The Fifth Civilization: A Novel (26 page)

Roan never imagined the
Colobus
would exit FTL so close to the mystery planet. The coordinates, a series of
numbers programmed into the main navigational computer, never betrayed any
indication of how close the
Colobus
would be coming to the desired destination. At best, Roan figured he’d be
searching for days in a largely starless region of space. But Aaron Vertulfo
was right on the money with the numbers—the blue alien world filled the
cockpit windows and proved just how skilled a planet-finder he was.

“Shit on a stick!” Roan cried, rapidly shutting off the
thrusters and pulling the yoke. His actions lifted the
Colobus
’ nose away from the planet rather than toward it. If they’d
continued on their path, the freighter would have collided with the atmosphere
before any on-board system was ready. And Roan did not want to see their
adventure end with them turning into a meteor.

“Oh my God,” Kel said. “It’s true. What Aaron said was
true.”
 
She sat in the copilot’s
seat, her elbows on the control panel and her head resting on her palms. She wasn’t
the only one there. David had barely squeezed his feathered frame into the back
of the cockpit, while Duvurn and a few Bauxens were forced to wait outside the
hatch, jostling for a peek and what was to be the sight of the pentury.

“It’s a planet!” the Prince squealed. “A genuine
planet!”
 
The man was near hysteria.
“Servant, fetch me five bottles of the Aginivo, vintage…the year of Chairman
Gask. I think they are apt for this occasion.”
 
The servant, however, remained
enthralled with the sight out the windows.

“Doesn’t anyone care how close we came to skipping off the
atmosphere?” Roan said, acting the killjoy. He adjusted the yoke and the pitch,
and the blue blob in front of them was now drifting out of sight. “We’d be
charred toast—we’d be history at history, if you will.”

Kel rolled her eyes. “But we’re not toast, Nick,” she said.
“You should learn to enjoy the view.”
 
The
Colobus
began shaking. Kel
reached over to Roan’s set of controls and pressed a stabilizer button; the
shaking stopped in moments. Coming out of FTL so close to a massive body had
shocked some of the systems on the ship, and the
Colobus
wasn’t exactly in pristine shape.

Slowly, the planet crept back into view, unfolding beneath
them like a sea. Evidently they were over the night side of the planet, with
the sun behind them. At the edge of this black sea was a blue horizon where
they could hopefully soon glimpse distinct oceans and continents.

“What should we call it?” Roan asked.

“Perhaps we should postpone naming it,” David suggested.
“The inhabitants might already have their own name for it. Remember your
Christopher Columbus, and the Bauxen explorer Grajetus, whose unfortunate spate
of naming started a worldwide conflict some fourteen hundred years ago.”

“Fine, fine,” Roan said. “That’s assuming there
are
inhabitants, you know.”

“Correct.”

Kel looked over the console in front of her. A circular
representation of the planet blinked onto a screen, surrounded by a pulsating
blue field, which indicated the ship’s sensors.

“OK, we’re scanning for iron and other metals that might
signal construction. Our sensors are primitive, but they should be able to pick
up any large cities. This would be simple on any of the four major planets.”
The computer whined in negative. “Nothing. At least, not in this hemisphere.”

“Scan for any large bio readings,” Roan said. “Maybe there’s
a group of people we can land near.”

“Call it Wenayla!” Duvurn yelled from the back, pounding his
fist against the wall.

“A minor Bauxen deity,” David clarified. “Of fertility.”

“Wenayla!”

Roan and Kel tried their best to ignore Duvurn. The computer
whined another negative, and Kel frowned. “Our sensors aren’t powerful enough
to detect a crowd of even thousand people. If there were millions clustered in
a city, maybe. But nothing besides apparent vegetation is reading.”

Nick shook his head. “Great. So we find a new planet and
nobody’s home. That’d be rich. I didn’t risk my life to come here and discover
the fifth alien species is a clump of moss.”

Something clasped onto Roan’s shoulder. Somewhat startled,
Roan looked back to see David wrapping a feathery talon around it. He was
leaning in to get a closer look at that planet out the cockpit windows.

“Actually, Mr. Roan, adding a planet full of unclassified
flora would benefit science greatly. You must get past your biases about
humanoid species being the only ones that matter. By expanding the definition
of life, the Four Civilizations have discovered many alien species, though none
that are bipedal or use complex language. Remember that on Iquelmus, the
Bauxens found bacteria living within the methane seas. In the Fortu System,
several moons have been confirmed to contain small rodents. And then there were
the Chickens of Orion, who did not survive the first five years of human colonization.”

“Be that as it may, David, I didn’t come all this way to
find a planet full of farting cattle. I came to find an intelligent species.
Someone we can relate to.”

“Wenayla!” Duvurn shouted again. “Wenayla, Wenayla, Wenayla!”

Roan glanced at David. “That
most
of us can relate to.”

 
Duvurn
continued. “As the richest person on this vessel, I demand naming rights!”

Roan had enough. He jabbed a finger through the hatchway at
Duvurn. “Listen! Until we ask these inhabitants what they call their world,
we’re calling it ‘Aaron’s Planet.’ ”

Duvurn said nothing. His mouth twisted into a wide, toothy
Bauxen scowl.

“It’s final, then,” Kel said.

“Where’s that wine?” Duvurn growled from behind them. The
Bauxen servant jumped from his awestruck daze and clattered out of sight to the
mess hall. Duvurn laughed, and Roan broke a smile as well. If there was any
occasion that merited a few glasses of port, it was this one. They’d just completed
the journey of two lifetimes.

It had been a relatively uneventful, and some might say
boring
, month. Since blasting out of
Bauxa, they’d detected no sign of any pursuers, or indeed space traffic of any
kind. They were heading to a dead region of space, where a lack of habitable
worlds and light years of cosmic dust had given commerce no reason to
penetrate. Kel snugly fit into her role as captain, and Roan volunteered for
the role of copilot. It was only natural, since the two had decided to reboot their
relationship.

Company policy is that the command structure of a ship
cannot be romantically intertwined, but they weren’t on a Company-sanctioned
mission, so to hell with that. At Kel’s insistence, the two made a point not to
rub it in the other’s faces, even going so far as to spend much of the workday
on opposite sides of the
Colobus
. But
as the weeks wore on, the two became more inseparable, taking dinner together
and all but abandoning their separate quarters. Roan had to admit he was
embarrassed when David mentioned he heard a bout of lovemaking one night and
asked if he could sit in once and observe (no).

The alien, though, had grown on Roan. They were swapping
stories about Aaron and science now. While the Nyden couldn’t convince the
cynical pilot there was something ethereal about the whole universe, Roan was
growing to tolerate his conversations more, and was perusing the ship’s
encyclopedic database for information about the Nyden culture.

Now the Bauxens were another story. The good Prince seemed fond
of barking orders and taking constitutionals in his quarters. Perhaps Duvurn’s
habits shouldn’t reflect on the whole Bauxen race, Roan reasoned. Most of the
other Bauxens had pitched in with maintenance and cooking, as well as other minor
duties. Instead, the Prince’s actions should speak to the lethargy of royal
entitlement.

After completing one orbit, Roan and Kel set the ship on
autopilot and followed the rest of the crew down to the mess hall for the
celebration. There wasn’t any rush to actually
fly
into the atmosphere so soon. Duvurn had gotten to the cafeteria
before them, and had several of his trademark wine glasses with spiral handles
laid out on the table before him.

Their atmosphere was jubilant. A Bauxen poured wine
liberally into the glasses. Some centuries-old tunes by the Earth artist
Ellington played over speakers. Most of the crew trickled down to the mess
eventually, even Moira. All were placing their trust in the autopilot and the
alarms that would sound in case anything untoward happened.

Not that they expected anything to, since they’d left all
trouble behind on Bauxa.

Duvurn held up a glass to Kel. “No word from the surface?”

“No communication of any kind.”

“Well, then…” He held up a glass of wine high above his
head, some of the liquid spilling out. “Some of you humans may not be familiar
with the Bauxen way of toasting. We are all familiar with it here!”
 
He repeated the line to some of the
Bauxens who didn’t speak English, and they laughed. “You see, on such a
momentous occasion as this, it is customary to drink as much as possible in
as little
a time as possible. That way,
by the time you’ve had enough, you appear twice as happy for the occasion as
you normally would.”

“Only twice?” Roan asked.

“It depends, I suppose.”
 
Duvurn moved the glass to his wide lips,
then stopped to survey his human hosts. “Please, take a glass. There is quite a
lot of Aginvio and we should finish it all.”

“That may not be the best idea,” Kel said, though she was
scooping up a glass as she did. “We don’t know what’s out there. Maybe we can
have a bigger celebration once we land on the planet.”

“Are you subverting my traditions?” Duvurn asked, though it
was evident that the good Prince was only teasing. He looked to his men, who
were waiting impatiently with their glasses and even spilling their liquid on
the mess hall’s linoleum. Since the humans did not appear to be especially keen
on this tradition, Duvurn waved his hand and his men began to down what was in
their glasses, finishing within seconds. Roan tasted some of the wine, then his
glass over to Duvurn, who was now struggling to uncork the next bottle. A
servant jumped in to complete that task while Duvurn finished Roan’s drink.

“Somehow I’m no longer thirsty,” Roan said, then moved with
Kel over to the mess hall window. The Planet was effulgent, bathing the room in
blue and green. Two continents were visible, locked together by a connection of
algae-green isthmuses. All the usual landforms seemed to crisscross their
jagged frames: dark mountains, topped with clouds; rivers leading into lakes
and the oceans; a desert bordering what appeared to be a series of steppes. It
was more verdant than any of the four planets in existence, save perhaps Nydaya,
and certainly more so than Earth. If it had any inhabitants at all, they
probably reveled in its beauty each day.

“It kind of makes you think of Eden, doesn’t it?” When Kel
said this, she rested her head on Roan’s shoulder.

“Eden? You talking about the place Christians believe in?”

“Yes, Nick,
of course
that’s what I meant. What we have before us is an unspoiled paradise. Think of
how beautiful it would be to see it up close.”

“A real utopia. Yeah.” Roan noticed rows of islands in the
ocean they were currently over, green and beautiful and tropical, and probably
much like the Garden of Eden he remembered hearing about. None, of this, of
course, settled the questions they came here to answer. Did the planet have
life? If so, how old was it? And did all other life in the galaxy originate
from here? Roan told himself not to worry about those questions at the moment,
and focus on the here and now. Beauty wasn’t going to give him any answers.

“Something wrong?” Kel asked. She rubbed her hand along
Roan’s back.

“Nothing. I’m just thinking: out of one hundred billion
planets in the galaxy, what are the chances we found the one that started it
all?”

David came up alongside the two, holding a glass of wine.
This surprised Roan, as he was sure the Nyden’s philosophy prevented him from
drinking.

“Oh no, this glass was not my idea,” David said, as if
sensing what Roan was thinking. “The Prince handed this to me and I took it. I
didn’t want to be rude. You know, he and his fellow Bauxens are on the road to
being quite intoxicated.”
 
Kel and
Roan glanced back at the table, and Duvurn was blabbering about something in
his own language, much to the delight of his fellow citizens. In his hand was a
bottle of wine, uncorked and full, no doubt soon to disappear. The human
crewmen were sitting at a table, far away, eyeing the group with a mixture of
shock and awe.

“Should we stop them?” Roan asked.

Kel laughed. “You want to tell the Prince he can’t drink? It’s
going to offend him.”

“Fine. But
he
’s
not going to be the one to make first contact with the natives. We’re not going
to screw this one up.”

“Excuse me, but when
do
we plan to make contact?” David inquired. He was leaning toward the two, and a
small stream of wine fell from his glass. Roan reached over and gently tipped
his glass up to avoid this, and David’s head swirled fallow in embarrassment.

“I figure we’ll do a few orbits, maybe for another twenty
minutes,” Kel said. “That’ll give whoever’s there a chance to contact us. If we
don’t hear anything, we’ll fly down to the surface and maybe land at a clearing
somewhere. We should be able to see if there are cities or villages during one
flyover—and if there are, we’ll land near one.”