Earth Man (8 page)

This time the voice was not in Danny
’s head, it came out of the ape-like face of the biggest and oldest of the creatures.

“
What are you?” Danny asked quietly.

The creatures looked at each other but did not respond.

YOU ARE THE VISHNU JESUS. WE ARE HERE TO GUIDE YOU. YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN.

“
Chosen for what? What do you want from me?”

YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO SAVE YOUR WORLD, YOUR KIND.

This time it was the female that spoke, her voice only slightly higher pitch than the others.

“
From those things, right? But how?” Danny pleaded.

WE HAVE GIVEN YOU GREAT POWER. GREAT RESPONSIBILITY.

“I don’t want it. Why me? Why do I have to do this?”

WHY NOT?

This time it was the small one that spoke but when Danny looked at it the creature turned away shyly. Its voice had a child-like quality to it and he spoke faster than the others.

Something was not right.
As much as Danny believed what he was seeing, something told him it was wrong. The first time they had appeared to him on a ship as aliens, now all of a sudden they were creatures of nature. It was almost as if they were changing to please him. Or he was changing them. He also found it strange that he had no fear of the creatures at all; they seemed familiar and somehow even comforting.

“
What if I say no? What if I walk away right now?” Danny said.

The creatures began to gnash their teeth and claws, stomping on the ground so hard that Danny almost lost his balance.
He had figured it out, even though he didn’t quite realize it, he knew what was wrong.

“
Nothing you say makes sense. Not really. Who are you? What are you? Where are from?”

HERE. WE ARE FROM INSIDE.

“Inside what? Where is here? Right here?”

YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN.

“Then I quit.”

THEN WE WILL EAT YOU UP!

The creature with the bald eagle head snapped its beak at him menacingly and Danny burst out laughing.

‘
This is all fake, isn’t it? All of this. The aliens, the ship, the voice? You guys, the animorphs, whatever the hell you want to call this? All of this is in my head.’

Danny
had not said the words out loud but still the leader of the creatures responded.

YES.

‘That’s all this has been about? I’m losing my mind. This is just me going nuts. The red light, the noise, everything, it’s all been in my head.’

Danny threw up his arms and
began to spin around like a madman. The three large monsters begin to disappear, merging back into the darkness of the trees. Only the ape-faced elder remained, shoulders slumped by age or sadness or perhaps both.

YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN DANNY. THE DANGER I
S REAL.

The monster held out a large bear paw and a small black cloud formed on its open palm.

A THREAT TO EARTH AND ALL LIFE IS HERE.

Foul, deformed faces took shape in the cloud including the mutating face of the homeless man from the hospital.

“What is that? What is threat you keep talking about?” Danny said out loud.

The giant creature began to shrink suddenly, closing its hand
so that the cloud vanished. Its horns became smaller, its face and body became more human-like, the bear fur pulled back inside to reveal dark brown flesh. When it was finished it stood only six feet, the same height as Danny.

IT HAS NO NAME OF ITS OWN. IN YOUR LANGUAGE, IN OUR LANGUAGE, IT WOULD BE CALLED THE CANCER GROWTH. THEY ARE THE DESTROYERS, THE CORRUPTORS.

It reached out and placed a hand on Danny’s shoulder.

YOU HAVE NO
T GONE MAD. YOU HAVE SIMPLY STEPPED THROUGH A DOORWAY INTO THE BIGGER UNIVERSE. THE TRUE UNIVERSE.

“
Who are you?”

I AM ALL THINGS.
I AM YOU.

“
You don’t look like me.”

YOU DON
’T LOOK LIKE YOU.

Danny p
ulled away, recoiling from the creature.

“
Of course, I never realized it before but you’re just plucking words out of my head, aren’t you? All that religious talk, the strange sentences, it’s all just nonsense my brain is throwing back at me, isn’t it? I can feel you in there, scratching at the back of my brain.”

WE ARE THE SAME DANNY. I AM TRYING TO WARN YOU.

“Warn me? Of this Growth thing? It’s a little late for that. One of them already CHOPPED MY FUCKING ARM OFF!”

YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN.

“By who? Who chose me?”

THAT WHICH WE HAVE DESIGNATED
‘SHE’ HAS AWAKENED. SHE WHO IS KNOWN AS EARTH WILL SPEAK WITH YOU NOW.

Suddenly the creature stepped forward and embraced Danny, the horns pressing against his sh
aggy hair. When it released him, it blinked its black eyes and shook its head.

“
I wish we had been better prepared,” it said.

It spoke with a human voice for the first time and Danny was s
hocked into silence. As the creature turned away from him he felt something at the back of his mind. Like a shadow something was hovering behind him, towering over him, so large he could feel the weight of it. Turning his head, the Earth revealed itself to him in all its glory and he collapsed.

From the moment
Danny had stepped out of the car on the day of the hunting trip, his brain had been preparing itself. From the red light in the woods to the wild things he’d just met, all of it was just a warm-up to the images he was now being bombarded with. Information was downloading into his brain at a superhuman speed, the entire history of the living planet called Earth. Not only was ‘she’ sharing her history with him, but she was sharing the history of the universe. It was not the life on the planets that the universe had been created for, it was the planets themselves. The planets were the children of the Big Bang with stars serving as their guardians, nurturing and providing for them as best they could. Their level of sentience was beyond human understanding, they did not ‘think’ or ‘feel’ yet they experienced the universe in as joyful and painful a way as humanity. All of the universe was a nursery for the developing planets, the creatures who lived on their surface did so with all the importance of ticks on a dog.

             
It had begun in the darkness, when all existence was a realm of pain and corruption and nothing good could form. All things change and even evil could not rule forever, not even in a universe without time. The old, dark universe collapsed under its own weight and from its death came a light, a spark that ignited the potential of a new existence. The new universe was born in a Big Bang and with its birth came the concept of life. As the stars began to settle into their orbits they began to attract and compress matter which then formed into new planets. Inside the light of the new universe was HOPE, precious and precariously balanced on the edge of time and space. In that balance the idea of good and evil formed. Hope’s fragility gave all things in the universe a meaning for their existence.

The planets carried a sentience within them, a small developing form of consciousness much like that of a
n unborn child. More importantly though they carried in them something that had not existed in any of the previous incarnations of the universe; they carried a piece of universal hope within them. With a stable orbit and a nurturing star, the planets became sentient individuals, with a greater population spread throughout the galaxy than all the people on Earth. Like humans, each was different and unique in their own way. Some remained barren, lonely rocks with no interest in changing their natural formation. Others created massive chemical changes inside themselves which gave them atmospheres and elemental deposits of various colors and hues. Some created life that lived and died symbiotically with them, while other life forms moved on, only remembering their home world as footnote in history. The lives of the planets spanned millions of years and when they died their bodies served as their own tombstones Eventually the parent star would collapse and the cycle would began anew.

             
Visions floated through his mind, drifting him comfortably through history. From the beginning explosion known as the Big Bang to the formation of his own solar system, Danny watched it all as if he sat in space.

Two planets around our Sun formed water, the rarest and most delicate element of all. He saw Mars struggle to hold on
to its water, creating life that ended in misery when the liquid evaporated. As it dried up, Mars pulled back into itself and went to sleep. On Earth the water took hold and turned the planet blue, so blue that it could be seen from space. The Earth was proud of itself and when life sprang from its precious liquid it felt complete. Danny could feel the planets pride at what it had done. Water was so abundant on Earth yet so rare an idea to the other worlds. With that life giving liquid the planet experimented with a diversity of different life forms, channelling its own living energy into the different branches of evolution.

Danny also saw
other things in glimpses, barely more than raw flashes of imagery from the farthest reaches of space where the light ended and the forever darkness began. The planets on the fringe grew without love or comfort. The evil that had ruled over the old universe still hid in the edges of creation. It could not manifest itself in another reality, its time had passed and it could not touch another realm directly. It was a stain, a black smear left over from the time before the Big Bang. The shadow’s very presence was enough to corrupt anything that came too close; Danny could feel the Earth’s fear of it.

On a world ten thousand times the size of the Earth a simple bacteria grew on the side of
a massive mountain.  Each time the planet’s orbit brought it into contact with the membrane of the universe, each time it grazed the darkness, the bacteria grew larger. The slow caress of evil at the edge of the universe rotted the planet, forming the Growth on the surface with each rotation of the sick planet’s orbit. It was nothing more than evil seeds, growing with each passing year. Eventually it spread across the entire face of the planet, covering every inch of it until the life force inside was suffocated. That world was home to the earliest incarnation of the Growth and on its own it was only a simple bacterium, virtually powerless. If not for random chance the Growth would have died eventually when its home planet crumbled to dust. The corpse of its world began to crumble, its gravity collapsing as it broke into hundreds of massive pieces. For a hundred thousand years the planet fell out of orbit, pulling away from the edge of the universe. Eventually the remnants fell into a nearby star but before it was incinerated it spread itself through spores into nearby solar systems. The bacteria could live even in the vacuum of space and through the destruction and distance between worlds it waited patiently.

The Growth was nothing more than a sentie
nt fungus; it did not have the ability to grow beyond that, not until it came into contact with other life forms. To the Growth living DNA was malleable and changeable; the flesh of other living things could be controlled. The tiny spores infected the bodies of other living creatures and used their own genetic advantages to further their own biological imperative. It did not matter if the aliens were made of iron or water, the spores would infect them eventually and immediately change them into a suitable host by mutating and controlling them. Any living thing with DNA was a puppet to be controlled by the Growth.

Once all life on
an infected world was part of their collective they would destroy the planet, the explosion spreading their spores farther into space. The planets tried to defend themselves the only way they could; by creating life. A hero was chosen on every world to stop the spread of the Growth, someone who the planet believed could save it. Some heroes won and purged their world of the taint. Others, far too many, failed and were consumed, corrupted and eventually destroyed. The death of the protector meant that world had fallen, for their flesh too would become part of the Growth. The bigger the planet, the more evolved the technology, the farther the Growth could spread itself. The Earth was proud of its diverse life and it did not hesitate in choosing its defender. Just as the living planet knew that the aliens had reached it, it also chose Danny to protect it. There was no reason given as to why, perhaps it was random chance, the Earth was not saying either way.

             
Danny opened his eyes and took a deep breath. The sun blinded him but it was warm and comforting on his skin. The wind stirred the grass and it brushed gently against his face and he decided to lay there a minute longer and enjoy it. All the stress and fear he’d felt the last few days was gone. Although his head hurt and his legs were sore he felt better than he’d ever felt before. There was no urgency to move, nothing more important at that moment than watching the grass sway in the wind. With his eyes closed he could almost feel the planet moving through space beneath him. His mind had been opened to see the larger picture, the bigger universe that existed. Earth was more than just a home; it was the birthplace of all mankind. Knowing how unique the diversity of Earth’s life was, knowing there was other life out there, gave him a feeling of intense joy. Humanity was no longer alone and while there was great danger, he liked feeling as if he was part of something grand and impossible.