Beyond the Sky: Chapter 12
Overview Effect
Velli jerked awake. At first her thoughts seemed half-remembered dreams, then it came flooding back: Submarine, torpedo. Attack on the island, chasing down Takji in the boat with Jasam. Then running ashore, and... Black Triangle. The monstrous creatures, again.
She sat up, on a padded mattress of some strange material, lying on the floor of an equally-strange room. The walls were white, pure white, and impossibly clean, slanted inward at left and straight on the right. Three stripes on the ceiling glowed with light, like those fluorescent bulbs in markethouses, dividing the room into thirds.
One third was behind a floor-to-ceiling glass pane, with a door at right, and another door beside it in Velli’s section. A window to her left was covered by some sort of shutter, she went to open it and found an interior pane blocked access.
Her mind raced. Was this a prison? Nonsense, what prison looked so clean? A hospital, then? Maybe she’d tripped and been knocked out. She realized belatedly that her weapons were gone, pistol holster and knife sheath empty, and rifle nowhere in sight. Not a good sign.
She rushed to the accessible door, beside the glass divider. This too was like those of markethouses in that Velli guessed it could slide aside with motors, but it did not do so as she approached. Nor was there a knob or switch, just a little black panel on the wall beside it. Everything about this was wrong: the immaculate room, the doors with odd proportions, even the air—sweet and fresh, like a cool summer’s day.
Going back to the window, she examined the inner pane. It didn’t seem too thick. Raising her elbow and bracing with her other hand, she slammed against it. The window didn’t so much as bend. She tried it again, and then with a running start. Not even a crack, and her elbow stung.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” a voice said. From the volume and quality, she expected someone had snuck up behind her, but spun around to see an empty room. Must be a hidden speaker, somewhere. And a camera.
“Who are you?” Velli demanded, trying to project strength despite her increasing terror. “Where am I?”
“Take a look,” the voice replied, and with a mechanical clunk, the shutters slid open.
Velli blinked from the light which poured in. There was the sun, against a black sky.
And below it, the world.
It floated in space, a crescent with the sun shining off in the upper-right. She looked down and saw seas, coastline, lights of cities on the night side, clouds casting shadows, all shrouded in a blanket of blue atmosphere. For a precious moment, her fears and sorrow melted away as she looked down in awe, face pressed against the glass.
“I...I don’t understand.” She turned back to the room.
The door behind the partition slid open, and in walked an alien.
True, it was Mekim who spent hours reading those children’s books with creatures from space. But she knew in an instant this thing was not of the Land: It stood straight, with two legs and two arms like a Cepic or Trinn, but there the similarities ended. On the parts not covered by its maroon-and-white outfit she saw dark brown skin of strange texture, and short hair atop its flat-faced, muzzle-less head. Two oval eyes with round pupils, above a little wedge of a nose, met hers.
The alien raised a four-fingered, single-thumbed hand, the sight of which made Velli’s fur raise, touched a glowing green circle on the divider glass, and said, “We’re in an equatorial orbit around your planet.” It spoke Jepseitan, with a strange accent.
After a stupefied pause, she made the only reply which seemed adequate: “Am I dead?”
The alien bared its teeth and made a noise like it sucked in air. “No, I promise you are very much alive. I felt something similar when I first saw my planet from space.”
“Your planet?”
It bobbed its head. “I am a space traveler from another world, this is our vessel. May I come in?”
Velli paused a moment, raised her ears. “I suppose.” The thing gave her the creeps, but she could hardly refuse it.
It touched the glass again, which seemed to flow out of the way to form a rounded, door-like opening which closed up after the alien stepped through. It stood about a head or two taller than Velli, with longer arms and legs. Tapping its chest with a five-fingered hand, it said. “My species is called human, and I myself am Arthur Benson. You are a Cepic, I believe?”
“Of the Jepsei people. My parents...named me Velli.”
“Then it is nice to meet you, Velli.” Arthur-Benson held out his right hand, fingers and palm straight. “This is a gesture of greeting among my people, to take each other’s hands.”
Velli reached out gingerly and gripped the alien’s. It felt warm and leathery, he began to give it a gentle shake and then Velli jumped back, suddenly hit by the gravity of what was going on, the internalization of where she was and the nature of the being which stood in front of her. “You’re an alien!” She invoked every Spirit Guardian she remembered, hoping they’d overlook her lack of prayers before realizing few, if any, were known for defending their followers from otherworldly space travelers.
The alien, Arthur Benson, seemed to sense her fear and spread his hands. “Please, do not be afraid. We desire nothing but peace with your planet and its people.”
Feeling as if in a trance, she replied, “I thought that stuff about other worlds and creatures from space was just dumb stories.”
Arthur Benson looked out the window. “Do you know what the stars are, that you see at night?”
Velli raised her ears. “They’re suns, like ours. Now astronomers are saying some have planets.”
“Then would it not be the height of arrogance to think yours the only inhabited world in the cosmos?”
“I suppose so.” She paused for a while, then stepped back and began pacing. “No, no, no! This can’t be real! You’re not an alien, this isn’t a spaceship!” She remembered the holdout knife in her cheek pouch. “What’s really happening?”
“I suggest you step back over here.” Benson cleared a way to the window, gestured to it. Gingerly, Velli approached. To the right was the blinding bright sun, and at left some sort of huge white section of hull, and in front the world.
She stared again. On the nightside, city lights glittered, hugging coastlines and weaving down rivers. More lay inland, networks of roads splaying out. Across a red haze of twilight, the daytime clouds seemed to move—winds, or the ship’s motion? The latter, it seemed, for new lands rotated into view at right while the leftmost cities passed out of sight.
Benson continued, “Your homeland should be up soon. We’re in a middle orbit, not too fast. Gives time to dwell.”
Squinting, she looked again. Then she saw it: a particular configuration of islands, the south coastline of Mespreth, then an inward notch and—that was Trez Yafan! It appeared as a gray smudge of concrete, wisps of white smoke curling away from factories. Jasam, Commander Udan, Teliv, Naaca, they were all somewhere in Pars Revek, the entire province being but a spot on a massive globe. Borders were invisible, of course, yet the vast land to north was clearly Mespreth. There was its capital, along a river leading out to the Middle Sea.
Her brother was somewhere down there. She felt a surge of longing. Did he toil away in some factory? Serve in some mansion? And what of her parents, were they still together? Might one, or all, of them be looking up at the sky this very moment?
“It’s... It’s...” Words failed her.
“I felt much the same way when I first saw my own planet from space.”
“Like seeing it for what it really is.” Everything she ever knew—her home, her family, the National Front, all the lands she saw on TV or read about in books, all the battlefields of the Long War and those before it, all the palaces and villages and slums and Shadowstalker dens, all the canvas of history, shining under the light of the sun and shrouded in a blanket of blue air.
Velli stepped back from the window a different person.
“We have a term for it.” Benson looked from her, to the planet below. “The Overview Effect.”
“Show me more!” She spoke like a child celebrating. “Where are you from? Why are you here?”
“We are explorers, visiting planets in search of knowledge and scientific understanding. Our most recent, being yours.”
“Knowledge?” She looked around the room, then back to the window and its huge spar of spaceship sticking out. “Compared to you? What is there possibly that could be new?”
“More than you might think.”
Comments