“Knightwood—sometimes I do want to know who sent the ship to Earth,” Erin said. “You see—I’m changing. I have been for a long time, gradually changing, but I can’t ignore it any more. Now I find myself tempted to use my psychic abilities against others, and I’m not sure I can control them much longer without hope, without some understanding of who I am and what my real purpose for being here is, but at the same time I’m terrified to know—”
“I went to the holo-room once to try to get some answers, the day you found the bodies,” Knightwood interrupted. “Maybe if we try together, we can get the computer to tell us something—if not to me, maybe it will respond to you.”
“Knightwood—”
“Yes, I’ve been watching you ever since the day we first arrived—every time Selesta responds to us, it is because you were there to compel it. It’s one of the reasons I came to conclude that you were... connected to it in some way.”
“All right, I’ll go.” Erin said, nodding. “Though I fear that power is at the root of my temptations. If I begin to lose myself to it, will you promise to remind me who I am and what I stand for...”
“I’ll be here for you.”
* * * * *
“Who sent Selesta to Earth?” Erin asked again. She and Knightwood had gone to the holo-room, but the computer had yet to respond to any of their questions.
“What about the Zariqua Enassa the alien said the Orians are looking for? That explains why the Orians came, but not why the Selesta’s crew chose to flee to the Earth,” Knightwood reminded her. “Or what any of it has to do with the Empire and Federation the Tiernans described, or the “creator” of the lom-vaia. And where is Selesta taking us now?”
What is the face that haunts me, whose memory brings me pain? Erin wondered.
At once a broadcast was heard throughout the ship over an alien communications network the Earthlings had not detected. The beautiful, musical, feminine voice spoke in a sing-song manner, in a language not very different from the one the alien pilot had used—at least not to the Earthlings.
Erin stood woodenly, listening to the voice, but finally responded to Knightwood’s urgent expression beside her. She paused a moment, then nodded understanding, and began to translate the message over the Earth intercom.
“Today we leave Seynorynael again.” She began, her voice strangely accented and far more musical even in English than Knightwood had ever heard it. “We return to Selesta once more, to explore further galaxies, to draw in more territories for Marannkee-il and his insatiable greed, in order to swell his Empire. He is truly an evil ruler. I know he fears our power—his attempt at transferal must have failed. If only they knew what they wish for—but they cannot content themselves. The council wants rid of us now that they have realized their mistake. They cannot steal what is ours, what Hinev gave us, his explorers.” At this point, the alien voice had grown quiet, and Erin faltered.
Much of the message made no sense to Knightwood, and she wondered what the thousands across the ship were thinking of the sudden interruption, but she understood the pained expression on Erin’s face. Had Erin recognized the voice?
“Who were these explorers?” Knightwood continued, still pondering the message. “Who was that man in the picture, the crew that sleeps below us?!” Knightwood shouted in agitation. The computer had not answered their questions. One ambiguous message was not enough.
A minute passed and she looked to make sure that Erin was all right, but the young lieutenant just stared ahead, her eyes unblinking.
Is it too late? Will I become like them? Like the Orian Great Leader? Tempted to control the fates of others—devoid of any humane feelings? Changed by all I see until I no longer recognize myself? Erin wondered, then turned to Knightwood, who kept asking about the man in the picture.
Yes, Erin thought, who was he? What had he been like? And who were the explorers? Why had they gone out on their lonely mission?
Suddenly another transmission interrupted the silence. Erin and Knightwood listened to a long message without Knightwood’s understanding it, uncertain if the others across the ship could hear it. The male voice spoke like music; like the other voice, the sound was so beautiful that Knightwood hesitated to interrupt. “What did he say?” she asked at last as the message ended, looking Erin in the eye. Erin began slowly, translating as she recollected his words.
“Wait a minute,” Knightwood hollered, stopping a moment to open the Earth comnet again. “Start over.”
As Erin spoke, Knightwood could almost hear the song of the man’s voice accompanying her translation. “Crew log: ship engineer Fielikor Kiel. In response to a question encountered on Eretae 4. What is Selesta?—it is our word for discovery, and I have learned much here in Eretae 4. I do not doubt then that Hinev was right, and that we share a connection to the first race; I hope then that we can rebuild ties of friendship and trust among ourselves and these natives.” Erin finished the message, her heart pounding, and Knightwood deactivated the comnet.
“Who was he—this Fielikor Kiel?” Knightwood asked.
Erin looked at her as though she thought the answer obvious. “He was the man in the picture,” she answered, shaking her head. “The one down in the memorial room. He was the leader of the Seynorynaelian explorers,” Erin added, but the last thought came to her unbidden. Nonetheless she recognized it to be true.
“Then the other voice?” Knightwood breathed, her chest suddenly constrained.
“I don’t know her name. But she—she was my mother.”
* * * * *
“Yes, I am an alien. And I remember her voice, Knightwood, from my earliest memories.” Erin attempted to answer the doctor’s many questions. “But I can’t ask to hear any more right now, please understand. I’ll try to translate more messages later, but—please understand, I can’t—” She broke off, shaking her head. Erin’s head had begun pounding with blinding pain the more she listened to the strange alien messages; after the second, she had been unable to continue.
“Who was she, your mother?” Knightwood asked again.
“I don’t know who she was or where she came from, or how she related to the others.” Erin insisted. “But she wasn’t down there in the Memorial Room—”
“How—”
“I don’t know how I know, but she wasn’t. She may even have been from the Earth—and then returned with the others to their Empire after the Seynorynaelians discovered the Earth—all I remember is the sound of her voice. But Knightwood, promise that this will remain our secret for now. I need some time—”
“I promise, Erin—for now, I will not tell the others, but you know you can’t keep this kind of secret forever.” Knightwood nodded. “I told you no matter what it was—I wouldn’t hold you responsible. And these messages may be Selesta’s idea of satisfactory answers, but as far as I’m concerned, they just raise more questions. Zhdanov and I are going to have one hell of a time trying to figure out what they all mean once we’ve listened to them all.”
“You’ll need my help, right?” Erin asked. “Maybe when my headache goes away—” she said, then shrugged.
Knightwood smiled at her. “I think we’ll take a crack at what we’ve already got on our own first. You, my dear, need to get some fresh air—take a walk about the ship or something. Try to clear your mind. You’re probably just in shock. Remember, you won’t be able to help if you let this turn you into an emotional wreck.” Knightwood smiled and pushed Erin towards the door.
Knightwood watched Erin leave and waited for Zhdanov to arrive. As much as she loved Erin Mathieson, the possibility of who she really might be frightened her to death.
* * * * *
Erin walked alone for hours, wandering in and among the corridors of Selesta. Was this Zariqua Enassa her mother? Did she wait for her somewhere on board the ship? And where had she come from? Erin shook her head, trying to clear her mind as Knightwood had suggested, but the questions kept coming.
What was she, and what a
m I?
Erin stopped and looked up when she came to the end of a closed corridor. She had come there automatically, but the thought struck her that she had been here before.
Who was my father? She wondered, yet certain it had not been the one called Fielikor Kiel. On Earth, she had always assumed she could never know the answer to these questions—back when everyone thought her original parents had been killed by the Discovery’s or Selesta’s crash. Then Sasha Blair and Richard Mathieson had taken the roles of mother and father to her, and they had been all she wanted and needed. But here on the Selesta, she knew the truth had been lying in wait for her. And knowing who her original parents had been could never diminish her love for her Earth family.
Without paying attention to the impulse that told her the corridor had been blocked, she stepped up to the wide wall partition.
Elas-sa hai-eel lirah... the words played in her memory. Had she used them before?
The wide metallic door parted in the middle and retracted back into the wall. Before her, a hundred foot high, metal-walled, cavernous hold beckoned. Scintillating light danced on the golden undersides of pale green leaves on the trees before her; a pathway led through the beginnings of a great forest so beautiful that she shook herself to see if she were hallucinating.
She stood paralyzed, just staring. She had dreamed of this place her entire life, but it had been real all along.
Chapter Thirteen
“Colonel,” lieutenant Mathieson’s distraught voice interrupted over the emergency frequency to the bridge. Only a few hours before, her voice had translated the sudden messages from Selesta—scraps from the original crew log. Kansier had dispatched two communications officers to try to identify the source of the broadcast in the holoroom and to see if they could unlock more of the crew log stored in computer memory, but the last report had been negative.
What is it now? Scott wondered, concerned by Erin’s sudden communication.
“I’ve found something down here—can you locate my position?” Erin said; her image appeared in the holo-monitor. “Can you see this?” She asked and turned aside, pointing for the videocom to pan to the right, where a wide wall had opened. Beyond it they could make out a wide cavernous space, filled with what appeared to be trees.
“We’re on our way,” Kansier said.
* * * * *
In all of his life, Arthur Kansier had never seen anything as beautiful as the forest that lieutenant Mathieson had discovered. He had taken a moment on the bridge to call in a scout crew to rendezvous at the location, and he and Major Dimitriev had met them and Erin outside the door. What was a forest doing in the middle of an alien spaceship? he wondered, though not displeased by the discovery.
“Have you gone inside?” he asked the young lieutenant, but she shook her head.
“No, sir—not past a couple of steps, anyway.” Erin admitted.
Minutes later the scout party that included old Blue Stripes Einar Suffield-Andersen, Hans Rheinhardt, and Nathalie Quinn arrived. Erin looked at Nathalie as though expecting her friend to join her, but Nathalie remained distant and stayed beside the others in the scout team.
Glancing around as they entered the hold, Kansier was struck by the enormity of the forest—a large part of the unknown interior area had contained this place all along—a forest more than six kilometers long, two wide, and several buildings high. The dense foliage of bright leaves made it difficult to see the roof of the cavern, but after twenty paces they came to a small clearing in the overhead canopy. The holo-sky above showed an intense blue with few scattered clouds, the light it generated so bright that it hurt Kansier’s eyes to look up. Filtering through the dense foliage, the light created shadows on the forest floor, outlining the edge of nearby trees.
Had this been what the alien home world looked like? Kansier wondered. If so, how could they have left it behind? It was breathtaking.
Someone had created an artificial breeze to circulate through the forest; as they walked along, the trees rustled with a bewitching alien song, as though they had been perfectly fashioned to create music. There was a sound of the sea in them, Scott thought as he listened.
In truth, the smell of fresh earth and cool air was intoxicating; it would have been so regardless of their long confinement in space. The path through the forest floor branched off in several directions, but they continued to go straight, discovering a small river that cut across it. An earth bridge had been built over the river, allowing them to cross over. Scott surveyed the small purplish-blue stones that skirted the edge of the river, five meters wide at the point where the bridge had been constructed and had an intangible urge to pick one up and skip it across the water.
“What else is in this place that we don’t know about?” Einar broke the silence. “And where is that breeze coming from?”
“Now we know how the Seynorynaelians coped with the monotony of a long space voyage,” Scott laughed. “It’s like being on the surface of a planet.”
“Maybe this is what their world looked like,” Nathalie suggested, drinking in the wonder around her. The beauty had reanimated her, drawing her little by little out of her own despondent state of mind.
“Yeah, maybe,” Einar whistled.
“Yes, this would make a nice retreat—if we can determine that the area is secure of any threat to us,” Kansier agreed, looking around as if weighing the possibility that something living might attack them.
“Well, there aren’t any tracks indicating animal life so far—” Hans began. A loud noise interrupted him. The scout party looked past the end of the bridge and into the foliage ahead, where the strange rustling noise had originated. The leaves and branches jerked spasmodically as if some creature behind them had pushed them away. The team brought their laser guns up to bear on the thing that emerged from the other side of the forest.
A man staggered forward and looked up at them with one eye open, his head slightly lolled to the side. His torn white labcoat and ragged attire suggested that he had once been from the UESRC, that he had been one of them, a man from Earth.
“Professor Faulkner!” Kansier exclaimed, recognizing the strange creature that faced them as the man he had known years before from various conferences he had attended on the Charon aliens’ origins.
Faulkner had focused his attention on Major Dimitriev beside him and chose not to respond to the salutation. “Hinev?” he asked tentatively, then shook his head. The others regarded him in utter confusion and stood their ground as he approached. Then Erin turned around, facing the open clearing. The professor’s wandering eye focused in on her.
“You!” he shouted in a voice vaguely human. It had begun to resonate but in a tortured manner, oscillating between one pitch and three. He coughed several times, deteriorating into a fit of gagging noises. “I came to prove who you were,” he screamed, remembering his former self. Then his head tilted to the side, as if he recalled something else—”but aren’t you Alessia?” he asked. “No, not her—” he shook his head again and again in the manner of a lunatic, until he finally stopped and blinked weakly at them.
“Professor Faulkner, how have you been here all this time? What has sustained you? How did you get here?” Kansier demanded.
“Professor Faulkner,” the man repeated, uncomprehending, then suddenly exclaimed as the realization came to him. His rasping laughter sounded more like cackling. “Yes—I am Faulkner,” he repeated, remembering himself. He drew his shoulders up and looked Kansier squarely in the eye, suddenly sober.
“I’ve been here—forever. Dreams. I’ve lived in dreams. He is here,” Faulkner gestured around in a paranoid manner. “He takes care of me—keeps me dreaming. When I wake there is food—but I don’t need food—I need—I can’t go—” he cringed, looking over his shoulder to see that no one had followed him.
“Who’s with you—are there aliens here?” Kansier suggested. Faulkner erupted into laughter.
“He’s here—but he isn’t here—aliens aren’
t here—where would they be? They’ve already left—they’re closer than you think,” he smiled a knowing smile, and admonished them, wagging an upraised finger. “They welcomed her—but she’s one of them.”
“What’s he talking about?” Dimitriev looked to Kansier as if the Colonel could explain the man’s behavior. “How has he been living here without help—no food, no society?”
“Who is here and not here?” Kansier asked. “Who is he that helped you and who is she that is one of them?”
In response, Faulkner cackled again.
“Can you not feel him around you? He taunts your suffering but won’t tell you anything—he pities enough to care for your life but won’t end your pain—he controls all and led me here—then kept me from leaving, held me in dreams. Ask her—she knows the voice that cannot speak to you,” Faulkner pointed to Erin, his eyes narrowed accusingly.
“Erin?” Kansier prompted. “Do you understand what Faulkner is saying?”
Erin lowered her head and said, “he’s talking about the ship’s computer, I think.” The team became aware of running footsteps far behind them, but Erin continued. “Sometimes I think I hear its voice in my mind, but it can’t reach me very well—Faulkner hears it, but he thinks the rest of you can’t.”
Meanwhile, Knightwood, Zhdanov, Urbani, Hanashiro, Cheung, and Dr. Koslov caught up with them. Faulkner looked up at the intruders and began to howl as he spotted Knightwood. All the color had drained from Knightwood’s face when she saw him there.
“Dr. Faulkner,” she finally managed.
“How did he get here?” Cheung inquired, but Kansier shook his head to indicate that he did not know.
“We’ll have to take him back—run some tests on him. Try to help him recover from his ordeal,” Kansier suggested.
“Message from the bridge, sir,” Einar interrupted. The team paused to listen to the voice of Amina Johnson.