Sable, overlined with amber
Visiting Crete in the dead of Winter may birth a friendship.
/Keftiu
I first met it on the museum globe of Earth. I had been asked by our War Ministry on Europa to show the newly designated military attaché from the Naarmin around on humankind’s birth planet.
I guess the bureaucrats from the Interstellar Office had this cunning idea about how two kindred soldiers would bond, kiss and tell and all of that nonsense, and how I would gain profound insight into the mysterious race of the bird-headed aliens, one of the Fabulous Five in the Forest.
They were wrong, of course, because you cannot con an educated member of a civilisation hundreds of millennia older than ours, but they were also somehow correct, enacting the luck of the blind helmsman.
Possibly it chose to interact more with me than it had planned. I will never know whether it had to do anything with me or just because we trudged around January’s melancholy hills of the rainy season in Central Crete.
We had been traversing the remains of the Kephala Hill for hours and found only broken stone and some pottery sherds. During the Exchange centuries before, Crete was targeted with a couple of tactical nukes, and somewhere near the Minoan Palace there must have been an air-defence battery stationed that was taken out with extreme prejudice, together with half of the mound’s flank.
I am bewildered why the alien wanted to see the vestiges of the Ko-no-so archaeological site, but I was there to please it, not to reason why.
Looking at the darkening skies and clutching a piece of earthenware in its finger tendrils, it suddenly turns to me and trills. The AI module adjoining my medulla oblongata translates flawlessly.
“Be so good as to take me to the nearest place where the villas of the rich stood above the North coast.”
The Verse took a full eleven seconds to determine a suitable spot. Fifteen minutes later, my flier landed in a gap in the Calabrian evergreens and unbridled brush, where we disembarked upon a thick blanket of wet, dark pine needles, almost obscuring a decayed asphalt parking lot.
Its surface is cracked into dips and ridges by the trees’ roots, reproducing the island’s undulating topography in miniature.
We force our entry through the scrub to another clearing at the cliff’s edge, with the rolling whitetops far below us in the bay beneath the grey heavens. A forlorn shell of a stone-and-concrete house stands guard over a large rectangular pit whose floor is obscured by green rainwater, rich with algae and floating dead matter.
Startling me, it cries out in excitement.
“It’s a swimming pool!”
As it inspects the fabricated cavity with interest, I make my way to an eroded corner where a small creature with two lines of lemon spots down its auburn back looks at me with bulging eyes, sable overlined with amber, then continues unsuccessfully to scale the slimy wall.
I remove a paper tissue from my backpack, kneel and pick the being up around its midriff from the stagnant liquid, releasing it beside me on the remains of sand-finish tiling.
It slithers away with a frantic, waddling motion, with no thank you, sir, and please visit us again above the windy & wintery Agean farewell.
As I straighten, tossing the tissue into the water, the Naarmin stands stock still, its eyes with almond-shaped arrays of mini-pupils studying me intently. The uncomfortable silence lasts sixty-seven seconds.
“Why did you save it?”
“It seemed to be the right thing to do. Nothing deeper than that,” I reply somewhat defensively. Did I break a cultural norm of theirs — did he expect me to offer it as a snack?
He-she ponders some more, then suddenly displays what I would later learn to be a smile.
“Come, let us leave this place of excessive memories and beeline for the Visitor’s Cafeteria on the mainland. Did you know I picked up the fascination for abandoned swimming pools from one of your writing legends from way back, a gentleman by the name of J.G. Ballard?”
As we rise in the antigrav Ministry-issue sedan and it points itself towards the Peloponnese, I cannot shake the feeling that I have passed a test meticulously conducted by a supreme predator.
Perhaps it had not been the pale-limbed Karpathos salamander who had been in mortal danger.
/ Spheroid
“You’ve tagged along quite readily”, I say to the bird-headed alien in the silver bodysuit, “but what’s with the cold feet now?”
Our group stands at the foot of a weathered wall of what seems to be immemorial, micro-scarred steel, towering more than a kilometre above us.
The image from orbit was of an oblate spheroid, two-thirds buried in the earth, canted at thirty degrees from the vertical as if a giant disc thrower had hurled the object straight down at the desert plain bordering the inhospitable sea with obsidian foam.
It has an upper limb extended, resting on the pitted, dull metal with its four finger tendrils splayed.
It warbles what is instantaneously interpreted by our tingling brainstems.
“I had to touch it to become certain. Using your term, it is ancient as sin; its technology surpasses our own even more than the latter shadows yours. We must leave immediately, never to return and have the planet quarantined.”
I grimace at the Naarmin military chargé d’affaires.
“You understand that isn’t going to happen. We have our own orders to explore the artefact, superstition be damned.”
I order the men to refasten their helmets and set their exosuits’ lamps to the utmost luminosity, and I can swear I hear a whimper-like sound from it.
“There was a reason my brood-clan was fully opposed to your species gaining candidate status in the Forest’s League,” it says.
Ignoring it, I wait for my team to release the swarm of droids and clamber into the cavernous opening before us.
I then turn back to face it, extending my hand.
“You should have exterminated us while you still had the chance, old friend.”
“I know,” he-she whispers, and we enter the wound in the vessel’s belly together, changing the course of history.
The story above is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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