Chapter 7
714 Words
10
STARTLING STORIES
let me show you.”
He took my left hand, the one with the instruments in it. I felt a vibration and was afraid he’d just erased everything; but I could not resist as we leaned forward and he pressed my hand against the window pane.
I shook my head and blinked. I couldn’t be seeing what I was seeing. It wasn’t Pluto out there anymore. At first there was only scarlet mist, but then it broke and two suns shone in the sky, a larger red one, and a smaller, more distant white one that glared too brightly to look at. Mountains lined the horizon, but like none I’d ever seen before, formed under I don’t know what kind of conditions or out of what materials, brown and green with occasional flashes of blue, very sharp, taller than they were wide, like knives against the pale pink sky. In among the mountain peaks were crystalline struc-tures that might have been natural, or maybe not. As I watched, some of these broke loose and began to fly, like great, gleaming air-ships. In the foreground, a rolling prairie of what might be plant life of some kind, most of it dark purple or red and gently undulat-ing. Wading through this were various fan-tastic beasts, but one creature turned and ap-proached, as if it could see me. It was not a human being or even close to a human being, but it did walk on two legs. It had two arms. Its face was blue and spiked, like some kind of lizard. It had a single, dark, wide, oblong eye.
It placed a three-clawed hand against the glass right where I was touching, and I felt a further vibration, and then the words form inside my head, in English, This is who we were.
This is who we were.
This is who we were.
I was in an indescribable ecstasy. It was so intensely beautiful. I was sharing that other mind. To know what the other knows, to feel what the other feels, cannot be put into words in any human language, because we lack so many concepts.
Only once did I turn my head and look at
Mr. X beside me, and I noticed that his face was blue and covered with spikes and he had only one, very large dark eye.
“This is who we were. Tade estin hos es-ton,” he said.
* * * *
And that was when the lights started flash-ing and the alarms and sirens went off and two guys burst into the bar, dragged me out, and stuffed me into an ill-fitting, very smelly spacesuit. Emergency! Emergency! It seems an incoming supply shuttle had crashed into one of the domes and depressurized part of the station. I tried to protest that I was a re-porter, and needed to cover the story. I raised my left hand to take pictures, but I couldn’t because it was inside the spacesuit’s glove. Like every other civilian with nothing im-mediate to offer for the remediation of the catastrophe, I was hustled into a central Safe Area and sealed in. It turned out that our part of the station was never any danger, but it was hours before anybody acknowledged that and let us out.
You don’t need to hear about the accident anyway. That sort of thing happens. It is rou-tine.
* * * *
You are probably expecting me to con-clude this with an eerie, brain-twisting end-ing. No, Mr. Editor. That is not what hap-pened.
I don’t know what became of Mr. X. He was not with us in the Safe Area.
I’ve still got the recording of our con-versation, all the way to the final, strange phrase, but that is all. It wasn’t a name after all. I looked it up. Greek. Ancient Greek. It means what he said it did. He was translat-ing for me, perhaps when he realized that his probing into the collective memory of the human race had gone too deep and he was off by a couple millennia. It means: This is who we were.
You are also expecting that I would go back to the bar and find a puddle of strange, foul-smelling goo on the floor and Mr. X’s
- Writer
