The Filter Trap (39 page)

Dungeons awaited the tall ones on the polluted planet. Forced to do horrible things to each other, generations of pain blasted into the fragile human minds. The tall ones fought as gladiators for upturned stadia full of the squeaking bears, hanging from chairs that cupped them to the ceiling instead of cementing them to the floor. Such were the curious eccentricities of bearantula homeworld architecture.

Even less fortunate tall ones broadcast final messages to fellow captives before bearantula organs were grown inside and harvested from their immobilized bodies riddled with open sores only seen on Earth in industrial farming pens.

The bearantulas worked other tall ones to exhaustion to build muscle for harvesting, a strange delicacy on the rotting planet. Still more tall ones, forced to breed, screamed out at their reverse castration and rape. The bearantulas used the tall ones in the way humans might use cattle or plants; any economic benefit, no matter how deleterious to the host, no matter how miniscule the result, was explored and exploited.

Jill and Kam screamed for the images to stop. Their cries went ignored or unheard by the tall ones nearby.

‘Will this be our fate as well?’ they wondered when the barrage of horror finally ended.

More images brought a new revelation: the tall ones could read the bearantula language. They showed the humans images of the ship’s controls, the weapons storage, everything they knew about the ship in pictures, gleaned from generations of captivity and memory sharing.

“They want to revolt,” Kam guessed.

“Something’s missing,” Jill noted.

The information they shared seemed censored, as if another being had intercepted and muted important details.

“They’re taught to be pacifists,” Jill realized.

“They want us to do the fighting for them,” Kam added. “They see us as barbarians, the enemy of their enemy.”

“Tools for their escape,” Jill agreed.

Kam’s guess proved prophetic when coordinated visual maps arrived in the human skulls. Pictograms showed details about how many guards would escort them through and off the ship, and their capabilities and weaknesses. A preplanned route to escape repeated once per day until the ship arrived on the home planet of the tall ones.

Captivity gave the humans ample time to rehearse, trusting the tall ones implicitly, without other recourse. The tall ones instilled hope in the humans for a fate better than the slave dungeons of Tua’Goagh, the rough translation in the mind-tongue of the bearantula home world.

The mind-tongue had no speakable name for the tall ones’ home world, just the feeling of warmth or comfort. After weeks in transit, the tall ones communicated this feeling to the humans as they drew near to the home world. For many tall ones born in captivity the feeling was not of a longing for home, but excitement of a new life. That life hinged on the actions of the soldiers who waited for their chance to implement the plan their lives also depended on.

When the humans asked about their own home, the request fell on deaf minds. The tall ones neither knew of the Earth, more than they gleaned from exploring their fellow captives, nor cared. The need for freedom was an overwhelming desire. For their part, the human captives didn’t force the issue. Slavery, a scar on human development not so far in the rearview mirror, forced their longing for Earth to the back seat.

They had other reasons too, the most plainly obvious being their total reliance on the escape plans of the tall ones. Even if it worked, the humans would be on an alien world-the tall ones’ world. They would need their help, maybe even to breathe. The thoughts of getting back to Earth became a distant wish that could only be explored after more immediate dangers were extinguished.

The tall ones were right: not more than a day after they projected the feeling of home, the bearantulas strapped the humans down and shrunk the holding cells. Within hours, gravity pushed organs to the ceiling as the ship fell. Gradually, the descent slowed and discomfort decreased to a level of barely perceptible movement.

Just as before, their restrictions snapped off as the cells came back to life. An hour after the cells were fully formed and depressurized, the walls opened and the humans, Lee included, were reunited.

“Set to go on the major’s command,” one of the soldiers whispered near Lee.

“They may hear you,” she whispered back.

“They don’t speak English,” the soldier replied.

“They understand more than you know,” Kam told them. “The tall ones shared with me what they know. They’re highly intelligent, but only investigate what they can twist to their advantage. Speaking our language will only seem advantageous if we use it to plot against them, otherwise they look at us like chattering baboons. We must keep silent.”

“Right, just like you’re doing,” a soldier pointed out.

“Watch for my sign,” Amanda uttered, and the group said nothing further as the bearantulas came into the room to collect their captives, preparing them for the long march that the tall ones foretold.

The tall ones marched alongside the humans, towering over them by nearly three body heights. All of the bipedal captives wore white garments vacuum sealed onto their bodies. The soldiers felt naked, not because their new “clothes” left so little to the imagination, but because the process stripped all their hidden weapons away.

The tentative first breaths outside worried everyone. The tall ones thrived in an oxygen-rich atmosphere, though less dense than Earth’s. The humans could breathe, but the concentration of dioxygen brought brief feelings of euphoria that confused everyone. The tall ones too were unprepared, having breathed the manicured pollution of their captors since birth. Temporary fits of laughter broke out, sparking chittering from the bearantulas, who prodded the giants to stay in formation, used their long arms to prod the humans in turn.

The tall ones struggled with a loss of dexterity similar to the humans in the lower-than-Earth gravity. It was a troubling sight to the humans, realizing their escape plans were drawn up by beings who may never have visited their own planet, which brought certain disabilities. Cut off from their planet for generations, how accurate could their information about this place be? Did anyone still live here?

A new fear gripped Amanda. ‘What if they have no idea where we’re going? What if the ruins they showed with the mind-tongue are long gone?’ Even worse, she wondered if the tall ones that they’d assumed would welcome refugees would be in league with the enemy. Much must have changed since these captives’ ancestors left their home planet.

The tall ones heard Amanda’s worry and reassured her. The mind-tongue consisted more of imagery than letters or symbols, adapting in a way relative to conversational speaking.

“Do not fear,” the oldest tall one spoke silently to them. “If the old ways have been followed, we will be welcomed and you will be most revered. There is a place of hiding that the—” and here it was that the language broke down, and an image of pure hatred and anger was conceptualized to represent their captors—“do not know about. I know the way, just do as we have taught you.”

“Thank you,” Amanda thought, and was unsure from the lack of a response if the tall ones had the capability for understanding human gratitude.

The ship sat in what used to be a forest beyond the borders of the familiar black filth that grew from the blast radius of the landing craft. The bearantulas trotted their captives across the black surface toward the jungle. Machines cleared an old passageway through tall trees resembling centuries-old sequoias on Earth. Tall weeds peppered the path below.

In the distance, a stone outcropping peeked over the treetops with carvings of the tall ones in ceremonial robes making offerings to something. At least this part of the plan was foretold correctly: the stone building was a large city center in the time of the captive tall ones. They’d guessed the bearantulas would take them there first, as there were many rooms which could be used to keep them captive until needed. Needed for what, or why the bearantulas needed so badly to come back to this planet was still a mystery that either the tall ones couldn’t solve, or were afraid to share with the humans.

When they breached the forest wall it was time to act.

“Now!” appeared in all the human minds simultaneously.

The Bearantulas assumed the submissive tall ones would keep newer captives in line. That confidence left them vulnerable, foregoing their weapons for simple commands barked at the tall ones.

The tall ones, probably much more intelligent than humans, did the math over the course of years, or perhaps centuries. They knew that in the gravity of their home world, a sprint could outpace the strength of the bearantula lasers. Precision weapons can be a liability in a rainforest that extends a mile into the sky. The bearantulas put their faith not in their superior weaponry, but on subservience, the one thing their captives were about to exploit.

As planned, the humans ran diagonal to the marching group. Also as planned, the bearantulas, lumbering on all fours, didn’t notice for several seconds, since the taller captives blocked their view. When the tall ones took off, the bearantulas stood and chattered in confusion, before bounding after them. They’d never seen anything like this in generations of the tall ones’ captivity; they were assumed to be born submissive, when they’d really only been waiting for the right opportunity to escape.

As the tall ones foretold, the bearantulas couldn’t grow laser accessories and keep pace with the larger, faster organisms. To stand on two legs and attempt to run was a hopeless exercise for the stockier, shorter aliens.

The tall ones could have left the humans far behind, their muscular legs propelling them in the thinner gravity to great leaps. Their human counterparts were limited to the hopping speed they’d all seen of astronauts on the Moon. The fauna, too, took to the air, with plants not sprouting into leaves and flowers below five feet. Under that height all that was left were trunks and deep auburn soil. The most prominent animals above looked like hairless cats sporting webbing between their lateral limbs, shrieking as they flapped to the next tree limb.

Kam wondered why the tall ones had ever come down from the trees at all. On this world things that flew through the air were more akin to colorful bats and lizards than birds. The only biomass large enough to hollow out their bones and adopt feathers skipped much higher in the treetops; eagle-like animals the size of cows soared in the upper topiary, barking at the commotion below.

“We’re giving them quite a meal by rustling up all the smaller animals,” one of the tall ones spoke to the humans in mind-tongue.

“They look big enough to eat
us,
too,” Lee said.

“They would if they could get low enough.”

Kam realized it was the mass of the creatures, evolved at the higher altitude, which kept them from descending; if they dropped too low the gravity would pass a tipping point, dragging them to the floor to never return. Descending from the trees gave the tall ones an evolutionary advantage with fewer predators and an overabundance of plant life to eat. Perhaps they were vegetarians.

The tree leaves sizzled nearby.

“They’ve grown the heat rays,” the mind-tongue whispered with urgency. “We must hurry.”

For a tense few minutes the group became acutely aware of tree roots snapping and creatures sliding apart nearby. The same weapons the bearantulas had used on the Earth battlefield pulsed through the forest, where they caused more collateral damage. Falling trees and diving cow-bats proved deadly obstacles.

The tall ones made a turn through the forest so abrupt most of the soldiers had to circle back.

“Keep up,” the voice in their minds urged before it transmitted a raw emotion. The humans had trouble translating, but when they caught up with the tall ones they had no need. They too were awestruck by the sight.

In front of them, with trees growing through it and vines slinking along its sides, was a small ship. The craft’s sleek angles slid into deeper grooves on the sides seeming to start and never end, winding around to the other side. It looked like a twisted curling of carbon fiber, an industrial accident in a hypercar factory in Italy. But it was bigger than a car, at least three times that size. Surely a cockpit made for something bigger.

“Yours?” Amanda asked the tall ones.

An elder tall one approached the craft, putting a gentle hand on it, closing its eyes to concentrate, then shared what it saw. The ship, designed by the telekinetic tall ones, possessed its own mind touch.

Evident from the growth in and around the ship, the memories were old, but the vision was clear and immediate. Inside the stylized cockpit a young tall one sat, while behind him two copilots or perhaps gunners, steadied themselves. The viewpoint of the memory kept switching between the three beings. It was unknown if the elder one was parsing all three memories and selecting the best or if the ship had recorded the memories in such a way on its own.

The ship flew low over the treetops, cow-bats cooing just below. What first seemed to be the glow of the Sun on the horizon filled the three beings with despair. A great ship at the edge of the forest belched flame. The ship bore the same unending black coating of the Mojave Desert installation, but otherwise remained quite different.

Other small speeder ships joined to form a barricade, occasionally burning and tumbling into the trees. An earlier, less sophisticated version of the bearantula’s bodyborne laser shot speeders from the sky. The speeders swarmed in on the gargantuan black alien ship and opened fire. Just as on Earth, their projectile weapons did nothing to the energy-absorbing black disguise that the bearantula ship wore.

At the edges of the horizon, just beyond the towering black mass, the top of the statues on the ancient stone building stood out to the memory watchers. From this angle the contents of the ceremonial offering appeared to be skulls of the tall ones. The humans assumed the macabre monument must have been in appreciation of life in the same way that the Mexican Day of the Dead appropriates the human skull. Here too, flowers accompanied the skulls, with blooms of a type never rendered by Earth horticulturists.

A heat gun hit the speeding ship and caught the tall ones in the back in a blaze. The view continued from the pilot's recollection only, his companions presumably deceased. The remembrance was so clear, so real, that the humans felt the heat on their backs. They felt terror too, as the young pilot desperately pulled up on the controls with giant, long-fingered hands. The ship crashed into the forest; the pilot’s final memory a tree branch thrusting through the front and spearing him to the roof.

The vision over, the humans seemed more affected by the death than the tall one.

“This was of the coming,” the mind-tongue spoke. “When our ancestors were captured.”

‘So they
do
have technology here,’ Jill thought. ‘We may get back home yet.’

The elder tall one motioned for the group to head deeper into the forest. “Come, they will find us soon.”

“How long ago was that battle?” Amanda asked.

“The last coming was generations ago.”

None of the tall ones turned to indicate who had spoken in mind-tongue.

“How many generations?” another soldier asked.

“Slaves are not afforded the tools for genealogy,” another mind-tongue returned bitterly.

The humans were surprised by the tall ones’ ability to convert their imagery into such specific English meaning. But, they supposed the study of ancestry was the same for any intelligent procreating species, and the naming of the word had happened in the human mind after what the mind-tongue had used as a representation of meaning. It was in this fashion that the tall ones could communicate in other languages very quickly without bothering to learn them.

‘Imagine if we’d had one of these guys in Afghanistan . . .’ Amanda thought to herself. “Why did the bearantulas not come back?”

Images of the thick brown air flashed again. Transport vessels shot over deep caverns with trickles of dark liquid flowing in the far valleys. Skeletons of whale-sized creatures littered the shores of the waterways of Tua’Goagh.

Views shifted from being to being, all captives in bearantula operations. Through grimy windows the sky opened up, pouring rain in a maelstrom that seemed commonplace on the roiling dark planet. The buildings were reinforced for storms and harsh weather, as shivering tall ones erected girders and dams ever higher against encroaching flood waters. Others operated massive water reclamation facilities while more were bred for food as the native life on Tau’Goagh perished.

The bearantulas suffered too. Some unknown illness, combined with their reliance on slave labor, slowed their technological development. The black molecules that could build, absorb, create, and repel energy became their last great triumph for science before more militaristic attitudes acclimated society to one of survival by brute force.

“They couldn’t get back here without water,” Kam noted.

The tall ones beamed in agreement, and veiled contempt. After all, it was the sudden appearance of the Earth in the solar system that allowed the bearantulas access to the tall ones’ home world once again. The humans were their ticket home, but also perhaps their species’ doom.

“But how did they do it?” Jill asked. “It doesn’t make sense. The bearantulas stopped their technological development when they started using slave labor, they haven’t even developed artificial intelligence, but yet they can move a whole planet through the galaxy instantaneously?”

For the first time the tall ones sent images of confusion. Indeed, the topic confounded their minds as well. Surely their elders on the home planet held answers. Perhaps it was their own kind that brought the humans here, a final catalyst to rid the system of the bearantulas and free their long-lost relatives. Racial memory told of a gathering place below the temples where the elders may still congregate.

“You are too slow,” a tall one said to the humans.

Before any of them could protest, the gangly arms of the tall ones reached down and placed the humans on their long, gaunt backs.

Without the need to slow for the human gait, the tall ones leaped through the forest with speed that could outrun a cheetah back on Earth. The bearantulas had lost the trail, helpless to follow such speed with their stubby limbs. Surely they doubled back to get speeders of their own, the kind Amanda battled against in Operation Cold Flash in Los Angeles. She wondered if the tall ones here had anything like the heavy artillery needed to bring one of those black-bottom speeders down. Either the tall ones weren’t reading her thoughts or they didn’t know either, for they did not address it.

A few more tight turns later and white stone shone through the tree trunks. They approached a great structure, not so different from the grainy satellite telescope photo Pith showed Kam and Jill under the Rocky Mountains. The scientists wondered if the president would see this soon and know they’d survived. Maybe no one survived. For all they knew the bearantulas might have left some new bacterium on the Earth that gobbled up all the animals. There may not be a living Earth for them to return to. Perhaps if the tall ones were still here they could focus one of those repeating message-beaming satellites in orbit at the Earth.
If
they were still here at all.

They passed over stone steps at the feet of high statues, crumbling to ruin atop a city-sized pyramid. Their tall guides quickly found a passageway between grand, arched columns that led deeper into the dark. The ruins seemed completely abandoned and the humans grew fearful they were approaching a dead-end, for their escape and for the tall ones’ species.

‘You can see in the dark?’ Jill thought.

The tall ones shared her assumption with the other humans before pausing to answer it as they glided through the lightless passages.

“We navigate by the memories passed down from those who once lived here, before the ‘bearantulas’ arrived.”

“These passageways were lit then?” Jill asked aloud, so the tall ones needn't repeat it.

“No. The memory of the way was passed down from the original builders.”

With each step the way became darker, but the air somehow fresher. They started to smell food sensitive to the human palate, vegetables of unknown savor and charred meat.

Amanda fought her natural distrust of the tall ones. How long and how well would they keep this alliance? The tall ones had their freedom, for what purpose did they need the humans now? It seemed their only value was a temporary distraction for their captors; after that, the humans became a burden. She realized, as they clambered down the unlit tunnels, that it would be near impossible for the soldiers to climb out of such a place. If these tall aliens had a taste for human meat, what then?

Reacting to the thought, the one who carried Amanda stopped.

Amanda shuddered. ‘So you
can
hear all my thoughts!’

“Your thoughts are . . . unwise.”

There was hesitation there, something blotted out again.

“You are safe with us now.”

“Were we not safe with you before?” Lee asked aloud.

“You are our allies in this fight,” the mind assured them. “The elders must agree.”

“Can’t you talk to them now?” a soldier asked. “You’re home, right?”

“They are shielding their minds from us,” one of the tall ones flashed. “As they have shielded their entire presence since the invasion.”