F. Brejcha: With Other Eyes

But as I thought about their comics counterpart, I was suddenly a little worried.

“We better not tell them what we think they look like!” I had just remembered that Al Capp’s Shmoos were very obliging in turning themselves into anything edible that was desired.

“Ouch!” Lazz obviously realized what I meant. “You’re right. I forgot about that. When I was collecting, I was more into the Japanese comics.”

“Violence and sex. That figures.”

“Well,” he defended. “We all need our little distractions. Of course, I have Liza now.”

Another burst of noise from one of the Travelers interrupted, I couldn’t tell from which one, but after a moment we heard: “Balance is restored. You can stay.” It was a new voice this time; an equally mechanical female one. My computer gave a different, randomly selected, ‘voice’ to each new Traveler speech input.

I was suddenly reminded of the fact that there was no difference between the collective and the singular “you”, but Lazz just grumbled.

“Gee, very nice of you.”

I nudged him with my elbow and typed: “Thank you. May we meet with your leader, now?”

Lazz gave a snorting laugh. “Gee, I never thought we’d be the ones to say that!”

“Hey guys, your signal is fading…” Liza’s voice disappeared with a final popping sound.

“Now what?” Lazz asked nervously. “Pitch a bitch again?”

I shook my head, wishing I could see through the face-plate of his suit. “No, I can just hear the answer. Our having contact with the space station is an advantage for us. They’re just maintaining parity. We’re on our own.” I reached down to type: “What is next?”

Squeal, and then: “You must follow.” They spun in unison and headed for the back wall of the hold, where a large triangular door waited. The shape was beginning to make a little sense now that we had seen what the Travelers looked like: they were also tiny on top and wide on the base.

The doorway turned out to be the first in a pair of heavy, automatic doors leading into a large room about six by ten meters in floor area. I began to suspect what it was and I warned Lazz to hold on, since we didn’t have the lower body stability of the Travelers. Sure enough, without warning I found myself lurching to the side as my feet tried to pull away from me and I grabbed for the door frame as Lazz locked onto my arm with an iron grip.

“We’re in a spin coupler,” I explained belatedly. “We’re matching up with the rotation of the rest of the ship, and I guess the next step is to go down into one of the pyramids.”

Before long, my feet stopped trying to escape from me and I was able to let go of the doorway. The Travelers had been oblivious to our imbalance, and as the far doorway opened they led the way out into a large room where we found ourselves drifting up into the air, our magnetic boots no longer gripping. The room had three triangular corridors about four meters in diameter extending out, one in each wall—now that we were floating, the term “floor” didn’t really apply to any of the surfaces around us. Our hosts continued to ignore us, and used fine guide-wires crossing the room to rotate and float gracefully towards the right, turning to push themselves, feet first, into one of the corridors. As they turned in mid-air, I noticed that they were also wearing some sort of boot arrangement made of metal.

Feeling light-headed, I turned to Lazz. “Here we go, buddy: down and out.” I followed the Travelers’ example only to find that the corridor was apparently an elevator, because my feet quickly touched floor, adhering as they found magnetic grounding again. And as soon as Lazz snapped in place next to me, we began to drop outwards. It felt strange to be so close to our bizarre hosts, but I quickly found a distraction.

After we had been dropping a little while, I discovered that our ‘elevator’ was nothing more than a guided platform provided with guide-rails that kept it on track and powered it. Instead of continuing down a shaft as expected, we were suddenly in mid-air, dropping down towards a wild jungle that occupied the inside of the pyramid.

With all the open air around me I suddenly felt almost as nauseated and disoriented as on my first shuttle trip, and my hand clenched on Lazz’s arm as I backed towards the center of the platform nervously. Compounding the effect of the dizzying view around us was a familiar sensation: the mild disorientation one felt in moving from hub to rim on the station that was the combined effect of Coriolis force and change in gravity. I couldn’t help myself but swallowed hard as I squeezed my eyes shut, relieved that the action cut off the eye-set input. Technically, I could easily have been able to keep seeing almost as well with my eyes shut as open, but to my relief the programming of my eyes simulated reality.

Within minutes I grew aware of a welcome feeling: increasing pressure against the soles of my feet again as we moved down into the pyramid. Steadied by the return of gravity and prompted by curiosity, I opened my eyes.

As we plunged into the tree tops we stared out in awe, admittedly a little nervous, but also fascinated by the organic tapestry weaving itself through the air around us. An invisible barrier kept the lush growth at bay, several meters from the path of our lift. Apparently the top of this pyramid— and also the others? I wondered—was reserved for vegetation that grew almost unchecked in the low gravity this high up. I also noticed a fine network of wires laced through the branches and realized that they were there to support the jungle during acceleration and deceleration since the entire pyramid would be under gravity during those times.

Edging carefully forward, I moved closer to the edge and tried to spot the floor of the jungle below us, but I only saw increasingly dense and interwoven branches that grew more disciplined the further we dropped from the central shaft of the ship. I was starting to wonder if there was anything in this pod but forest. I tried to spot movement, curious to see if there would be any animal life up here, and Lazz must have guessed what I was thinking.

“There!” He pointed at a swarm of tiny shapes that were making flying leaps from branch to branch. They had small glistening bodies shaped a little like a pair of dumb-bells, large antennae-like fronds on the top of the front body bulge, and an indeterminate number of legs.

“Traveler monkeys,” I decided.

“Kinda’ purty,” Lazz drawled with a New England twang that made me cringe.

“True.” I looked around. “But all this makes me wonder how long this ship has been traveling.”

“You think it’s a generation-ship?” Lazz looked dubious. As big as these pods are, if they’re like this, I don’t think the ship’s big enough.”

“Maybe not, but we don’t know what the other pyramids hold. Maybe cryo-chambers? Maybe these guys just woke up. It could be an automatic sleeper-ship and this is some sort of recreational area they use when awake. Who knows how many solar systems they’ve explored?”

Lazz yielded and looked at our hosts with new interest. “Want to ask them?”

I shook my head. “Not yet. These two are only crew. I want to wait until we meet the ones I originally contacted.”

A sudden shift in movement interrupted me and I realized that our ride was over. The platform had landed on top of a metal pad in the middle of a jungle. There were no buildings, paths or artificial structures in sight, other than our elevator platform and the guide-rails disappearing up to merge with the shaft we had come out of.

I looked up, trying to guess the distance we had descended. “How far did we come?” I asked Lazz, since he was more experienced with the eyes and had a good sense of distance.