stood to their side, and before the three of them was a floor-to-ceiling windowpane.

It looked out on the universe. And Dodger realized that he'd been wrong to envision the world by map, because no map, no re-creation or attempt at organization could ever adequately express or contain what they could now see.

Infinite stars, pulsing in a million colors like spilled canisters of glitter.

Spiraling galaxies like wild paintbrush strokes.

Effervescent undulating clouds of nebulae splashed and running down the page.

Front and center: a star, a pale blue thing, fatigued, at its end.

Closer, the enormous ruin of crystal chunks that Dodger had glimpsed from Lucky Springs. They were massive, fractured, and held together by thousand-mile-long metal spans. They glowed more strongly in their fissures than on their cooled surfaces, like late-evening embers of a campfire.

“It was once a planet,” said the Director. “Called Paha'Ne. Our home.”

“What happened?” said Dodger.

“For seven billion years we lived on it. Our species evolved in tandem with its crystal structure. Our consciousness was connected to it, held within it. We could travel through it. A symbiotic relationship where we maintained the crystal, kept it free of corrosive bacteria and predatory species, and it maintained us in return.”

Dodger was reminded of those little fish that clung to sharks, or clown fish and anemones.

“Let me guess,” said Haley. “You overpopulated and overused the resources?”

“Ha,” said the Director, and she almost sounded offended. “We are not like humans in that respect. No, we faced a calamity that your young planet will, too, eventually. Our star expanded into a supergiant. We had to flee into space, and then we watched as our planet was scorched to the point where it fractured.” The Director swept her many fingers toward the remnants. “You can see that we salvaged the planet as best we could, but for centuries now we have lived in our ships, orbiting the graveyard of our past.”

Dodger felt a somber weight settle over him as he listened to this.

“In time,” the Director continued, “we began a search for a new home. When our planet exploded, chunks of the Paha'Ne were thrown out into the wider universe. We tracked these remnants. Many ended up flying into other suns or getting sucked into black holes, but we were able to locate a precious few that landed on planets. As you can imagine, most were quite uninhabitable—gas giants, frozen wastelands. . . . One that was overrun with tiny creatures that cause terrible rashes, that kind of thing.

“In our search we found only three planets that had an atmosphere and geography that could sustain us.”

“Earth was one of them,” said Dodger.

“Yes, the best one, in fact. And so we began sending exploratory teams, a few decades ago, by your time. We determined that with a few alterations, we could make Earth a viable new home. And so we have endeavored to do so.”

“And what about the humans?” Haley asked coldly. “Project Bliss? It's mind control. You're just turning us all into mindless slaves?”

“Well,” said the Director, “there was an early movement among us to exterminate humanity entirely, much as you might fumigate a house before moving in, but we value the natural world, on a universal level, and so, unlike
your
explorers, might I add, we strive to preserve and protect the individual ecosystems and habitats of the places we have chosen to settle.”

“You're environmentalist aliens,” said Haley.

“You could say that. Plus, after our initial research into the human species, we determined that your race and ours only differ by a few chromosomes. Rather important ones,
obviously
, but our DNA is largely identical.”

“People have most of the same DNA as mice,” said Haley darkly.

“Lab rats,” Dodger echoed, though he felt like he was saying it more for Haley than for himself.

“I suppose,” said the Director. “But the more important point is that there are two problems with humans: First, you are bound and determined to wreck your
own
ecosystem. If you raise the carbon levels of your atmosphere as high as you are projected to, it will have irreversible effects on the temperature and sustainability of life on the planet, as well as interfere with our crystal tuning. That would be a problem for us, and for you.

“Second, you humans don't share well. We need to move at least five billion Paha'Ne onto your planet. I'm sure you can imagine the response your population would have to that.”

“They might not like it,” said Dodger. It was only after he'd spoken that he realized he'd said “they.”

“‘Might' is putting it lightly. Once, we tried to introduce ourselves to a remote group of humans in Alaska, and your military secretly fired nuclear weapons at our ships. That was a nuisance.

“So you see our dilemma,” said the Director. “We need your planet, and we don't want to heartlessly exterminate you. So, instead we are in the process of setting up a network across your planet. In the meantime, we have been experimenting with a proper mind control program in Juliette. When it is complete and the system goes live, we will put the human race into a blissful state of life, going about their days unaware that anything is amiss. We would also keep you from screwing up your atmosphere any further, and most importantly, we would program you not to mind our presence. Actually, we thought we might move you all to select continents and then we'll live on the others. We do so love South America. You could have Australia all to yourselves. It would be, as you say, a win-win.”

“You'd be making us slaves,” Haley muttered.

“Nonsense,” said the Director. “Aside from having you build a few large-scale crystal interfaces, we would not make you trained animals. We would just give you happy, trouble-free lives. It would be like living in a really nice zoo.”

“But that's not life,” said Haley. “There'd be no choice. No change.”

“It's all relative,” said the Director. “You'll
think
you have choice. Is it really that different? At any rate, we're nearly finished, and we can't have our Juliette plans discovered. But all that is not why I brought you out here, Dodger.”

“Then why?” Dodger asked.

“Because all of us have watched you these past few weeks, and for years before that. You were one of our early rounds of experiments here in Juliette. Part of a special group that we selected for genetic trials. We merely turned on a gene or two—ones that are active inside us but dormant inside you—to see what would happen. At first, the only result we saw was that we inadvertently made you immune to the mind control program here in Juliette. Because of that, we returned you to your home. End of story . . . until these powers started activating inside you over this last year. My scientists think it was caused by your human condition of puberty. What a crazy state of affairs that is!” The Director made an electric sound like laughter.

“But my point is: As a result you have become something more than human. I suspect that you know this deep inside. Know that you are now as much one of us as you are one of them, if not more.”

Dodger nodded. He did know this. He'd suspected all along that he was different, wondered if Juliette would feel like home, and if his growing powers were steps in a process of changing. It was all true, in a way, and it explained so much of what he'd felt. And yet, what did it mean for him now? What was he to do?

“That is why I brought you here,” said the Director. “To give you a choice.”

“What choice?” Dodger asked weakly.

“You're powerful, and, in effect, we can't control you without locking you up. That doesn't seem right to do to one of our own. So, in exchange for your cooperation on Earth, we would like to invite you to live with us. You may roam free among the Paha'Ne, travel our world, our other new homes. And Earth too, of course. We feel that you are something special. Something to be cherished. And we would treat you as such.”

Cherished? Dodger had never dreamed of having a word like that associated with him. What should he do? He glanced over at Haley. Her expression was hard to read. Blank, serious. He really wanted to know what she was thinking. Now he felt her hand slip into his.

“And then there's Haley,” said the Director.

“What about me?” said Haley coldly.

“Well, your spirit, for one. Here you are, a young girl all the way at the far end of the universe, and you didn't do it with an internal connection, like Dodger. You are here because of your irrepressible desire to see beyond the horizon, to discover the unknown, to live beyond your life. It is very impressive.”

“I'd just been calling it selfish and headstrong,” said Haley quietly, “but . . . thanks, I guess.”

“You do your species justice, and that's why we'd like to extend the invitation to you, too.” said the Director. “Well, and also because he likes you.”

This made Dodger feel like he was blushing, though it might not be showing up, given that his insides were already glowing.