Austin Aslan - The Islands at the End of the World

“I’m Leilani. This is my dad, Mike.”

“Flower of Heaven.”

“Actually, we …” I pause.

“What is it?” he asks.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

Dad says, “Lei, tell him.”

“I … can’t,” I whisper to Dad. But Buzz has captured me with his patient gaze. Tractor beam. I look up from the toy balanced on my fingertip and take the plunge. “Did you know it’s alive? That it’s a creature?”

He startles. “We … but …” He falls silent. His expression grows grim, focused. “Richard. He put you up to this, didn’t he? Richard!” He calls out the front door.

“There’s no one out there,” I say. I lower my finger to the countertop and help the spinning gyroscope hop to its surface. “She’s leaving, isn’t she?”

“She?” Buzz’s eyes flick between us.

He knows , I think. He won’t admit it . “The Orchids,” I say. “There are two of them. A mother and a baby.”

“Orchids?” he asks. “I haven’t heard that. We call them Star Flowers.”

“The O`ahu newspaper called it the Emerald Orchid. Name stuck,” Dad explains.

“So …,” I say, “you’re admitting there are two?”

Buzz stiffens. “What in the world makes you think …?”

“Lei can hear the mother’s thoughts,” Dad says. “During her seizures. She’s epileptic. Some … electrical thing. We came to see if we could … if Lei could talk to it. We can’t let it leave.”

Buzz studies us. “Uh. Seizures. Well, this isn’t your average visit, is it?” He snatches up the gyroscope, freezing its momentum. “You talk to it? You interpret its signals?”

I shake my head. Buzz’s eyes drill into me. “No. I can’t talk to it. That’s why we came here. I want to try. I can only hear it. I don’t know why, or how. I’m not the only one, though. There’re epileptics on Moloka`i who put it together first.”

“Wait, so … can all epileptics hear it?”

I don’t answer immediately. The way he said that bothers me. Then it hits me: I don’t like the idea of sharing the Orchid. “I have no idea.”

Buzz stares at me.

“I know how it sounds, believe me.”

Buzz clears his throat. He circles around the displays to stand in front of us. “Epilepsy.” It’s not a question, just a word, as if he’s thrown it up on a chalkboard to study it.

We wait.

Buzz takes a deep breath. “That Star Flower’s signature has been off the charts every which way. We were studying it like mad even before it blossomed onto the visible spectrum. Then it surged, of course, destroying most of our equipment. But we recognized that the transmissions were from a sentient being from the moment it entered the solar system.”

“Hold on. You knew about this thing before it … blew up in everyone’s faces?” Dad asks. The weight of his question punches me. Everything we’ve been through … If we all could have had more warning …

“Slow down.” Buzz raises his palms defensively. “No one’s ever dealt with a first-contact scenario before. We had no idea it would pop all of a sudden.”

“The president knew.” Dad raises his voice. “The prime minister of Japan knew! We were thirty miles away from the observatory! Why did they get all the warning?”

“The Subaru scope up here—it’s funded and operated by Japan. You’ll have to ask those folks what they relayed to their government. We’re on the same mountain, but we don’t necessarily coordinate. As for us, we contacted the Defense Department, in accordance with protocol. They called the shots. There’s a mandatory cooling-off period built into the protocols. No leaks.”

“A cooling-off period?”

“Dad.”

Buzz drops his head. He runs his hand through his hair while he looks at his shoes. “Look, if I had to do it over again, we would have gone public immediately. Hindsight is … We had no way of knowing.”

Dad relaxes. “Yeah. I guess so. But the president still—”

“The White House has its own protocol in the event of first contact. We never gave them anything actionable. They had their reaction all lined up sixty years ago. Earth-visitation scenarios always assumed a far superior technology or intellect than our own. A defensive posture was the only logical one. Anyway, the president changed his mind. He was trying to tell the whole world it was arriving when it blossomed and fried our satellites.”

We’re quiet, watching Dad toy with the eyepiece of one of the big telescopes near the foyer.

“It’s not intelligent,” I say. “I mean, not like us. It’s more like a … a sea turtle.”

“A sea turtle.” Buzz loses himself in thought. “Okay. A giant … space turtle. Just doing its thing. Coming ashore to lay eggs. Wow.”

Dad pats Buzz on the shoulder. “Sorry, Buzz. You have no idea what we’ve been through. We would have stayed on the Big Island if we’d known—”

“You guys were off-island when the blackout began?”

“O`ahu,” I say. “We just made it back. Yesterday.”

Buzz stares at me, agape. He shakes himself out of his trance. “We effed up, big time. I honestly don’t think it would have changed anything, but we should have done more. Learned more. I don’t know. Maybe it’s not too late. It’s finally leaving—which is not a blessing, believe me. But maybe those of us left can make do. Go underground. Rebuild. Repair all that integrated circuitry. No more tungsten, obviously. I’ve noticed that some analog circuits can still function. Basic batteries, resistors, transistors, and diodes can work. Edison would still be in business. We just have to go back to the level of technology that was around when he—”

“Buzz … what about all the meltdowns?” I ask.

He stammers. “You—you know about that, too?”

I nod. “The Orchids—they’re radiation mops. If they leave, nuclear winter falls.”

“How did you figure that out?”

“A priest on Moloka`i started us thinking. He’d figured it out. There have been meltdowns, but no radiation.”

Buzz laughs. He gathers his wits and says, “At least thirty plants have gone supernova, last we could count. As fail-safes buckle I bet we’ll average a couple a week from here on out. Right—the crazy irony is that these Star Flowers seem to render the radiation inert. Like I said, it’s not good that they’re leaving. We need them now.”

“What if we can bring them back?” Dad says.

Buzz turns to me. “You came up here because you’ve found a way to talk to it?”

I shift my feet. “Not really. I tried to get its attention once, but it didn’t work. But I thought that if I were just a little bit closer to it, maybe it could hear me.”

“Because you’re higher up?”

Dad and I nod.

Buzz’s expression is kind. “Okay. There’s a lot going on here. First thing: you haven’t gotten closer to anything. The Star Flowers are drifting away at about fifteen thousand feet per minute . Since we started this conversation, they’ve already moved about four times as far as this mountain is tall.”

“Oh.” I steal a glance at Dad. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so stupid in my entire life.

“The other thing is that we’re turning. Relative to Hawai`i, it’s on the other side of the globe right now. It won’t rise until about four p.m. So, technically, as far as distance is concerned, at this particular moment you’d actually be closer to it if you were at sea level.”

“The Orchids rise at four?” Dad asks.

“They come over the horizon at four. We don’t see them until dark, but we’ll be in line with them by then. That doesn’t really seem to impact their effect on us . But if you want to get their attention, it’s best to wait.”