Xenophobia (31 page)

“Look at the turns and folds, the crevasses and channels,” Bower said, pointing at the living, pulsating mass before them. “There’s structure here, an interconnected network much like a human brain.”

Again, a pulse drove the floater higher. The pulses were coming more regularly now, every ten seconds or so. Bower found she had to watch her footing as each pulse drove so hard she had to fight from falling to the ground.

She could see through the semi-transparent membrane out across the indistinct ocean. Clouds dotted the horizon in the distance, but along with the sea they appeared tinted purple through the skin of the bladder. The muted shades reminded her of the view through a pair of designer sunglasses.

The floater was already well above a cluster of fluffy clouds drifting with the wind. Bower tried to recall the different types of clouds and the various heights at which they drifted, but all she could remember was that cumulus were white and puffy, like a pinch of cotton wool, while cirrus clouds looked like a streak of white paint daubed on the sky.

The craft passed through fine wisps of vapor, cirrus clouds barely visible as smudges against the darkening beyond. They had to be somewhere around twenty thousand feet up. To one side, the coast of Africa appeared as a long, jagged line on the horizon.

Elvis didn’t seem too bothered by the pulsing thrust of the alien spacecraft. Bower followed him as he walked around the sloping brain cavity to the front of the alien vessel. There, facing forward, was a set of seats.

“What the hell do you make of these, Doc?”

Bower blinked a couple of times at the sight, trying to process what she was seeing. The seats looked man-made. The sharp lines, repeating square shapes, and straight tubular frame were out of place within the organic structure. Bower wondered if they had been ripped from the fuselage of an aircraft. The dull grey frame supported a row of ten military cargo seats, seemingly identical to those in the Osprey.

Bower was struggling to walk, her knees were on the verge of buckling beneath the pulses. Every five seconds the craft surged higher.

Elvis examined the thin, canvas padding on the seat, the seatbelt and buckle.

“Looks new.”

“Looks deliberate,” Bower replied, dropping down into one of the seats, relieved to rest her legs as another pulse thrust the craft higher.

Elvis sat down, but he appeared more relaxed, intrigued perhaps.

“You think they got these from the Osprey?”

“The design, maybe,” Bower replied. “Stella must have figured we would think this was comfortable.”

“Damn,” Elvis replied. “We should have demanded an upgrade to First Class.”

Bower was struggling for breath now the floater pulsed every two to three seconds. Above them, they could see the massive bladder being drawn back into the body of the craft.

They were seated at the blunt end of the living alien vessel, with just a thin membrane in front of them. Cirrus clouds soared low beneath them. The curvature of Earth was apparent, as was the darkening sky.

“Just like the seats on a roller-coaster,” Elvis said.

“Yeah, just like a roller-coaster,” Bower replied, pulling the seatbelt harness over her shoulders. “Only this roller-coaster is passing through fifty thousand feet.”

Elvis laughed.

The pulsating thrust continued to increase in tempo, driving them on several times a second. Finally, the pulses merged, becoming indistinguishable and the thrust became continuous. Bower felt like an elephant was sitting on her chest. She took short breaths, trying not to hyperventilate. Her arms felt like lead weights beside her, while her neck and head were pushed back into the headrest.

Bower felt light-headed. She focused on clenching her arms and legs, trying to use her muscles to keep the blood from rushing away from her head.

She could feel her body being propelled onward, accelerating upward. Her face felt stretched, her cheeks pinned back, and still the alien vessel thrust them on.

Suddenly, the pulsating engines eased and Bower felt like she was going over the top of a roller-coaster and plunging down the far side. Her eyes were shut. She didn’t want to look. She had to look. She opened her eyes and saw Earth curving beneath her, stretching out as smooth as a bowling ball.

“Oh, dear God,” Elvis mumbled.

At first, Bower didn’t notice the physical change around her, but she was no longer anchored to the seat. She was so distracted by the sensation of falling that all other considerations faded. This was worse than jumping out of a plane with a parachute. She couldn’t even begin to tell herself everything was going to be all right. Bower felt as though she was plunging down an elevator shaft or falling from a skyscraper, falling in a dream, a nightmare from which she desperately wanted to wake. In the darkness of night, she kept waiting to hit the ground, but the ground never came.

Even in retrospect, Bower couldn’t identify whether the view around them changed smoothly or abruptly, all she knew was once there had been an alien spacecraft, now there was nothing, nothing between her and the dark void of space.

Elvis had his eyes shut, she remembered that, but the alien spacecraft had disappeared. Whereas before the alien membrane in front of their seats had given her a tinted view of reality, now she could see clearly.

The horizon ran in an arc before her, cutting through the darkness, separating the night below from the pitch black of space. It would take her some time to get used to having no fixed point of orientation, but initially she thought the planet was on an angle, sloping away steeply to her right. That she was slowly turning wasn’t apparent at first.

A hazy blue line traced the horizon, revealing how perilously thin Earth’s atmosphere was as seen from orbit. The gently curving planet looked serene. What little she could see in the darkness looked flattened, as though there were no elevation, no mountains or valleys.

Clouds and coastlines curved with the planet, catching her eye not because they were familiar, but because they looked stretched and elongated. A mesh of lights lit up a city off to one side and Bower wondered where they were relative to the various major cities on Earth.

She felt small.

The pitch black of space was ominous, foreboding. Even the stars seemed further away, which didn’t make sense to her, and yet there they were, static pin-pricks of light fighting off the eternal darkness.

Bower clenched at the straps running over her shoulders. Her knuckles were white with terror. She looked at Elvis. He’d opened his eyes and was staring straight ahead, trying not to look at anything in particular.

“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck,” he repeated silently to himself.

It was only as she was looking at him she realized there was no seat beneath either of them. The straps she thought she was holding onto were the bunched folds of her own clothes. Bower put her hand down, wanting to touch the stiff, hard cushion beneath her, but her fingers grasped at nothing.

She was floating freely in space.

In her initial panic, she turned only to find she kept turning. Bower twisted the other way, trying to stabilize herself.

She watched as her hands floated up before her, drifting as though they had a mind of their own. Bower felt as though she were swimming, floating in deep water. Her body naturally moved into a neutral, fetus position, with her thighs out in front of her.

She breathed deeply, calming herself. She had drifted to one side and couldn’t see Elvis, but she could hear him still cursing under his breath.

“Hey,” she said.

Bower wanted to add something else but she was at a loss as to what. She was disoriented physically, mentally and emotionally, unsure quite what to think as the stars rolled past her blurred vision.

With each motion, the horizon shifted. Any notion of up and down dissolved. She reached out with her hands, stretching out her legs, trying to steady herself. If a skater could spin faster by drawing in their limbs, she sought to slow her motion by extending hers. Her heart was racing. She needed to calm down.

A hand rested on her shoulder, turning her gently to one side.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Elvis said, and she could hear him trying to suppress a gag reflex.

“Try to look at something in the distance,” she said. “Just like at sea. Try not to move.”

Elvis didn’t answer. He looked pale.

“Breathe slowly, and keep your eyes on some fixed point.”

Typical bloody doctor, she thought, great advice for someone else, but never advice you’ll take yourself. Bower turned slowly, trying not to subject herself to any quick motion. She tried to pick a point in the distance, but everything was in motion. She too was struggling with the urge to vomit. A sickening feeling welled up within her stomach. It felt as though her insides had become unhinged. Not only did her hands and legs float freely but so did her innards.

Elvis couldn’t help himself. He vomited. The contents of his stomach sprayed outward in a thick stream. Bower expected his spew to arc, but it projected in a straight line.

His stomach muscles contracted and he spewed again. Bower noticed he was drifting away from her. She reached out, grabbing at his loose shirt.

The sick continued to drift away. Bower watched, wanting to see what it would hit, but it simply kept going as though there were no boundary, no wall enclosing them, and yet that wasn’t possible.

Elvis wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Small drops of spew floated before him. The smell got to her, making her feel green. She couldn’t appreciate how remarkable it was to see fluids floating there undulating in globules of various sizes.

“I don’t understand,” Elvis said. “What’s happening?”

“Ah,” Bower began. “It appears we’re in orbit.”

“Where are they? Where’s Stella?”

“I don’t know,” she replied.

As she gazed into the distance, the spew faded from sight, drifting out into space. Distances were impossible to judge, but she figured she lost sight of it somewhere around a fifty yards.

“Are we still in the floater?” Elvis asked.

“I don’t know,” Bower replied.

“How can this be?” Elvis asked. “If we were in space, we’d die. There’s no air.”

“At a guess,” she said, “I’d say they’ve given us front-row seats and are distorting our view. They probably think they’re honoring us with a unique experience.”

“I’ll take a tin can any day,” Elvis replied.

Earth looked majestic, not that Bower could appreciate it as she struggled with the sense of disorientation coming from her swirling inner ear.

As they moved out of the shadows and into the light of a new day, they could see the alien mothership looming large hundreds of miles above the Pacific Ocean so serene below. Sunlight caught the underside of the organic vessel. What had looked like fine cilia from the ground were gigantic tubular growths protruding below the craft, casting shadows along what Bower assumed was the hull. Fat fingers, sprang to mind, and Bower found herself wondering about their function, not in a mechanical sense, but from a biological perspective.

The alien vessel rotated slowly along the length of its axis.

“That’s not a spaceship,” Elvis said softly, and Bower nodded.

As they passed beneath the craft, traveling along the length of the alien vessel, Bower felt as though she were looking at a bacterium under an electron-scanning microscope, only this bacterium radiated color. Like a beetle’s shell, the colors shifted with the light reflecting off the seemingly oily surface.

Below them, the curvature of Earth looked out of place. Whereas before they had been held spellbound by the sunlight reflecting off the azure blue waters of the Pacific, now the ocean seemed distant, as though it were incorporeal, a figment of their imagination.

The jagged coastline of South America came into view, with dark streaks of lifeless desert and rugged snow-capped mountains giving way to lush green forests, and yet their eyes were transfixed by the alien creature.

Creature, yes, thought Bower, Elvis was right. This was no spaceship, it was alive. There were no steel panels, no portholes or blinking lights. As if in response to her thoughts, Elvis murmured.

“How does this thing work? There’s no machinery, no rocket engines or engine bells, no heat shields or fuel tanks.”

“Nope,” was all Bower could muster in response, mesmerized by the dangling alien structures sailing by above them. For some reason, they reminded her of tonsils, or perhaps they were an enlarged version of the tiny papillae covering the tongue? Whatever these structures were, they had the chaotic mesh of life about them rather than the clinical, deliberate placement of mechanical parts.

The floater should have prepared them for this sight, but the sheer size of the alien vessel defied the imagination, and yet it was no vessel, not in any sense they had ever known. This was a living organism on a scale that dwarfed life on Earth. Was it a hundred miles long, two hundred miles?

They skimmed beneath the creature, in awe of the living structure drifting lazily above the thin blue atmosphere of Earth.

“How big is this thing?” Elvis asked.

“She’s bigger than either Switzerland or Belgium,” Bower replied. “Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, take your pick.”

“In US speak?”

“Ah,” Bower said, not taking her eyes off the craft as she added, “at a guess, I’d say bigger than Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, maybe even Vermont... I don’t know.”

“Damn.”

Slowly, their course took them in among the fleshy, hanging pods. Each appendage was easily the size of a skyscraper, and like a cityscape, no two pods reached exactly the same height.

As they drifted between these alien structures, Bower wasn’t sure who was upside-down. With their smooth curves and rounded tops, the pods looked fleshy. The two unwitting astronauts glided between the pods, curving around them as they moved closer to the body of the creature.

“I wanna go home.”

Bower thought they were her words, certainly she felt that way, but it was Elvis who had spoken.

“Me too.”

Elvis held her hand, squeezing tightly as their forward motion slowed and they drifted upward toward a dark, irregular shaped hole at the base of one of the appendages.