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One day, excitement filled Gam Tol. Through the city ran word that an explorer had returned from a ruined world with artifacts of an alien civilization.
After evening sacrifice, all in the city --ten thousand of us, fully a tenth of Ul's inhabitants -- stayed in the Hall of Evening Sacrifice to listen to the explorer and look at what he'd brought us. As a member of the royal family I got to sit on the dais near him. I gazed with adoration at a brave man who alone had flown a crystal-ship across the stars to a dead world. His name, Pen-Har, deserves to be recalled.
He reminded us of his not having been the first to visit the ruined world, which circled a yellow star that he called by its earth-human name, Tau Ceti. Others before him had gone to the ruined world and marveled at its landscape of death. In an atmosphere of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, with no trace of oxygen -- Pen-Har used the earth-human names for the gases, as the Tan's speech had no names for them -- dead animals lay among stands of dead plants as if time had stopped.
Some of you may be about to ask me, "Why hadn't everything rotted?" None of us Tani on Ul thought of that question, as none of us had ever seen anything rot. Whatever died lay where it fell till recyclers put it into recycling pits, where bu turned it into soil. The Colonel and Dr. Ventnor would tell me that nothing rotted where the Tan lived because there were no bacteria there. Clearly, our ancestors had brought none to Ul from their world in Orion. Luckily for the earth, as we children brought no alien bacteria with us.
The Colonel and Dr. Ventnor, though, would have no explanation why nothing had rotted on the ruined world of Tau Ceti. Any answer to that question must await another expedition there, if there can ever be one.
"But to our tale," as Robert Burns wrote. Grandfather Dor-Sad broke into the explorer's tale to say that some unknown force must've suddenly removed all of the oxygen from the ruined world's atmosphere, but none of us had the patience to listen to our world's Einstein just then. Pen-Har the Explorer went on.
He told us of cruising through the lifeless world's air till he found a city. This was not a pueblo, like Ul's cities, or a sprawling metropolis, like America's cities, but a city of tunnels driven into the walls of a wide pit dug deeply into rock. Landing his ship on the pit's floor amid a lifeless garden where bodies sprawled, he dressed himself in a pressure suit of earthly design and got out. Wandering across the pit's floor and peering with a light-crystal into tunnels, Pen-Har took pictures with a digital camera and picked up a few small items of interest.
Before we saw the wonders from Tau Ceti, Grandfather got a chance to impress us with more wonders from the earth. Hooking the camera to a computer, he hooked the computer in turn to a projector. Both camera and projector, he hooked, in a way that I wish I could recall, to a power-crystal. When the hall's light-crystals were quenched, the projector cast pictures onto a huge square of the finest white wool, hung from a wall of the chamber.
We Tani oohed and aahed like earth-humans watching fireworks as pictures of the dead city appeared before us. Its dead inhabitants looked like us or the earth-humans, except that the Lil-i -- the Others, as we called the dead world's inhabitants -- were all bald. They wore gorgeously dyed and embroidered long robes, along with gold jewelry and gemstones. The Others' tunnels held fine furniture and shelves upon shelves of books.
Pen-Har had brought several of these with him. I myself got to handle one that night. Turning its pages, I gazed at columns of symbols that looked to me like the earth-humans' musical notes, which I'd seen on Sesame Street. In Ul's last days, many pored over the symbols, but none understood them. Sadly, Kan Tan Sor-On put none of the Others' books aboard the crystal-ships that carried Ul's last survivors here. Some here might've read the books, if only those persons had had the chance to.
Pen-Har brought home other items -- brooches and bracelets of exquisite workmanship; a strange metal flute that made weird, mournful tones when one of the royal flutists tried to play it; and a statue, maybe a foot high, of what I guess was jade. The statue depicted a tall, broad-shouldered man whose high forehead, wide-set eyes, and solemn features made us Tani call him "The Wise One." Thinking of him and his long-dead kin, I gave him an offering of tears. I was not the sole Tan to give him it.
During the talk, the slide show, and the display of alien artifacts, the hall shook twice from tremors. By now, none of us heeded them. I say, "None of us," but I did see Sor-On and Dor-Sad give each other sad-eyed looks. My father-in-law and my grandfather gave each other like looks as someone wondered aloud whether the Tan's world could die as the Others' world had died.
As a five-year-old girl, I didn't know what to make of those looks. Now, I wonder whether Sor-On and Dor-Sad already knew what would happen to the Homeworld in just a year.
When I was twelve, the Colonel and Mom took me on another of my semiannual visits to Dr. Ventnor. They left me with him while they went to antique shops in Columbus. As I'd been assiduously reading National Geographic, Scientific American, and astronomy texts to come to terms with who I am, my mind teemed with questions.
They came down to one. "Dr. Ventnor, how could the earth-humans, the Tani, and the Others all look alike?"
He gave me his crooked smile, which I loved, as he said, "You watch science-fiction, don't you? Don't all aliens look human?"
I gave him a raspberry of which baby Par-On would've been proud.
Dr. Ventnor chuckled. "All right, Belle, what are the possible answers to your question?"
I shrugged. "Convergent evolution or intelligent design."
He nodded. "What would evolutionary biologists say of outwardly human life's independently arising three times within a radius of less than thirty light-years?"
"Nothing that Mom would approve of my saying."
He laughed a rich, deep laugh that made shivers run up and down my silly adolescent spine. "It seems to me that you favor intelligent design, Belle. Do you believe that God made man, Tan, and the Others all in His image?"
I frowned. "The hymns to Holy Light speak only of the Tan's creation. The Bible speaks only of the creation of earth-humans and angels."
"True, Belle. Still, how do you know that the Tani and the Others aren't angels? Doesn't the Bible speak in Genesis Six of angels, called the sons of God, that came to the earth and had hybrid children, the men of renown, with human women? Wouldn't Tani or Others make sense as the angels in that passage of Scripture?"
Now, Dr. Ventnor was toying with me. I'd learned that he and the Colonel had run secret experiments on Tan tissue. They'd learned that, though we Tani have the same internal organs that earth-humans have, our bones consist of carbon filament, which also forms cell walls around cells in which DNA is wound onto stacks of protein disks like the disks in a hard-drive. Too, our genetic code, though it has many codons in common with the earthly genetic code, codes for two extra amino acids. Even then, I knew enough of biology to say that there could be no half-Tan, half-earth-human children.
I gave Dr. Ventnor a haughty sniff that I'd learned from Mom, daughter of an antebellum family from Virginia. "You're the one who's been watching science-fiction if you believe in alien-human hybrids."
"Touché, Belle! I concede your point on Tan-human hybrids, but can you rule out Other-human hybrids?"
I shrugged. "For all that I know, the Others could've been earth-humans."
Dr. Ventnor raised a gull-winged brow. "How, Belle?"
I shrugged again. "Maybe, passing aliens seeded some earth-humans onto the world of Tau Ceti, or maybe there was once an advanced civilization on the earth that colonized the Others' world."
"What became of the advanced civilization?"
"The Flood? The fall of Atlantis?"
Dr. Ventnor pursed his lips. "Your speculations might explain the Others, but what of the Tan?"
I felt silly, but said what I'd been thinking. "Maybe, we Tani were genetically engineered by the aliens or the advanced civilization. Maybe, we're androids designed to live on marginal worlds."
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Dr. Ventnor again laughed the deep, rich laugh. "Now, who's been watching science-fiction? Still, Belle, you've covered just about every possible answer to your question. I'm telling you the truth when I say that I can answer it no better than you did."
He did know more than he was telling me, but I wouldn't learn it till the Colonel was dead, and my own life was falling apart.