Matt Mikalatos

         When they fired my Uncle Rory he laughed so hard that he fell down outside the GAIA building, banging his forehead onto the sidewalk and bellowing into the ground.  When they told him he had botched the most important moment in history, tears squeezed out of his wrinkly little eyes and he wheezed for breath.  He!  Rory Stanovich!  He alone had made fools of the entire Global Allied Intergalactic Administration!  He had lost his job as a satbot programmer, yes.   But he would also be remembered on history sites as the greatest practical joker of all time.

         The only reason Uncle Rory programmed the Valkyr satbot was that no one thought it would find anything, certainly not sentient life.  When the first feeds came back from Abraxas Six showing insects and fish, no one thought anything of it.  There had been fourteen other planets with the same.  But then came the reptiles.  And then the mammals!  And then the news that on one continent the satbot had found what appeared to be tribal, tool-less life.  Language studies started pouring in, hours of them a day. 

         By then it was too late to take Uncle Rory off the project, and I could tell by the gleam in his eye that he had another joke in him.  The last time I had seen that gleam he had patched a live feed into his shower at home, and suddenly every screen in the Nor-Am New States had a long view of my Aunt Kitty scrubbing under her arms with a brush.  Everyone I knew had nightmares for weeks and weeks.  My aunt, bless her, never knew.  So when I saw that gleam I knew trouble was coming.

         After the Abraxian natives were comfortable with the satbot and it knew their language, GAIA decided the Abraxians should choose their first human ambassadors.  The whole First Contact department squealed—after all, they had trained hordes of people and spent skillions of creds for just such an eventuality—but GAIA ignored them and compiled an extensive, thousand-person database, listing a million bits of data: education, genetic viability, ethnicity, loquacity, dating history, vertiginous tendencies, musical preferences, on and on.  We invited the Abraxians to choose five from the list.  That's how Uncle Rory pulled off his joke.

         "A little luck is important in any practical joke," Uncle Rory always said.  "Timing and luck.  That I worked at GAIA, that I was on the Valkyr team, that sentient life was on Abraxas Six, this was all luck," Rory often said, as if teaching a class.  "But putting Benjamin's file in with the thousand ‘Exemplars of Humanity,' and slipping it past GAIA, now that was timing!"

         Imagine GAIA's surprise when the Abraxians chose me, Benjamin Stanovich.  Middle-aged, sagging, balding, bespectacled, unmarried, average Benjamin Stanovich.  Why the aliens wanted a mediocre professor of Hebraic studies from Nike University (TM) baffled everyone.  Yes, I was baffled, too.  I remember spitting out my milk.  I thought Uncle Rory was playing games when he told me on the vid, but then the news broke in over our conversation.  Nike was thrilled, of course, although somewhat surprised to find I worked for them.  I had been hired when I was younger and well, sportier. 

         "Maybe you will find some answers there, in outer space," said my Uncle Rory.  "Maybe you won't be always asking the questions."

         "I like the questions," I told him, "And I don't like pretending to know the answers.  I'm an agnostic."

         "Knock knock," he said.  He was a legendary knock-knock teller.

         "Who's there?" I said.  But Uncle Rory didn't answer.  "Who's there?" I repeated, but Uncle Rory just laughed and walked out of the room. 

         Meanwhile, GAIA's surprise shifted into anger when the satbot reported that the Abraxians wanted just one representative, thank you, send him or don't bother.  Forget the five exemplars of humanity.  No explanation, no nothing.  I was called in to the GAIA headquarters.  About ten minutes after I arrived, Uncle Rory was tossed out onto the pavement, roaring like a lunatic.

         It didn't get much better after that.  The Abraxians refused to budge.  Me or no one.  Thus began an invasive battery of tests, carried out with extra glee by the angry head of GAIA himself, who came out of semi-retirement as a physician to give me my "check up."  Then came the training.  Exercise, diets, eye surgery, and several failed attempts at hair grafts so I could be "presentable."  "You never get a second chance to make a first impression," the First Contact department kept saying over and over.  They finally bought me a toupee.  It kept floating off my head in zero-G when I was asleep and terrifying me when I came around a corridor to find its greasy tendrils waving at me.  In zero-G, toupees are worse than spiders.

         Even with the Yashima drives, I had to be in deepsleep a good twenty-six years.  A command team came, but they stayed in orbit while I shuttled down to the surface. It makes me sad to think that Uncle Rory is dead by now.  The dispatches from Earth say he was a big star by the end.  He had his own practical joke netshow and everything.  He had a heart attack in the middle of his show and no one knew it was for real.  For ten minutes everyone just roared and roared with laughter while he flopped around on the ground and called for help.  Suddenly he got really calm, they say, and when the audience got quiet he laughed, dry and low, for about a minute.  Everyone waited to see what he would do next.  Then he died. 

         There have—of course—already been "sightings" in New Vegas.  The Aunt Kitty footage is now considered a classic.  It's the second most often downloaded footage on the web, right next to Uncle Rory's death footage.  Someone on the command crew downloaded that for me.  I thought I would cry when I saw it, but I didn't.  I laughed like one of my male students upon hearing a gaseous discharge.  I think Rory knew he was dying but couldn't resist playing it for a gag.  The Aunt Kitty footage, on the other hand, disturbs me to this day.  There's nothing funny about that.

         Rory would have liked Abraxas Six.  Every class of animal that we have on earth is represented; nothing defies or even complicates classification.  In addition there are salamanders— Ambystoma tigrinum—genetically indistinguishable from those back home.  It throws everything into turmoil.  There's no new information to be found, or precious little.  The salamanders create extra trouble.  The odds are so astronomically unfavorable to identical evolution, even with similar environs, that the laymen collapse into babbling heaps. Several cults have started back home as a result, and at least one paranoid group believes that our salamanders were sent from Abraxas as spies. 

         Of course the scientists, being highly trained professionals, have no trouble at all with the salamanders. They've found ways to fit the salamanders into their theories. Grants have been issued in celebration of everyone's pet theory being proved scientifically verifiable by ambystoma tigrinum.  Yes, Rory would have liked Abraxas Six.  Especially the sailbirds.  Their mating call sounds just like him laughing at one of his dumb jokes.

         By the time I stepped out on the planet surface, the Abraxians had already learned English from the satbot.  "Hello, how are you?" one of them said.  I felt like one of the pilgrims being greeted by Squanto.  My shoulders slumped and my hands dropped to my side and the wind whipped my toupee off and over the fields. I stood there at the foot of the ramp, my mouth open, and finally stammered, "Fine.  I'm fine, how are you?"  So much for first impressions.  The Abraxians might as well have asked us to send them our Woody Allen archives.  Don't get me wrong, I love vintage Woody Allen. But you don't want him—or me, for that matter—to be the first thing a sentient race finds out about you.

         Another thing Uncle Rory would have liked here is watching the Abraxians speak.  They're similar to giant tortoises, but with parrot beaks and elephant legs.  An adult's shell peaks at about my shoulder height.  The shells have rows of dorsal thorns that point toward the anterior.  At night they form a ring with everyone facing inwards, the young and the very old in the center.  It keeps the predators out.  When they speak English, though, it's like watching a CGI sock puppet created by an untalented high school artist.  Uncle Rory would have liked that, too; the magnitude of his sock puppet collection invokes awe to this day.

         I was "adopted" into the Abraxian religious tribe—there are thirteen tribes—because they felt that would be my greatest contribution.  I objected at first, but when they asked me what I was good for, I didn't have a good answer.  "Can you join the circle at night?"  I had to admit I couldn't.  "Do you know how to sow the fields and plant the right seeds, to tell the weeds from the grain?"  No, I couldn't do that either.  They roll on their backs and their dorsal thorns break up the soil near flowering grain.  They even asked me if I could help, um, propagate their race, and of course, no, sorry.  I am ill-equipped for every duty of their society.  Except, of course, answering questions about the beliefs, customs and culture of the people of Earth.

         Their favorite questions have to do with my specialty, Hebraic studies.  By far their favorite topic is messianic prophecy and cults throughout history. They want to hear mostly about "successful" messiahs, by which they mean people with longevity of effect on the world and culture.  The three "messiahs" that received the hottest debate in the evening circles were Shabbetai Zevi, Yeshua of Nazareth and Julie Hampton of Romania.

         It was surreal, sitting in a circle created by giant tortoises, the howls and grunts of plains predators echoing over our heads, the little ones gathered around me and softly snoring, strange stars wheeling slowly overhead while alien beings debated the merits of this or that man who claimed to be Messiah.  Some took the position that Messiah was yet to come, of course.  I began to wonder what Uncle Rory had programmed that satbot to teach in the twenty-six years I had been en route.  I asked the satbot and it assured me it had access to extensive libraries, but had not been asked religious questions by the Abraxians.

         After three months Shukileo (an Abraxian elder I was particularly fond of) told me it was time for me to officially join the religious tribe.  Our wandering over the last few months had not been aimless, he told me.  Tomorrow I would enter the sacred cave, a privilege reserved for only the priestly class.  Going into a cave scared me enough on Earth.  The technicians at GAIA had assured me that I was completely wrong for the job of coming to Abraxas Six.  "According to your Heschenwick Temperament Test, you're not even curious," they said.  They were right.  I was scared to the bone.

         The sacred cave.  I've thought and thought, but I don't know how to explain it or prepare you for what it was.  It sounds so ludicrous and yet, there it was, like a genetically identical salamander.  You have to explain it somehow.  The cave itself was beautiful.  I had stayed up all night worrying for nothing.  Sinkholes in the "roof" let in plenty of sunlight, and I could walk upright into the holy place.  And there, carved on the walls, was the entire text of the Torah.  In ancient Hebrew.  In addition to the Torah there was the first half of the Book of the Kings, and a bit of Job.

         During the Diaspora, there was an old saying.  "Israel fills the whole world."  My first thought was that it must be some sort of hoax.  The satbot had carved it into the wall for some reason, maybe?  But no, the Abraxians told me it had been that way for many centuries.  In fact, they said, I was not the first to visit them from my planet.  The first visit, according to their oral traditions, had been about 2,650 years ago. 

         "Impossible," I told them.  "That would make it about 300 BCE.  That's back when we thought iron was innovative. Humanity was still unclear on the basic workings of the cosmos at that time."  What, I asked them, was the real story here?  If I was to be one of them, then I deserved to know.

         Then they described the "ship" to me.  There was a whole oral tradition about it: Beneath the eyelid of night, the chariots wait.  Light goes forth before them as before the stars.  Their sails are many, for in the cold reaches no wind blows.  Below them circles intersect, and each circle is a direction.  The fire never burned, and the chariots spoke for they were living beings.

         The talk of chariots and fire is what jolted it from me.  The dates were wrong, which had initially clouded my thoughts.  "Was he called Elijah?" I asked, and their dark eyes shone with pride.  Yes, yes, they all said, you know his name, truly you are one of us.  "But that's the wrong time," I said.  "The historical Elijah didn't live in 300 BCE.  The date is wrong by several hundred years."  Yes, they said, but he made stops along the way before he came here.  There are more than we two races to proselytize in the cold reaches where no wind blows.

         I was in a stupor for days.  It's inexplicable.  What is the answer?  The chariots are aliens?  Biological machinery?  The cherubim of Jewish tradition?  Angels from the Christian God?  The inter-species collective unconscious?  Israeli time-travelers?

         Like all the best practical jokers, whoever set this one up refuses to step forward to take the blame.  Me, I'm just a normal guy, a professor of Hebraic studies. In the end I try to make it all fit nicely into my own private philosophies, and I try not to think about the specifics.  For me that's no trouble; I'm an agnostic, after all.  What are a few more questions thrown into the pot?  The tribal elders laugh at my questions.  They say only one question interests them right now, and that is, "Who is messiah?"  They keep telling me to think about that.

         I think Uncle Rory knew somehow.  I think he knew how hard it would be to come here and keep up my agnosticism.  I can feel it slipping away from me, and I am trying to hold on.  Some nights, staring up at the Abraxian constellations, ringed in by my priestly brothers and slipping into sleep, I catch myself asking that same old question.  Who's there?  I see the stars, the bright planets, I think about the sacred cave and the salamanders.  It's like a knocking on the door, it's a message I can almost make out, a pattern in the sand that looks like letters.  "Who's there?" I say, in barely more than a whisper.  I'm caught off guard by the squawking, repeated rasp of a sailbird.  I almost believe it's Uncle Rory laughing.

 

Copyright 2006, Matt Mikalatos

Matt Mikalatos is leader of The Burning Hearts Revolution < http://mikalatos.blogspot.com >, which is not as cool as it sounds but he's working on it. 

 

 

Cover: "Alien Tower" 

Copyright 2006, L. S. King

A homeschooling mom, and a gramma, L. S. King taught martial arts for years, and currently coaches gymnastics. She loves Looney Tunes and the color purple, and adores Zorro, which might explain her fascination with swords and capes. When on the planet, she lives with her husband and youngest child in Delaware.

Visit her website Loriendil's Dreamland < loriendil.com > to read her published short stories or her blog.