Space Rocks! (9 page)

B
efore I took them below, I encouraged the humans to conceal their rocket-bikes as best they could.

“Couldn't we use them to get around in the caves?” asked Nicki.

“Yeah. Beats walking,” said Becky.

“Not inside,” I said. “Too narrow.” The rocket bikes were too big for most of the winding confines of the tunnel system.

The humans ended up stashing all four of them inside a nearby crater. They were invisible unless you were looking down from above or actually standing inside the crater itself. It wasn't a perfect hiding spot, but it was better than nothing.

“So where is this entrance?” asked Hollins.

I found a thoroughly ordinary blue-gray Gelo rock and reached behind it, fiddling around a bit. There was a click and then a hiss as it swung open to reveal a dark tunnel behind it.

The four humans followed me inside, and I closed the hatch behind us with a dull clank.

“My home,” I said.

Their eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom. Then their mouths fell open. We stood in a cavern that snaked its way downward, toward the heart of the asteroid. The walls and floor were covered with countless species of mushrooms and lichens and molds. Bulbous phosphorescent globules—fungus that we Xotonians call glowing zhas—provided enough dim greenish light for the humans to see.

“Dude. This. Place. Is. Super. Weird,” said Little Gus, slowly reaching out to touch a feathery sicras-stalk growing out of the rocks. The sicras-stalk recoiled from his hand, startling him.

It struck me how strange these caverns—utterly familiar to me—must seem to a typical human. They'd all been born and raised on the bright blue-and-green surface of Eo.

“We thought this asteroid was totally lifeless,” said Hollins, shaking his head in disbelief. “I guess we were just focused on looking for iridium.”

“I have to collect samples!” cried Nicki. And she ran to the walls and began picking one of each type of fungus and carefully storing it inside an individual plastic baggie. Fascinated by fungi. She and Linod would probably get along well.

“Nicki, come on,” said Becky. “Those things are disgusting.” But from her tone I could tell she held little hope of dissuading her duplicate in this matter.

The humans were still wearing their spacesuits. Hollins checked the meter on his belt.

“Only thirty minutes of oxygen left,” he sighed.

“Air here breathable . . . for humans,” I reiterated. This was the reason I'd brought them here. Becky and Hollins looked at each other.

“If you're wrong about this . . .” said Becky to me, crossing her arms.

“We'll all suffocate to death horribly,” added Nicki helpfully. She noticed that everyone was staring at her. “What? If we want it to learn proper grammar, we have to speak in complete sentences.”

“Maybe bringing us here to suffocate was its plan all along?” said Becky. That would have been a very complicated and time-consuming plan, I thought, considering I could have just as easily let them die in their own pod.

I didn't share this, of course. Instead I said, “Not plan.”

“Too late to worry about it now,” said Hollins. “We have no choice but to trust Chorkle. If I pass out, try to re-pressurize my suit and wake me up.”

“Pass out?” said Little Gus. “Wait, Hollins, maybe we should—”

Hollins cut him off. “Here goes nothing,” he said. In one final act of not quite total trust, he took a big breath of air. Then he popped the seal on his spacesuit's helmet.

He slowly lifted the helmet off his head, still holding his breath. Everyone stared at him in agonizing silence. I suddenly started to worry that I'd incorrectly judged how much oxygen these humans actually needed to live.

Hollins's skin took on a bluish tinge. He began to tap his foot. At last he gasped and sucked in a big breath of Gelo cavern atmosphere. His face looked terrified. Gradually his breathing slowed to normal. His fear gave way to a smile. He gave the others a nod, and one by one they popped off their helmets as well.

They all began to laugh. Little Gus danced around and burst into an impromptu song about how cool breathing is.

“Chorkle, you did it!” cried Nicki, and she wrapped both her arms around me and squeezed. “So the air in these caverns must be at least seventeen percent oxygen, right?”

“Uh,” I said.

“An alien best friend,” said Little Gus, trying to pick me up but toppling us both over. “Everybody in sixth grade is going to be so jealous. Might even impress a few seventh graders.”

“This still doesn't make up for causing our pod to crash,” said Becky.

“Come on, Becky,” said Hollins. “Ease up. Credit where credit is due. Thank you, Chorkle. You saved our lives. You're still a prisoner, though.”

“Thanks, alien,” said Becky quietly. She still sounded angry.

The truth is, Becky was right. I'd solved the most pressing of the humans' problems; they weren't going to run out of air. So what? It still didn't make up for stranding them here.

“Chorkle, are there any others of your kind?” asked Hollins. Now that the immediate danger had passed, he was already trying to think of the next step of their plan. “Maybe they could fly us back to our parents.”

“Xotonians not have starship,” I said.

“Maybe there's another way they could—”

“Others not . . . understand humans,” I said. I was trying not to scare anyone.

There was no way I could take them to Core-of-Rock. I could only imagine what Sheln—and all the others who favored a direct attack on the humans—might do if I brought these four back home with me. In fact, now the greatest danger to these humans was probably running into an angry mob of Xotonians in the tunnels.

And if I'm being truly honest, there was another, more selfish reason I didn't want to go home: Kalac. If I hadn't sneaked aboard the human pod, the asteroid-quake plan would have gone off without a hitch, and the humans would now be gone from our world.

Instead I'd stranded these four on our asteroid and, even worse, allowed myself to be seen by the human commander. By now, probably all twelve billion humans knew that Gelo was inhabited. It sounded like the humans were going to return with soldiers to reclaim their offspring. Like Becky, Kalac had every right to be furious with me. I just couldn't face that.

I tried to tell myself my intentions had been good, but it didn't change a thing.

It was up to me to get the young humans back to their families and somehow avert a war between our two peoples. If by some miracle I could solve both those monumental problems—unlikely, considering I had no good ideas for either of them—only then would it be safe for me to return home.

“So what do we do now?” asked Nicki. She'd collected one of every fungus in the immediate area. She was already straining under the weight of her duffle bag.

“Keep moving,” I said. “Moving . . . safe.” That last part of what I said might not have been technically true. I probably should have said “safer.” But again, I didn't want to frighten them. And I did need to take them someplace where other Xotonians wouldn't find them.

“Follow,” I said.

We walked a hundred meters until we came to a fork in the passage. A right-hand turn was the first of the twenty-seven that would lead us to Core-of-Rock.

I turned left. I was taking them deeper into the Unclaimed Tunnels.

“S
o much of the life in these caverns apparently requires no sunlight at all,” said Nicki while scraping at a green . . . something on the rocks. “It's interesting. This is the only species I've seen that seems to engage in any sort of photosynthesis whatsoever. And it apparently relies on the light from the glowing zhas—not the sun!”

“Yes, that is interesting,” I lied.

According to my chronometer, we'd been traveling through the Unclaimed Tunnels for over a day now. Nicki's sense of scientific wonder was undiminished. As fascinating as I found all things human, she was even more interested in learning everything about my subterranean world.

She held up a tiny piece of the green something with a pair of tweezers. “I mean, what do you even call this stuff?”

“I . . . I don't know,” I said. “It doesn't have a name. You can name it.”

Her face lit up. “Well, I've been referring to most of what we've seen growing down here as ‘fungi' because of certain apparent similarities to organisms we have on Earth,” she said. “But obviously, any life on this asteroid evolved completely separately from life on Earth. I mean, unless you believe in exogenesis or something.”

Here, she paused as though she expected a response from me. I shrugged.

“We might need a whole new kingdom of biological classification!” she said. “Probably more than one, even.” Her words were tumbling out of her mouth now, as they always seemed to when she got excited.

“Then, of course, we would have to come up with its phylum, class, order, family, and genus. It would take years of study,” she said, now frowning at the problem of the anonymous green speck. “Giving it a proper scientific name at this time is impossible.”

“Why don't you just call it ‘Little-Gus-Is-the-Original-King'?” said Little Gus, strolling up to us. “It's simple. Easy to remember. Rolls off the tongue.”

“I think that name would be confusing,” said Nicki, distractedly making handwritten notes about the green something, “but I'll take it under advisement.”

“Anyway, dinner's ready,” said Little Gus. Despite being the youngest of the humans, he had assumed the role of the group's cook. It wasn't so much that he was good at cooking; it was more that the other three were terrible at it. Personally, I couldn't tell much difference. The only human food I cared to eat was astronaut ice cream. After that nothing ever tasted sweet enough.

“Tonight we're having Little Gus Stew, piping hot!” said Little Gus. I was starting to detect a recurring theme as to how he chose to name things. The group had eaten Little Gus Eggs that morning.

“What is Little Gus Stew?” I asked as the three of us walked back toward our camp.

“Simple recipe. Take all your dehydrated food and mix it together. Then add water and heat it over an open flame until it turns from gray to dark gray,” he said. “Of course, the secret ingredient is love.”

We walked beside a huge underground lake that seemed to stretch on forever. This lake had no name that I knew of. We were far into the Unclaimed Tunnels now. Fifty-nine turns from Core-of-Rock, if we retraced our steps.

This was an area where Xotonians rarely traveled—which is exactly why I had brought us here. The occasional hunter or forager or scout might pass through these deserted caverns. But the entirety of our small civilization was located at Core-of-Rock. Almost all our food, water, and other necessities were produced within the protection of the Stealth Shield. According to Hudka, this too was by Jalasu Jhuk's design.

Hudka. The thought of my grand-originator gave me a pang of homesickness. I'd been gone for nearly two days now. Hudka was probably worried about me. At least it had some idea of where I'd gone, I tried to tell myself. Maybe Hudka was sitting at home running up its own high score in Xenostryfe III. Wishful thinking, probably.

While I missed Hudka, I dreaded the thought of seeing Kalac. I couldn't imagine how disappointed and angry my originator would be.

So far, our journey through the Unclaimed Tunnels had been a slow one. In many ways humans were not well suited to subterranean travel.

These juveniles were a bit taller than even the average adult Xotonian, and, owing to their strange body structure, they often had a hard time squeezing through narrow passages.

They had difficulty even walking in this environment, especially across cavern floors that were smooth and slick with water and fine silt. Every so often, one of them would fall and land on their backside. If it didn't look too painful, the others would laugh.

Early on in the journey, Nicki had slipped off a narrow ledge and slid thirty meters down a steep, mud-covered slope. Luckily, she hadn't been seriously hurt. But her bag had been open at the time, and a good bit of the human food supply had fallen out of it and into a deep crevasse—a space so narrow that even I couldn't retrieve it. She was much more concerned with all her biological samples that had been lost. After the incident, Hollins instituted a policy that all the humans should be tethered together when walking.

“This way, if one of us falls, the others can hold them up,” he said after they'd tied a rope around all their waists.

“More like if one of us falls, we take all the others with us,” grumbled Becky. Again, I wasn't sure she was wrong.

Light was also an issue. The glowing zhas is an extremely common species, and it bathes most caverns in a dim, greenish light, about as bright as twilight on Eo, according to the humans.

But there are some tunnels where there is no glowing zhas. And in those places, human eyes were totally useless.

“Try to dilate your pupils further,” I said to them after we'd reached one such darkened area, “to let more light in.”

“We can't ‘try' to do that,” said Becky. “Our pupils just dilate on their own.”

“Then your species needs more eyes,” I grumbled.

“You know, that's a really good idea,” said Nicki, attempting to jot something down in her notebook despite her inability to see. Presumably she'd had a thought about how to increase the human eyeball count.

In the deepest darkness, the humans had no choice but to pull out their small illumination devices—“flashlights,” as they were called—to light their way. These flashlights were annoying to me because their brightness made it impossible for me to see into the darkest corners of the caverns.

Occasionally, one of the humans would accidentally shine the beam right into my light-sensitive eyes, causing me a moment of excruciating pain and rendering me temporarily blind.

I begged them to please watch where they pointed those things. I needed my eyes. There was no shortage of dangers—Xotonian or otherwise—to watch out for in the Unclaimed Tunnels.

I was carefully avoiding the somewhat heedless beam of Little Gus's flashlight as we arrived at our camp on the shore of the lake—which, of course, had been christened “Little Gus Lake.” The humans spread out their bedrolls on a small peninsula jutting a few dozen meters out into the calm black water.

A metal pot steamed over a little fire. Fragrant Little Gus Stew bubbled inside it. The humans figured out fairly quickly that fires were only a good idea in large caves with proper ventilation. Otherwise the smoke made breathing impossible.

“That acrid burning smell means it's almost done,” said Little Gus as he began to stir the stew.

Nicki sat down and began quietly classifying. By now, she'd nearly refilled her bag with samples, almost too many to carry.

Hollins's hologram device—the same model as the one I had, er, borrowed from Nicki—sat tantalizingly on a nearby rock.

“Is that a human hologram device?” I asked, feigning ignorance.

“Yeah, it's a Tunstall 24x Holodrive,” she said. “I used to have one that I coded on sometimes. But I lost it.”

“Why is it called a ‘Tunstall 24x Holodrive'?” I asked, trying to change the subject.

“Well, ‘holo' is from the word ‘hologram.' And ‘drive' is like a computer drive. And ‘Tunstall' is a company that makes computers. I don't know about the ‘24x,' though. Sometimes we just add numbers and
x
's to make things sound cooler, I guess,” she said. “Anyway, it's pretty useless.”

“Why?”

“Well, the ship was our only link to satellite service. So no Internet. I think Hollins has just been using it to make a map of the caverns we've been through.”

“I wonder if it has any games on it,” I said. “I mean, if you humans indeed play games on such devices, a question to which I don't know the answer. Obviously.”

Nicki stared at me for a second. “Yeah, it has some games,” she said, something in her eyes changing. I recognized the expression because I'd seen it on Hudka, probably even made it myself. It was the look of a hologram game addict.

“Here, let me show you,” she said, “to give you a sense of what human culture is like.” Nicki activated the device with a flick of her hand, and the three-dimensional menu floated in space before her.

“This one is called Super Mar—”

“How about that one?” I said, pointing to the flying saucer icon of the blast-the-aliens game.

“How do you know that's a game?” she asked.

“Er, just a guess. Is it one? I don't know,” I said.

“Yeah. It's called Xenostryfe III,” she said. “But . . . I don't know if we should play it.”

“Why?”

“Well, I'm worried that you might find it, uh, offensive,” said Nicki.

“It's all about blasting aliens to goop,” said Little Gus from across the campfire.

“Well, uh, yeah. Basically,” said Nicki.

“It's okay,” I said. “This is not offensive.”

“Good,” said Nicki, relieved. “I'm not a violent person, but Xenostryfe is my favorite thing to do on a holodrive outside of coding. In fact, I've been working on a mod where you shoot at flying doughnuts instead of—”

“Choose two-player mode,” I said, now dropping all pretense. I needed my hologram-game fix.

Each of us grabbed a holographic blaster, and we repelled a computerized alien invasion together. Our lasers wove a web of fiery death for all flying saucers. Nicki was amazing at the game. Though I must admit, I wasn't too bad myself. Final score: Nicki, 1,659,870; Chorkle, 1,659,842.

“Wow . . . it's almost like you played that game before,” she said.

“Almost,” I said.

“Wait, did Chorkle beat you at Xenostryfe?” asked Little Gus, amazed.

“Nope. My score was twenty-eight points higher,” snapped Nicki, startling me.

It was unlike her. I momentarily wondered if I was actually talking to her duplicate. Had Becky stolen Nicki's vision lenses to play some elaborate trick on me?

But the outburst passed just as quickly as it had come, and she went back to placidly taking notes on her specimens.

“Is it rude to ask how you were duplicated?” I said.

“Not rude,” said Nicki, a little uncomfortably. “So first off, we're twins. We weren't ‘duplicated.' Except . . . we sort of were, I guess. See, with identical twins, the zygote splits into two separate embryos. . . .”

And she launched into an extended description of human reproduction, as disgusting as it was terrifying.

“Wow. Giving Chorkle the talk already?” said Hollins, thankfully interrupting the lecture. He and the real Becky had returned to camp together. Both of them held a coil of twine with a makeshift wire hook on the end.

“And just where were you two?” asked Nicki, her voice suddenly sharp again.

“Still trying to catch those reeya . . . er, ruhyee . . .” said Hollins, trying to remember the Xotonian word I'd taught him. His pronunciation was atrocious. As quickly as I had been picking up the human language—Nicki had described it as “linguistic hyperaptitude”—the humans were very slow to learn even the most rudimentary Xotonian.

“Chorkle, help me out here,” he said at last.

“R'yaris,” I said. He was searching for the word for the blind aquatic creatures common to the underground lakes of Gelo. They range in size from nearly microscopic to almost as large as a full-grown Xotonian.

“Right, reehaayrees . . . those fish-thingies,” he said. “But I haven't had any luck.”

“I'm not sure I'd want to eat a r'yari if we could catch one,” said Becky. “I got a pretty good look at them. They're like brains that can swim.”

“Heh, you're just mad because you didn't catch anything,” said Hollins.

“Thanks for the psychoanalysis,” said Becky. “But you didn't catch anything either, Dr. Freud.”

“What is Dr. Freud?” I asked. No one answered.

“Yeah, I know. But it doesn't make me angry. It inspires me to do better. ‘With self-discipline, most anything is possible.' Teddy Roosevelt,” said Hollins smugly. “Tomorrow, I'm going to use a little bit of dehydrated beef for bait. I'll catch a ton of brain-fish.”