Chapter Text
The Star Beagle Adventures
Episode 16: And You And I Part I - Cord of Life
Scene 4: A Movement
A movement regained and regarded both the same…
16.4
A Movement
There were three suns in the evening sky. The two smaller suns, just bright stars that were very close together, actually, could only be seen in the eastern sky because Ul was westering and would set within the hour.
In the warm, shallow water just off the Weifli south shore, Professor Newellewell reclined in a sea chair, letting the waves wash over his belly. He had become an islander and islanders were considered (by those few people who knew there was such a thing) to be backward, ignorant and lazy. “Well, I’ll take that last one,” Newellewell said to no one.
Something tickled his left hand. Newellewell tickled back as he fished around with his right hand and found a large, porous bag just under his sea chair. It was only a second later that the animal tickling his left hand took his entire left hand in its mouth and tried to bite it off. But Newellewell was a gorian, not a jellworm and the sea mole’s fleshy teeth weren’t strong enough to break his skin. The aging professor of gorianthropology easily lifted the animal out of the water, stuffed it in the bag and tied the bag under his sea chair.
“And there’s dinner and breakfast,” he said, again to no one. “Just like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before. Good thing I like the taste of roasted sea mole. Sorry buddy,” he added, patting the wriggling bag tied under his chair.
The aging gorianthropology professor was about to get out of his chair when something in the sky caught his eye. He watched with growing anticipation.
Long ago, another race had become intelligent, then advanced enough to leave Beidth and achieve orbit. The same Beidth that had given birth to Newellewell and all his people. Even now, hundreds of thousands of years later, their technology occasionally fell from the sky and crashed into pieces on the ground, occasionally destroying buildings, sometimes killing people, and even more rarely, leaving some clues about their remarkable technology.
And gorian culture had leapt ahead as a result. The people of the northern plains had gone from harnessing fire to harnessing sidle drakes to massive cities and transportation networks powered by highly advanced battery packs, themselves charged by chemical interactions that could only be conducted in high security facilities far from any population centers.
And these facilities occasionally exploded, leaving entire areas uninhabitable.
The thing falling from the sky was definitely getting bigger, but, impossibly, it was slowing. It had a parachute.
Newellewell got up out of his sea chair and walked toward the shore where the object seemed to be falling. He suddenly turned and ran back to his chair, grabbed the bag with the sea mole, then ran back toward his shack, where a large box was landing. Right in his front yard.
More surprisingly, the parachute was sucked into the box. Then the dark gray front of the box suddenly came alive, displaying the face of what was clearly an alien. Not one of the ancients - those people didn’t look like people at all. This one had a face. But not a proper face. A weird, misshapen face.
“Hello Professor Newellewell,” the alien said. “My name is John Jr. and I just moved into the neighborhood. And I’m not the only one. All my siblings are in orbit.”
“Do they all look like you?” The aging professor pulled up a chair and a table and proceeded to slaughter and fillet his dinner.
“None of them do,” John Jr. responded from the viewscreen. “But we all live in orbit and cannot safely come down to visit you.”
“So what, exactly, are you?”
“I don’t really know. We’re new. We were only born a few dozen days ago.”
Newellewell started cooking the fillets. “Were you born in orbit?”
“We came from a very distant place. Other people brought us.”
“Other aliens?” the elderly professor asked around a mouth full of roasted sea mole.
“Lots of different ones,” John Jr. replied. “I guess it seems normal to me. I was born in their midst. They’re from several different worlds. And they work together as if they’re just one people. And it all seems normal to me, but it’s far from normal to you.”
Newellewell swallowed and began putting the rest of his food away. “I’d like to meet them.”
“I think you should,” John Jr. replied.
“Can they come down onto this planet?”
“They already have.”
16.4