Xenophobia (32 page)

“You know,” Elvis said, with a change of tone that signaled an attempt at humor, “If I hadn’t seen Sigourney Weaver in
Aliens
, this would be quite exciting. Oh, God, please don’t let anything jump out at me from the shadows.”

Bower forced herself to make a nervous laugh as they passed into the darkness.

Distances were hard to judge. There were no points of reference, no familiar shapes with which to relate sizes. What’s more, the creature seemed to swell, with sections stretching and contracting, undulating and pulsating.

Darkness enveloped them, swallowing them. Elvis held her hand tight. Bower squeezed as hard as she could, focusing on the sensation beneath her fingers, assuring herself he was still there.

Slowly, their eyes adjusted to the night.

“We’re in the belly of the beast, now,” Elvis said.

“You’re not helping,” Bower replied, her heart pounding within her chest as they passed through a dark opening on the surface of the alien vessel.

They found themselves standing on the upper edge of the broad hole inside the vast creature. Instinctively, Bower stepped forward, wanting to move away from the dark chasm behind them. Her feet drifted lazily through the air.

Streaks of soft red light stretched out inside the empty, cavernous void. Faint strips of semi-transparent blood-red light moved in swirling motions, crisscrossing and intersecting each other as they faded into the distance.

Bower looked down. Her feet rested in soft sand. She crouched, but that act caused her to drift off the ground and she watched, fascinated as she drifted back to the sand in slow motion. Her boots barely made any indentation. Elvis still held her hand, but not as forcefully.

Bower picked up a handful of sand and stood up again, feeling as light as a feather as she bobbed up and down with even the slightest motion. She ran the sand through her fingers, watching as the fine grains fell slowly to the ground. Although they glistened like stars, the grains of sand drifted like snowflakes in no rush to end their fall.

The sand felt moist and was surprisingly warm.

Sand dunes rolled away before her.

A light breeze blew from her left, but the air felt dank, heavy. Bower couldn’t place the sensation, but the air felt thick. She wondered about its composition and pressure. There had to be oxygen, or they wouldn’t be able to breathe, but she was curious about the ratio. Breathing deeply, she felt no need to rush for another breath.

“What do you make of that?” Elvis asked, and she turned to him, seeing his eyes cast upwards.

Blobs of molten fluid floated above them, defying what little gravity there was within the creature. From what she could tell, each blob would have been thirty to forty feet in diameter. Although they glowed like lava, she doubted they were hot. She wasn’t sure why, but something about the appearance of these blobs suggested they were cool to touch. Perhaps it was the lack of any shimmer in the air. The blobs undulated, with soft waves rippling back and forth, causing their shape to flex and distort as they drifted onward.

Now her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she could make out thin streaks of dim red light stretching across the sky like pathways, winding their way between floating islands of light sparkling in the darkness.

“Beautiful,” was the only word that sprang to mind, the only word to pass from her lips. Any fear she held evaporated with the wonder around them. In the distance, several more blobs of glowing lava-like fluid rose up in long strands before breaking free and drifting onward.

Stella appeared in front of them. Suddenly there were dozens of aliens swarming past. Their spindly, spiky carriages wheeled around them as they raced across the sand and into one of the transparent red strands that crossed the crest of a low hill. Bower watched in awe as each one was lifted up and whisked away by the light. It was as though they were leaves falling in a stream.

Three of the alien creatures paused before them. Which one was Stella?

“Come.”

“... With.”

“... .... Us.”

Elvis held out his hand, not sure which creature he should reach toward.

“I don’t get it,” Elvis said. “Stella?”

“Yes.”

“... Yes.”

“... ... Yes.”

“They’re smaller,” Bower said. “Not the frames, but the core.”

“I don’t understand,” Elvis said. “How can there be three of them?”

“I guess there was always three of them,” Bower replied. She laughed, adding, “We’ve assumed so much, too much. These things, these spindly structures, they’re like a life-raft. They must have pooled their resources, banded together.”

“I’m confused,” Elvis said.

“You’re confused? Me too. Imagine how they must have felt when we treated the three of them as a single individual.”

“Huh,” Elvis said. “So all these little critters made up three people.”

“People?” Bower asked.

“You know what I mean,” Elvis protested. “Three whatevers, three thinking personalities.”

“I guess so.”

Whatever Stella was, she seemed to understand their conceptual difficulties. The three alien structures reached out, touching each other, their fronds intertwining. To Bower’s amazement, the tiny creatures at the heart of the bladed structures swarmed back and forth, swapping between the frames.

“This is doing my head in,” Elvis confessed.

“I think this is what they wanted us to see. They want us to understand what they are, how they operate, how they’re interchangeable, how their intelligence is comprised of numerous component parts.

“For us, it’s all too easy to get caught up in macroscopic life. We look at each other and we see eyes and hair, arms and legs, and we think these things define us, but they don’t. Our bodies are a projection of trillions of cells, each of them far too small to be seen by the human eye. What seems so alien to us is actually the norm. Microscopic biology has defined life on Earth for billions of years, and microbes like bacteria and archaea reside in swarms like these aliens.”

Bower crouched down, taking a good look at the mass of creatures switching back and forth between the three separate cores. She was sure they were listening, thinking, evaluating her words. They seemed as intent on observing her and Elvis as the two of them were on understanding these alien creatures.

“I’ve been thinking about Stella. Did you see the way she merged in with the swarm of other bugs?”

“Yeah, how does that work?” Elvis asked. “I mean, what was with that? Was she just part of some other, bigger creature? And what is she now? Is she like a team of aliens or something?”

“I don’t know,” Bower said, “but we’re not that much different. We like to think of ourselves as individuals, as a single entity, but we’re not. We’re composite creatures, made up of billions and billions of other creatures. Your body is an ecosystem in its own right, every bit as remarkable as the Amazonian rainforest or the islands of the Galapagos. Boy, if only Salvador Dali had known, what paintings he could have created.”

Bugs flowed freely between the three spindly alien structures as if they were consciously reinforcing her point.

Elvis didn’t seem convinced. To Bower, the expression on his face was one of skepticism.

“You’d be surprised,” she continued, looking up at him in the soft, red light. “There are tiny mites that are only ever found on human eyelashes and nose hairs, beards and the like. Oh, and what a grand time they have. They defecate, fornicate and raise entire families on your face and no amount of washing will get rid of them.”

She laughed as he screwed up his face.

“But they’re harmless. They’re simply along for the ride. And they’re not alone. There’s roughly a hundred trillion individual organisms that call you home.”

“Hah!” Elvis cried.

“I’m not kidding. Microbes out-number the cells of our body ten-to-one. They’re found mostly in the gut, only they’re so small compared to our body cells that they live among them like squirrels in the forest.

“On your skin alone, there are hundreds of different species of bacteria, and far from making you dirty, they keep you healthy. In your gut and bowel there’s at least five hundred different, living species of bacteria, numbering in their billions to trillions. I say, living, even though the term is redundant, because these billions of bacteria are alive in their own right. They’re just as alive as you and me. Without them, there’s the very real possibility we could die.

“Chow down on a burger because you’re hungry and you think you’re feeding yourself, but you’re not, you’re feeding the zoo in your gut. Only the creatures in this zoo break down carbohydrates and make nutrients for you, like Vitamin K and Vitamin B12.”

“No shit,” Elvis replied.

“Oh, don’t get me started on the micro-biome of feces,” Bower added, playing with him. “People get so darn paranoid about cleanliness. Everything’s got to be sterile. I’ll let you in on a little secret: Nothing is sterile, at least not for long. And that’s not such a bad thing. Microbes are everywhere. Microbes rule Earth, but they’re humble folk, letting us take the glory.”

“You’re making my skin crawl, Doc,” Elvis replied.

“It was already crawling,” Bower said, grinning.

Elvis shuddered.

“Think about Africa,” Bower added, noting that the cores of the three alien entities had separated again. “There’s no one species that defines the continent, but between lions and zebra, crocodiles and snakes, wildebeest and leopards, acacia trees and the long grasses of the Kalahari, we form a view of Africa that is more than a single landmass. In the same way, humanity is more than one species comprised of 23 chromosome pairs, we’ve evolved as the host for hundreds of other species, and we depend on them as much as they depend on us. I suspect the same is true of these alien creatures as well.”

“So,” Elvis replied. “You’re trying to say, I’m not me?”

“I’m saying, you are y’all.”

Elvis laughed, clearly appreciating her translation into southern US terminology.

“And there’s so many misconceptions in this regard,” Bower continued. “No one likes catching a cold, but viruses aren’t always the bad guys. There are phages that look like miniature Moon Landers, like something from a game of Space Invaders, and they’ll land on hostile bacteria and destroy them with the ruthless efficiency of an invading army, and all without any acknowledgment or gratitude from us, their overlord hosts. Oh, and don’t get me going on the jungle that is the human mouth.”

“He he he,” Elvis chuckled. The big guy was growing on her.

“So what is Stella?” Elvis asked, gesturing toward the three prickly carriages looming patiently before them. “Is she one creature or many?”

“What are you?” Bower asked in response. “Are you one creature or many?”

“Ha,” Elvis replied. “Very good, doc.”

The creatures began rolling away from them, calling out as they climbed the sand dune.

“Come.”

“... With.”

“... .... Us.”

Was this an invitation or a command?

Either way, what choice did they have?

Elvis stepped forward, following as the creatures thrashed their way across the sand, their fronds slapping at the ground as they sprang out in low gravity.

Bower felt as though she were moving through treacle or wading through waist-deep water, although she knew that was the wrong analogy as nothing held her back. Her footsteps unfolded in slow motion, and she felt like she was walking on the Moon. With each step, she hung in the air like a ballerina.

As they reached the crest of the nearest dune, each of the Stellas peeled away into the air, being caught in the flowing red stream of light.

“What is that?” Elvis asked.

“You’re guess is as good as mine,” Bower replied.

“Looks like a freeway in the sky,” he added as he watched the three aliens they’d once called Stella take flight. The creatures cartwheeled like tumbleweeds as they flew through the air, twisting and turning, racing into the distance.

“Come on,” said Elvis.

“Hold on a minute, cowboy. We have no idea what that stream will do to the human body. Look at it, it’s accelerating them from a standing start to, what? Fifty, sixty miles an hour in just a few seconds.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Our bodies weren’t designed to withstand those kind of stresses,” Bower said. “For us, that will be like a car crash in reverse, although the damage will be the same.”

“You think too much, Doc,” Elvis replied, reaching out with his hand and touching at the stream of red light running through the air. His fingers dipped into the light like he was touching a fast flowing stream. The three alien creatures whipped by overhead, following some other semi-visible track through the dark sky before disappearing from sight.

“Elvis, I’m serious. The speeds being reached up there are more than our fragile bodies can stand. They’re moving at hundreds of miles an hour. Even if we’re OK stepping into that stream, what about stopping at the other end? We’re overripe peaches. Our bodies can’t withstand sudden acceleration or deceleration, our internal organs are vulnerable to bruising and bleeding.”

Elvis wasn’t listening.

“You know what the difference is between us, Doc?”

Bower was silent.

“Roller-coasters. You need to know it’s safe before you’ll go for a ride. Me, I’ll jump in the front carriage to find out.”

“ELVIS,” she yelled, but she was too late. He jumped and was whisked away, horizontally at first, but he quickly shot high into the air, twisting and turning as his body followed the contorted beam.

“ELVVVVVIS.”

The three alien creatures came sailing back, passing the other way along the beam, crossing in front of Elvis as he spread his arms, soaring like a bird.

“YEEEEE HAW,” he cried. “Come on, Doc.”

He was right. If this were a theme park, Bower would have gone to get some cotton candy. She’d have been the one holding the bags, or the jackets while the others went on the ride. Every ounce of her body screamed, no, but she knew she had to go with him. It was either that or sit there on the sand dunes waiting for a ride home. Against her better judgment, she jumped.

Bower felt as though she’d run into a wall of water, as though she’d slipped and fallen face first into a swimming pool. She found herself tumbling through the air, flaying around like a rag doll in a dryer.

“Spread your wings, babe.”

Elvis was beside her.

How did he do that? He was flying beside her. He reached out and steadied her, helping her orient her body in the direction of travel. Bower breathed deeply, calming herself. Her muscles relaxed, and that seemed to be the key to flight within the slipstream.

She smiled. She could do this. She could fly. Was this a daydream? A childhood fantasy come true? She laughed, feeling like a kid.

“Pretty darn cool, huh,” Elvis said.

“Pretty darn cool indeed,” she replied, as they raced above the dark, rolling sand dunes.

The distant strands converged on nodes in the sky, like roads leading to Rome. In her mind, Bower found herself making comparisons to the way the cardiovascular system worked, certainly the red pathways reminded her of veins converging on arteries, all leading back to the heart. They were sinuous, meandering, not taking the most direct route.

The three alien creatures drifted by, spinning idly so as to dismiss any notion of any one particular direction being upright for them. As they soared along the floating highway, Bower found she had some directional control by twisting. That must have been how Elvis had been able to reach her.

As they gained height, she could see numerous hubs or nodes running the length of the craft. The nodes spidered in irregular shapes, reaching out with thin veins cutting through the air. Thousands upon thousands of alien creatures like the three Stellas raced along the various pathways, hurriedly going about their business. Rush hour in orbit.

Together, Bower and Elvis passed through a central node and emerged into the light. They had broken through cloud cover, coming out from the darkness into the bright light of day.

“What the hell is this thing?” Elvis asked, soaring beside her. “I mean, it’s not a spacecraft, not as we’d think of one.”

“Why leave your planet?” Bower asked, “when you can take it with you.”

Dark cloud-tops rolled beneath them. They were still inside the vast alien ship; that much was obvious from the transparent dome stretching out easily ten miles above them. Here and there, lines were visible, crisscrossing the dome, providing some sort of structural support.

“Are those stars?” Elvis asked, pointing at several massive clusters of light further down the body of the vast creature. Bower couldn’t bring herself to think of the alien vessel as a spaceship, it was a living organism, or at the very least, an ecosystem.

“I don’t think so.”

There were dozens of clusters, each one rising above the clouds with thousands of tiny lights glowing like the sun.

As their path took them closer, they saw that what looked like thousands of miniature stars resolved into hundreds of thousands and millions of fine pinpricks of light, all tightly grouped together in structures that reached up for miles above them.

“They’re trees,” Bower said.

“Trees?”

“Yes, look at the structure, look at how they’re connected.”

As they wove their way between the gigantic structures towering over them, Bower could see fine, silk-like threads grouping the lights together, banding them into twigs, branches, limbs and various central trunks.

“Trees?” Elvis repeated, clearly struggling with her analogy, but that was all she could come up with to describe what she was looking at.

Each tree of light spanned several square miles, reaching up at least a mile or two in height. They were lopsided, lacking symmetry, often with vast blooms of light in one area or another, while other sections were hollow, devoid of light, allowing them to see through to the interconnected core within.

Around each base, roots spread out across the cloud tops, a tangled mess set in stark contrast to the neatly branching structures reaching up toward the lights. In some cases, the roots of several trees were interconnected. In almost all cases, the lights on the roots reached out beyond the farthest branch.

“Understand,” Stella said, although Bower wasn’t sure which Stella had spoken.

They slowed as they came up to an irregular tree standing on its own. Millions of pinpricks of light spread out through its root ball, reaching for miles beyond the largest of the branches. The inside of the tree looked dead, with just a smattering of lights at various junctions, but the outer branches teemed with life.

Life, that was it. Bower understood what she was looking at.

Slowly, they drifted to within a few feet of the various twigs stemming from the branches of the largest limb. Bower reached out and touched at the lights, half-knowing what to expect.

A beetle.

At least to her it looked like a beetle, and it wasn’t quite what she expected, but it was life. She’d figured she would see something associated with terrestrial life.

Floating before her was a beautiful scarab beetle with six spiky legs, its iridescent shell glistening in the sunlight.

“I don’t get it?” Elvis said. “What the hell is that?”

“It’s a beetle,” Bower replied.

“I know it’s a beetle, but what’s a beetle doing in space?”

Bower heard his reply, but his words didn’t register. She ran her hand over the other pinpricks of light. She watched with childlike amazement as the image of various beetles appeared above each of the fine pinpricks of light. The beetles varied in size and shape, their colors, the textures on their shells, and the length of their legs, but the variation was ordered. If she moved in one direction, the beetles changed in coloration while their shells slowly elongated.

Bower was fascinated by the beauty before her. Hints of turquoise gave way to scarlet red, shades of orange and yellow. The specimens were ordered, clustered together on various related twigs and branches.

As her hand left each section, the beetles there disappeared from sight, returning to pinpricks of white light.

Bower found she was neutrally buoyant, weightless. Reaching out, she could propel herself by pulling on the stiff structure. As she skimmed slowly along the surface of the tree, barely half a foot away from the glowing lights, beetles continued to appear before her. Their abdomens would swell in one direction, while their mandibles and antennae would increase in another, and always with an astonishing variety of color. For her, it was as though the insects had been dipped in a rainbow.

Elvis came up beside her as she examined one of the beetles in detail.

Bower found that if she worked with her hands she could enlarge, rotate and manipulate the three-dimensional image before her. Zooming in, she found the view before her continued to expand. She was able to zero in on a single strand of hair on the head, and from that point, closed in on the insect’s compound eye.

“As freaky as that is,” Elvis began, “it doesn’t look out of place here.”

Bower moved closer, and the hundreds of segments within the eye slowly increased in size until she had focused on just one dark panel.

Bower was smiling like a kid on Christmas day as she said, “I think I understand what we’re looking at here.”

Elvis was quiet.

She was sure he was itching to ask her to explain further, but, like her, he was in awe of the view around them. Within seconds, they were at the resolution of an electron microscope, and still she could zoom further, constantly plunging her hand in close to the point of focus and then slowly drawing back. What had looked like the smooth, curving outer wall of a single eye segment now looked ragged and pitted, like the surface of the Moon.

Bower zoomed still closer.

Slowly, cells came into view, and then cilia on the cell walls along with a clearly defined nucleus within. There were ribosomes, mitochondria, lysomes, all the various elements she remembered from her university days. And, coiled up in the nucleus, there were chromosomes. Moving closer, the tightly wound double helix was visible, as were the individual nucleic acids linked in lumpy pairs, forming rungs on the ladder of life.

Bower put her hand back by her side and the image faded, returning them to the sea of stars on the vast, sprawling tree.

“Is that it?” Elvis asked. “Is that what they came for? Beetles?”

“Not just beetles,” Bower replied, gesturing to the gigantic tree towering thousands of feet above them. “All of life.”

She pointed at the lights glistening in the thicket of roots hundreds of feet below them, stretching out across the cloud tops like a tangled bush.

“Do you see that? Do you see the way the matt and tangle down there looks like a root-bound plant? At a guess, I’d say that’s the microbial world, with its reliance on asexual reproduction and horizontal gene transfer. Oh, my mother and father would love this stuff.”

“Did you say horizontal sex?” Elvis asked. From his tone, Bower knew he was being facetious.

Bower went to repeat herself, and then thought of a simpler explanation in just two words. “No sex.”

“No sex,” Elvis repeated, looking at the roots as they crisscrossed each other. “Bummer.”

Bower laughed. “This is the tree of life. For the most part, complex organisms rely on sex passing gradual, successive change down through countless generations, and in this way, life has slowly branched out from a common point of origin, just like a tree, but microbes are more like a public library, constantly swapping books between themselves.”

“Huh,” Elvis replied.

She could see he was lost in thought.

“Like a library?” Elvis said absentmindedly. From his tone of voice, she could tell this wasn’t a question, it was an inquisitive statement.

Bower felt jubilant, playful. She wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was the excitement of discovery, but in that moment she felt mischievous.

“Are you feeling a little like those microbes in the library?” she asked. “Not getting any sex?”

Elvis bust out laughing. That got his attention, she thought, smiling.

“No, it’s not that,” he replied, grinning. “When you said, library, it sparked something in my thinking.”

Elvis turned, gesturing to the other trees dotting the celestial plane, each of them resplendent with millions of lights glowing like stars.

“Perhaps that’s what this is,” he said. “Some kind of interstellar library.”

Bower was surprised by Elvis; he’d made a remarkably astute observation, one she’d overlooked.

“Do you think,” he began hesitantly. “Do you think those other trees would show us life on other worlds?”

Elvis seemed unsure of himself. He shouldn’t have been, she figured.

They were both out of their element, but given her upbringing at the feet of a university biology professor, Bower was comfortable with what she was seeing. Whenever her mother had lacked a babysitter, she’d taken young Elizabeth Bower into her lectures, setting her to one side with some dolls and coloring pencils while she taught. In the same way in which most kids would play with Lego blocks, Bower had fond memories of playing with anatomical models of the brain and a segmented model of a frog. She’d spent her childhood playing with fake hearts and not-so-fake skeletons. And yet, she hadn’t seen this. Elvis was right. She smiled at his insight. For all his gun-toting, macho image, he’d seen something she missed, and that impressed her.