Shülna reached out then, and William kneeling down upon the rock passed his father into the selkie’s care. Gently, she embraced the man and cradled him to herself, almost as if she were holding her own child. Joseph’s head rested easy upon her shoulder as Shülna’s lips pressed deep into his hair. She cooed softly, comforting him against the chill of the tide, saying, “Nahl Iem kurut thyla uem briimos vitu, en uem evørn mieno enifalwann.”
The words, like those she had spoken earlier at the gate pulled again at William’s heart and he asked, “What’s it mean? The words, they sound so sad.”
Shülna did not reply at first, instead she looked away, avoiding his gaze. Silence came down hard between them then and only when William started to apologize did she answer. “It’s how we say goodbye after we have loved one of your kind,” said Shülna. “It means, Now I will kiss your tears away and they will become mine always.” But William did not understand, and seeing his confusion, she went on, “I am not human, Will. I am selkie. We’re not the same. I cannot cry. I cannot loose my pain, my sorrow or my joy with tears. I carry those things with me on the inside always. They are a part of me. They will never grow dull or fade. They will never pass away.”
William nodded, only beginning to grasp what it truly was he had asked the selkie to do for his father and for himself—and worst of all—what it meant to Shülna and how deep that wound would go. “I did not know. I mean, I did not realize,” he said. “I am sorry.”
Shülna shook her head. “Don’t be,” she said, her voice going even lower. “I’d have it no other way.”
Will looked down into his empty hands and said, “I am glad my father loved you first.”
Then Shülna smiled, though it was a fey smile, and reaching up with one hand, tenderly caught hold of William by his shirt. She drew him down just a little, and brought her lips up to kiss the tears which glistened upon his cheeks.
The Drake Equation
written by
C.L. Kagmi
illustrated by
Michael Michera
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C.L. Kagmi has loved both science and fiction from an early age. When she stumbled across her first science fiction novel at the age of eleven, she knew she’d found her home.
She studied neuroscience at the University of Michigan and worked in clinical research with the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network for five years before turning her attention to writing full time. She is now a wandering freelance writer, splitting her time between half a dozen cities in the US.
This is her second fiction sale, the first being the short story “Twiceborn,” published in Compelling Science Fiction #2 (June 2016). A novel in the same universe as “Twiceborn” is in the works.
“The Drake Equation” was born of her fascination with the mathematical equation of the same name; and with the question of why we haven’t yet met any aliens.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Michael Michera was born and currently resides in Poland.
He has been passionate about prehistoric animals since childhood, when he began drawing dinosaurs and creating his own creatures from imagination. A little later his interest expanded to include all animals and biology in general. He read many books on this topic and earned priceless knowledge for his current work as a concept artist.
Also as a youngster, Michael watched a lot of horror and sci-fi movies. Those films influenced the dark atmosphere in his personal art projects today.
Michael has always been fascinated by traditional drawing as well as comic art. He loves to experiment with art styles, though he most enjoys creating robots and futuristic designs of sci-fi technology. His creation process includes using digital painting and 3D sculpture.
Michael’s biggest dream is to work as a concept designer for the film industry in Hollywood.
The Drake Equation
Carol closes her eyes, or tries to. Nothing changes. What she sees—a beach near her childhood home on Long Island—is the same behind her eyelids as before them.
The pounding waves are a relaxing, rhythmic white noise. The distant traffic is another kind of white noise, the constant sound of haste. The white paint of the house behind her is chipped and cracked, weathered hard by the sea breeze. The sand is coarse gravel beneath her bare feet.
She hasn’t been here since Ron …
Am I dead? Panic threatens.
Her rational mind thinks that unlikely. She has not believed in any sort of afterlife in years, and this is not the cold oblivion of the void.
But she has also never hallucinated. Never dreamed half so vividly as this. Never been so certain that she was awake, yet so baffled by her surroundings. Oxygen deprivation could do this, maybe. She thinks back, strains to think back to before.…
The hull breached by a meteor. No pinprick—something the size of an all-terrain rover ripped the ship clean in two at the passage connecting the command quarters to the hub. The meteor moved too fast for the sensors to pick up, too fast to do anything about even if they had seen it. She’d deduced what had happened only in the split second before she was sucked out. Before the vacuum demanded her, her oxygen, and her books with equal ferocity.
For less than half a second as her eyes froze solid, she had seen the rest of the Agena, its pale sunlit form so deceptively small when viewed from the outside. She had separated from the ship at a rate of meters per second, salvation a short sprint away if she’d had ground to run on.
So near and yet so far.
No one will be able to reach me in time, she knew. And then … and now she is here, standing barefoot on an achingly familiar Long Island beach.
She is not alone.
The figure stands a few meters from her, his ankles lapped by cold surf. He is beautiful. His facial symmetry is heart-stopping, his features perfect.
Carol feels very confused.
She’d never spent much time visualizing her ideal man, but apparently someone else has done it for her. And the presence of a stranger—especially an attractive one—in what could otherwise pass for a memory concerns her.
Carol’s heart skips a beat and her stomach flutters, and she pauses to wonder how that is possible if her body is freezing in space.
Wish fulfillment. She has heard of this. That the dying brain gives gifts—near-death experiences, rushes of endorphins, and the like. Hers is apparently her childhood home, and a handsome stranger. She half-expects her brother to come sauntering around the side of the house, as though he’d never left.
Her heart warms at the thought of that reunion. She smiles, glancing back toward the house.
To a good death.
But Ron does not appear. It is the stranger’s voice that attracts her attention.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “if I startled you.” His voice is soft and deep, gentle and powerful.
Blushing isn’t something a dead person is supposed to be able to do, yet she is blushing.
And deeply suspicious.
“And we are sorry,” the stranger continues, “about—the interruption.”
There is something off about his speech. Her own language center going? No—if that were it, his speech would sound normal to her. There is a problem with the meter of his speech, the not-right quality unsettling in a person who seems so perfect.
Who’s to say how hallucinations should behave? some part of her asks.
Not like this, she decides.
She tries to speak to the stranger. Chokes. Like a schoolgirl approaching a crush. Blushes more furiously, this time in embarrassment which threatens to turn into anger.
The stranger smiles wryly.
“I apologize,” he says again, a little wrongly, “for any distress. We were not sure—”
He flickers then, and all of reality flickers like an old fluorescent light bulb. For fractions of
a second, there seems to be nothing. Then, again—
“—how best to approach you.”
Carol barely hears him.
“Who are you?”
A sweeter, broader smile. “We are—‘aliens’ is an alarming term, I’m told, in the lexicon of your people. But you don’t seem to associate particular alarm with it.”
It is true that alarm is not quite the right word for the sensation that her stomach has dropped out of her body and is plummeting toward the Earth’s core.
Hallucinating, she reminds herself desperately.
This is not entirely outside the realm of wish fulfillment. Perhaps that is why it scares her so: she wants to die comfortable, but not deceived. She does not want to believe she’s just made first contact with extraterrestrial intelligence.
Unless it’s true. Does she dare believe?
Does she dare not to?
“We live somewhere—not physical,” he is saying. “Somewhere else …”
Where else can be parsed out later, if she’s still alive. But right now the where seems academic, and a more burning question is:
“Why me?”
He studies her carefully, as though considering his words. “We apologize for—specimen collection.”
“Specimen collection?” That brings a flare of righteous indignation. Which combines with her awkward embarrassment to become anger. This doesn’t seem to fit the wish-fulfillment script.
“You blew me out into space for specimen collection?”
Nothing so cruel, she reassures herself inwardly. My death an act of random nature, not of will. This is a hallucination. My last dream.
And yet …
And yet she had known, even as she felt the world sucked out from under her, that the odds of colliding with an object that size in near-Mars orbit were astronomically low. Had thought briefly that she might just be the first person in human history to be killed by direct collision with a meteor.
The man’s face still sends her heart fluttering when she meets his eyes, even as she tries to scrutinize him.
He says: “You will be—well cared for. Your crew—is safe.”
Well cared for. That sounds nice. Suddenly, Carol feels very tired.
If he is an alien …
“Can we drop the illusions, please?” she asks wearily. “I think reality would be more comfortable.”
The man smiles cheerfully. “Not possible. I do not have a physical form. And you are nowhere physical—that you would understand. There is no ‘real’ interface that corresponds to anything your brain is able to perceive. We can only communicate through patterns you recognize.”
“Then … I don’t have eyes anymore, do I?”
“No,” he confirms gently.
“Will I ever have eyes again?”
“That remains to be seen.”
She sees nebulae. Nebulae as humans see them through false-color images. Nebulae as they exist in the human lexicon, sprawling and beautiful and vast. That each dot within the glowing gas clouds is the sun of many worlds is well beyond her ability to comprehend.
Humans think of nebulae as the nurseries of stars, but they are also graveyards.
The scientists of Earth had said that the Population II stars could not have supported life. Said they were too poor in metals, in carbon, in every element beyond the hydrogen and helium birthed in the Big Bang. That the necessary materials for complex life—carbon at least, better with nitrogen and oxygen and even heavier things—were lacking.
When the Population II stars exploded in their blinding glory, those heavy elements, created by the fusion in their cores, had been flung across parsecs to seed new star systems.
Humans thought of this as birth.
Her guide had introduced himself as “Daniel,” and walked with her on the beach, the two of them alone, until he deemed her ready for something more.
Now he tells her that the birth of this nebula had been death for his people.
“We are an old form of life. Very old, to you. Wise, we like to think. Still powerless.”
“You managed to ram a meteor into my ship, she reminds him, and lifted me from my dying body through some process I still don’t understand. That seems pretty powerful to me.”
“Power,” he tells her, “is a relative term.”
He shows her the spread of his civilization.
It’s like a dream. Carol sees not one civilization, but thousands. Life and intellect and society orbiting a thousand stars. Stars in different galaxies, separated by unfathomable expanse. Life spawned from the electrical storms of gas giants, from chains of simple hydrocarbons on cold moons, from crystals of ice in everlasting convection currents. In all of these places, she sees patterns form, change, re-form.
Wherever patterns form and change, the potential for self-replication exists.
Wherever self-replication began on those ancient worlds, so too did evolution.
“It still begins.” Daniel corrects her, casting her eyes to a dozen watery, rocky worlds that no human scientist has ever heard of.
Carol is momentarily awed by this. Then, an even stranger realization hits her like a brick.
“When the stars you showed me died—that was billions of years ago. You are from—one of them?”
“Yes,” Daniel confirms. “We were lucky. We were taken.”
“Taken?”
“Lifted. Preserved. By another. Much as I took you. My people were naturally doomed. Old even then, far older than your race is now. We had survived long enough to overcome war. Not long enough to escape our dying sun. We had not prioritized our resources in that direction. That was—a mistake, on our parts.”
He shows her something else, a layout of the Milky Way and through it, a web of light, spreading.
“Only one species,” he explains, “had to learn the higher geometries well enough to live there. To draw on vacuum to perpetuate patterns of thought. Only one to teach the others. They took us before the end came.”
And she sees “the end,” an explosion of light and heat and searing ultraviolet, of vital elements sowing the seeds of a dozen new stars with planets.
Planets like her own. Born from the deaths, not just of stars, but of civilizations. Parents they might never know.
If this is true, the man she is talking to is more than five billion years old.
He’s old enough to have watched the Earth itself congeal from dust, seen the Moon thrown off in a titanic clash of worlds, watched the oceans condense out of a haze of water vapor and the first cells arise from complex molecules in Earth’s seas.
If this were true, he would see Carol as a product of those cells—little more than an outgrowth of a petri dish. The entire history of the human species would have spanned, from his viewpoint, a matter of days.
He would be, for all intents and purposes, a god.
Did Daniel watch her species grow? Or had he been occupied elsewhere, part of some inconceivable, eternal society?
Carol is too afraid to ask.
“So,” she no longer knows if she is dreaming, and finds that she no longer cares, “both of my hypotheses were right.”
Daniel sends her waiting silence.
“You’re an alien. And this is also Heaven. The afterlife.”
She doesn’t like the tone of the silence he sends back.
“I mean, you take dying humans, don’t you? You must. Why not? When do I get to see Ron?”
Silence.
“Answer me. Please.”
“Give us time,” Daniel beseeches her. He seems distressed, and that disturbs Carol deeply. “Give us time, to explain it to you properly.”
There is a waiting that is much like death or sleep. And then there is a room, with people—aliens that look like things out of fantasy and science fiction seated along its wall
s. Most of them are humanoid, and Carol remembers what Daniel said—that they must draw from her own brain to find symbols that she understands. She is standing in the middle of the room, as though on trial.
And she is angry.
“I am not an animal,” she says, upon flickering back into consciousness. “Don’t tranquilize me just because you don’t want to deal with me.”
Daniel sits at the head of the council, smiling a faint and maddening smile. It is he who says: “We apologize. Your pattern made it clear that you would not accept distractions. You asked the right questions more quickly than we expected. We needed to prepare.”
“Prepare what?”
Carol is surprised to find that she feels betrayed. By his words—by his very presence standing with the others and against her. She’s known him only briefly, but his disguise worked well enough that she’d stopped thinking of it as a disguise. Started thinking of him as a friend.
Not human. She finds her mind is quick to jump to that now that she feels offended.
Yet she knows that she has good reason to be offended. They are the ones who killed me. They seem not to care. They have promised me nothing. They have not even answered my question—
She thinks of her brother, and her heart jumps into her throat.
But something nags at her. Some part of her has not yet managed to shake her belief, perhaps because of his beauty, in Daniel’s inherent goodness.
The council is silent. Glancing at each other, murmuring in words she cannot understand. She feels as though this is some sort of answer.
We had to prepare this council to judge you.
“You’re damn right I won’t accept distractions!” she fumes. Remembers losing faith in the god of her childhood, in all gods.
Remembers why. The image of the judge sitting on the throne, ready to condemn, indifferent to his own responsibility.
“You have great power. You have a duty. You can do for others what they cannot do for themselves.