This story originally appeared in Alien Dimensions #12
“Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science.” ― Charles Darwin
Tulip had changed into her new brightly colored pilot suit. She was a yellow flower in the dim daylight; her suit was skintight nylon and neoprene, and the helmet hid the tufts of frizzy hair that escaped her braids. Tulip didn’t have to wear the helmet until she was in her ship or in outer space, but she liked the feel of it against her forehead.
Tulip’s mom Alicia had equipped her with mini lights that could slip onto her suit. Her other mom Harriet had done her hair in tight pigtails that made her head hurt. Harriet had added yellow nanotech ribbons that matched Tulip’s suit, and a few butterfly clips.
“This is silly-old,” Tulip complained.
“Nonsense,” Harriet said. “Nothing is silly-old in our home.”
“Listen to your mother,” Alicia. “Oye con cuidado.“
“Solamente oigo,” Tulip responded.
“Entonces oye ahora,” Harriet said. “Wear the ribbons.”
Tulip made a face at her mothers. They both kissed the top of her head.
“We love you,” they said. “Te amos.“
“Love you too,” she muttered. Too many dog-eared books from Earth told of kids who never told their parents that before something bad happened. Those books had many detailed graphics. Tulip still had nightmares of oceans rising, even though their asteroid had no ocean. Their water reservoir would flood if someone messed with the pipes, but it had little to no salt.
She had walked out of her colony home, helmet tucked under her arm. When she was out of sight of her moms, she dived behind a pillar and pulled out the ribbons, stuffing them into her pants pocket. They were the nanotechnology type that would grow if you tore them in half, like an earthworm. Harriet and Alicia said that it was more practical when you didn’t know what mass forages would uproot, and it wasn’t as if you could make silk on an asteroid. Other grownups had tried, but the caterpillars refused to spin. Alicia had then tried to cook the silkworms since they were an Earth delicacy, but no one wanted to try them.
She strode onto the landing area. Her pilot’s license hung off the lanyard around her neck, gleaming despite the dim light. The squiggly signature in black marker was the most prominent.
“Oh greetings,” Bernie said, trying an accent Tulip hadn’t tried that twanged like an old-fashioned banjo. “I haven’t seen you before, missy. Where did you come from – the moon?”
Tulip giggled. The suit covered her body entirely, so that Bernie couldn’t see that a recent solar flare had darkened her skin to pottery-brown, the color terra cotta that the grownups seemed to like.
“I come in peace,” she said in a nasal tone; the helmet muffled it. “Take me to your spaceships.”
“Not without a license, Miss Tulip. You know the rules.”
She brandished her license at him, and the lanyard. He removed it from around her neck and inspected it.
“You pass,” he said. “This signature is real?”
“Very real,” she said out of habit. “I made it myself!”
“Good. I remember when your moms came to see your test. They gave me such an earful!” He handed back the license to her. “You know the rules; use all your safety straps, update your log book with what you find, only go halfway and then come back . . .”
“Don’t forget to check in with Central Bernie,” Tulip finished. “I’ll check in, Central Bernie. Is anyone else flying?”
“Sunny is. She’s exploring Proxima B.”
“Maybe I’ll go to another asteroid then. Maybe there are more green crystals!”
“We’ll see.” Bernie gave her a serious look. “Keep your line open. And don’t take your fuel or oxygen levels for granted. Getting stranded would be dangerous.”
“Yes, sir,” Tulip said, with more seriousness. “I won’t need a tow. You have my word on that.”
In the Central Command building, she found the hangar where her shuttle was. The hanger had an arch like shape, with doors that opened directly into outer space, past the atmospheric dome that shimmered like wine glasses when the sun rose. It was the size of a racecar, if racecars had wings and engines meant to help with breaking the force of gravity. Several months ago, Bernie had painted the letters MARCH HARE in ink-black on the side.
Someone had hung a wanted poster on the wall. She peered at it as she checked that the wheels had air and that the oil didn’t need changing. The poster had a double-chinned man with bleached blond hair wearing a pair of glasses and a rubber mustache. He held up his thumb and pinkie while curling the rest of his pink fingers.
Tulip rolled her eyes. Nothing ever happened at Central Command. Bernie’s disapproving look could put out chaos faster than foam could put out an electric fire. She doubted that a face on a wanted poster could cause trouble.
The row of buttons and the stick faced her in the cockpit. Her roll of duct tape remained the same, strapped into a tiny niche in case of emergency. She checked the controls on her ship, the fuel and oxygen levels, as well as the carbon dioxide expulsion. Bernie had instructed the pilots to always check those, and to not play chicken with increasing carbon dioxide or decreasing oxygen.
“Only go halfway and then travel back,” he always said. “No adventure is worth your life.”
#
From the right angle, the Flores de Oro asteroid resembled a giant potato chip. The rock curled in on itself, sheltering a pocket from the wrath of space. The stars glimmered around it, distant but present, lighting the way into a vast darkness that never ended. Even a few kilometers from her colony, the stars looked more like a painting hanging in a gallery rather than a series of surging energies that glowed against the dark.
Tulip always turned back to look at it before her shuttle broke the asteroid’s gravitational pull. She sometimes deliberately drove the ship around to get that proper view. Potato chips always made her think of pad Thai marsala, and that made her think of the Bhavanis’ cooking whenever they invited Tulip’s family. She wondered if they would be cooking tonight, and if there would be a giant feast, combined with a discussion about how the grownups’ old world ended. Alicia and Harriet always said men and women’s submission to men were to blame, while the Bhavanis always said that willful ignorance was the real problem. Sunny’s parents, the DeMayos, complained that economic disparity had led to ignorant masses.
A light blinked on in shining red among the multiple lights and buttons. Tulip pressed the button next to it. Static emerged, the only sound apart from her breathing.
“Jenny Wren, this is March Hare, ready for travel. Over,” she said into the mike on her helmet. “Bernie Central, this is March Hare, ready for travel. Do you copy?”
A few minutes passed. This was normal. Even with radio transmission, real-time communication wasn’t yet a possibility.
“March Hare, this is Jenny Wren,” a nervous voice responded. “I don’t think there’s code for this; I’m lost. Over.”
“What?” Tulip sat up straighter, straining against her seat belts. “Did not copy. Jenny Wren?”
The pause that followed was agonizing. The pilot’s words had sunk in.
“I’ve landed on Proxima B and am mapping the terrain for mining. A blistering solar flare appeared, so I dove into a cave with the ship to hide from it. Over.”
“Sunny,” Tulip groaned into her mike. “We’re not supposed to spelunk without partners on foreign terrain. Over.”
“Negative on the spelunking, T. It was just a quick jaunt to prevent pain from the flares. I only got out of my ship to expel the CO2 buildup for a minute. Next thing I know, the cave moves, making the ground shake from some earthquake. When the dust and the rocks clear, I can’t find my ship. Over.”
“What?”
“I can’t explain it either. My ship isn’t with me. I don’t know where I am or how to get out. My map isn’t complete, and it’s not helping. Over.”
“Central Bernie, do you copy?” Tulip asked. “Jenny Wren is stranded on Proxima B. What is our battle plan? Over.”
Static appeared through the communicator. Silence followed.
“Central, we have a problem,” Tulip spoke louder. “We have a stranded pilot on Proxima B with a limited oxygen supply and constant threat from solar flares. Over. Over!”
Still no response. Tulip started at the red light on her dashboard. Her mouth went dry. She tasted the peanut butter that had been freshly ground and made that week, and she had slathered on toast that morning.
“Central Bernie isn’t responding. Over,” Sunny said through the mike.
“I noticed, Sunny,” Tulip said, an edge to her voice. “What do you think happened?”
There was more silence.
“Over, drat it, over, Sunny. Over! I finished speaking! Over!”
“I don’t know what’s happened, Tulip,” Sunny replied. “I don’t know anything. What are we going to do? Over.”
“Put your tracker on. I’m coming for you. Over.”
“How will you find me without a map? How is your fuel and oxygen? Over.”
“I just launched myself,” Tulip said. “I’ve got one day’s worth if it comes to it, but getting to you will only take four hours. We’ll improvise. Over.”
“Watch out for the solar flares, T,” Sunny warned. “They’re stronger today than usual for some reason. Over.”
“Affirmative. Make sure you have enough oxygen and that you expel the CO2. Over.”
“Remember what Bernie says, only go halfway. Over.”
“Only go halfway,” Tulip repeated after Sunny’s voice had died away. “I wish we could say it together. Over.”
Suddenly space looked bigger and emptier than it had a few minutes ago. Tulip’s mind smashed against the building panic about what had happened with Bernie, and why Central Command had gone silent. She switched on a recording of a lecture about tectonic plates, to fill the silence between her breaths.
“Keep talking to me,” Sunny said. “I don’t want to be scared, Tulip. Over.”
“Me neither,” Tulip replied. She didn’t bother to add “over”.
#
Proxima B came into view. The planet was orange, with off-white swirls and jagged blue areas that marked frothing bodies of water. The host star, a red dwarf, blew away any atmosphere and sent solar flares down its surface. The flaring star was like a red beacon, millions of miles away but blazing.
Heat from the red dwarf penetrated the ship. Tulip could feel her cheeks and chin sweating from under her helmet.
“Moms, Harriet, Alicia, if anything happens, I love you,” Tulip said into her log recording. “Not that anything is going to happen, but just in case.”
Central Command didn’t respond. Tulip kept messaging Bernie. She only got static.
“Four hours,” Sunny said, sounding impressed. “I’m going to try and stay where I am. My tracker is on, but you don’t have a proper map. Over.”
“As I said, we’ll improvise.” Tulip checked her oxygen level and fuel. “We have about twenty hours before we’re in trouble. How much do you have? Over.”
“About fifteen hours. I was here first, remember? Over.”
“I do,” Tulip said with a grimace. “I better find you fast, then. Over.”
“Affirmative. What altitude and attitude do you have? Over.”
Tulip told her. Sunny gave her landing coordinates, which were a while away.
“It’s a flat terrain, hill with a cave aside, so it shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t have landed. It’s the only hill there; you can’t miss it. There’s also lots of space to coast to a stop. Over.”
“I think we can stop saying ‘over,’ Sunny. We seem to be speaking in real time.”
The orange dust and land glistened below. Tulip looked below as she adjusted the ship. She double-checked the coordinates. She saw large mounds below her, too curvy to be mountains and the color of powdered turmeric. Sunny’s beacon beeped on a radar screen, a bright yellow blip. According to the screen, she was in the middle of whatever those mounds were.
“Sunny? I don’t see flat terrain. Are you sure you gave me the right coordinates?”
“No, I deliberately sent you to the wrong place so I can die of oxygen loss on a planet where everything is hot and the nearby star can burn me into a fritter.” Sunny sounded miffed and sarcastic. “Whatever earthquake shook me, maybe it changed the terrain.”
“In any case, I can’t land here. Going to circle around to find a better point.”
Tulip maneuvered the ship so that the planet’s gravitational pull didn’t force her to make an emergency landing. As she did, the mounds shifted. Yet dust didn’t crumble, and rubble didn’t ensue. The rock seemed to rearrange itself. It was like seeing someone assemble a Rubik’s cube if Rubik’s cubes came in circular sizes.
“O.M.G,” Tulip said. “Sunny, you’re in a moving part of the planet.”
“Is it another earthquake?” Sunny sounded panicked.
“I don’t think so. Things aren’t collapsing like in the old videos from Earth. Nothing seems to be breaking. You’re not feeling rumbles, are you?”
“No. Wherever I am is stable. But that doesn’t mean anything. I could just be cushioned from the tectonic plates shifting.”
“I don’t think so.” Something pinged at Tulip as she did another lap. “Something’s not right, Sunny.”
“Lots of things aren’t right. Bernie should have responded by now. I’m stranded, and Jenny Wren is missing. You can’t find me even though I gave you the right dratty coordinates.”
“That’s not what I meant. Never mind,” Tulip looked. “I’ll find a space to land in these mounds, as close to you as possible.”
“Don’t leave your ship unless it’s utterly necessary. Don’t make the mistake I did.”
“Affirmative.” Tulip eased her ship so that it was flying lower. What she saw on looking down nearly made her choke.
Large green creatures strolled between the mounds, resembling giant turtles walking on their hind legs. Their shells, glistening black and silver, coated them from shoulder to toe. They kept their gleaming yellow eyes on the ground. Her jaw dropped open. By Tulip’s estimation, they were ten times as large as the grownups back on Flores de Oro.
Tulip remembered to grab her driving stick and straighten. She curled around for one more lap. The turtle creatures didn’t even notice the plumes of smoke that she was trailing. They talked. Sunny’s blip grew even stronger on Tulip’s radar screen.
“Sunny,” Tulip said, her voice edging into excitement and panic. “You didn’t land in a cave. You landed on a ship.”
“What?! What are you saying?”
“You’re on an alien spacecraft. I see aliens out here. Their ship matches the color of the land on Proxima B.”
“Oh, cow pies.”
“Oh, cow pies is right,” Tulip said. “What are we going to tell Bernie? What are we going to tell our parents? I need to log this now!”
“Forget logging it; what’s going to happen if they find me?”
Silence passed between them. Tulip remembered the videos of scientists on Earth studying eels under a microscope as the eels struggled to breathe out of water.
“Maybe they’re not like humans,” Tulip said. “Maybe they don’t cut up and kill strange creatures they find for the fun of it.”
“Tulip! I’m serious! I don’t want to be cut up and looked at under an alien microscope!”
“And I am too. Stay out of sight, as best as you can, and stay where you are.”
Tulip hated this. She hated Proxima B not having a proper landing platform. She hated Bernie for not responding.
It was amazing that the turtle aliens hadn’t noticed her. They obviously couldn’t hear her, and they didn’t seem to need oxygen to explore the planet, or carbon dioxide to expel. But even so, surely they ought to have reacted.
I’m like a fly to them, she thought with wonder. How often do you notice the houseflies that stow away on the spaceships and feast on the first apples harvested at home?
The fact was, however, that she couldn’t keep circling around them forever. Sunny was losing oxygen by the minute, and she was in a strange place without any escape. Tulip’s heart pounded at the thought of Sunny being put under a microscope with large tweezers pulling her mouth open. The aliens would look up eventually, and she got a twinge wondering what would happen.
On her last lap, she decreased her altitude. Her palms sweated through her gloves. She wiped one against her helmet. She was still wearing it.
The mounds had several openings, of varying sizes. Tulip chose the largest and the closest; she slowed down her speed. Regardless of what happened, she could not crash. Crashing was not an option. Finding Sunny was the most important thing.
As she entered the darkness, she pressed a button. Lights shone from the front of her ship, sharp white beams. She slowed down her speed further.
“Time for mini-lights,” she murmured, turning them on. Her suit glowed, adding to the beams. “Gracias, Alicia! Te amo!”
Fortunately, the tunnel did not narrow, as she flew down it with caution. Tulip reminded herself that to those aliens, she was going through hairlines cracks. Sunny’s blip seemed to get closer.
At times, she slowed down; her ship had an emergency ejector that could be used for disposal. At times, she dug into her pockets for the ribbons that her mother had put in her hair. She tore each one in half, wait for them to regrow, and attach duct tape to each one. When she slowed at forks in the tunnel, she would release a handful of yellow and grey, and it would hit a wall. The method wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t as if she had breadcrumbs to spare.
The tunnel then opened up and grew wider. Tulip found herself in an open, circular space with a clear, glasslike substance below. As she looked down, her fear gave way to surprise.
“Wow,” she said.
“What is it, T?”
Below, different sections of the circular space held various animals, waters and trees. Glass separated the sections, each pane thicker than elephant bones.
“It’s like a zoo!” She told Sunny. “They have sharks down there, and I think some dinosaurs. At least, they look like dinosaurs.”
She flew down to get a closer look. One glass tank had water and sharks in it. At least, from a distance they looked like sharks. When Tulip got lower, she saw they were sharks bigger than her rocket ship, huddling around streaming bubbles that came from dead coral reefs. They swished their tails and bobbed, as if they were dancing.
Tulip quickly logged in what she saw into the recording area. She saw the facets of the ship move as she flew in circles. They must be shifting again.
“Augh! Not again!” Sunny wailed through the intercom.
“Oh, cow pies,” Tulip said; Sunny’s beacon went off further than it was. “We can’t wait until the ship moves again; we need to move towards each other.”
“But I don’t know where you are; I don’t have a tracker!”
“We need to think,” Tulip rubbed her forehead. “The ship keeps changing shape, which is why I keep losing you. This zoo part is the only place that stays the same. You need to get here, or I need to get you here. If this planet had magnetic poles, I could tell you which direction to go.”
She thought. This would be easier if Bernie were to dial in, to help them reunite and maybe find Sunny’s ship. He would use his computers to draft a rudimentary route, after estimating the time between each time the ship changed shape. Her ship ran on a computer, but she’d have to use her log files to time it. Speaking of time . . .
“How much oxygen do you have?” She asked.
“Twelve hours. It’s not a lot of time.”
“I know, Sunny. My fuel isn’t halfway yet. I’m going to see how long each change takes. That way on the next one I can find you.”
“Keep talking to me then. Tell me if I should walk one way.”
“Yes, it can’t make things worse.”
She flew around, giving Sunny instructions. Sunny’s beam started walking. The sharks in their tank remained oblivious. The dinosaurs ripped long leaves and ground at the dark green fiber. When the shift happened again, Tulip checked the time on her log.
“Thirty of our minutes,” she said. “It doesn’t look like you got too far away this time.”
“Hurry. These moving walls give me the creeps.”
Tulip turned her ship in the direction of Sunny’s blip. She made out the best possible opening, and had to hope that it would lead directly to her friend.
“When we get back to central command, I need to show you the wanted poster in my hangar,” she said.
“Wanted poster? Bernie would never hang one up.”
“Well, it was a weird one. It showed a fat blond guy.”
“Maybe it’s the space graffiti terrorist, the one my parents hate.”
“You mean Brainvita?”
“Yeah. I wonder why Bernie would post a picture. No one’s ever seen his face.”
“We can ask him. I’m approaching you, so I’m going to slow down. Don’t want to overshoot.”
Ten minutes passed; Tulip slowed and shot out more duct tape ribbon balls. She flipped a switch, so that her wheels came out and made contact with the smooth ground. Her ship shook.
As she turned another corner, she saw the figure in her beam’s view. A tall girl dressed in a lime green space suit waved frantically. Wheels screeching, Tulip slowed down.
“Get in.” Tulip pressed another button. Her extra seat in the back popped open. So did the hatch. Tulip was relieved she had kept on her helmet the whole time.
Sunny clambered in, scrunching her knobby knees together. Her arm reached out and wrapped around Tulip’s neck in a brief hug. The hatch closed over her.
“We may need more oxygen,” she warned as she strapped herself in. “I still have mine, but the ship will have to account for two of us. And thank you.”
“No problem,” Tulip turned the ship around. “I think I know where we can get oxygen. We haven’t gone halfway on fuel.”
Going back the way she came was easier than going forward. Tulip knew where she was going, and she had a reason to go faster. Her beams revealed the ribbon and duct tape she had ejected earlier, to mark the right path. Sunny stared at them.
“Good of your moms to pack the nanotech ribbons,” she said.
“Don’t tell them what I used them for,” Tulip said as they got out into the open space with the glass tanks. “Take a look down.”
“OMG!” Sunny squealed as they did a circle. “Is that real?”
“Very real,” Tulip replied with a grin. “I’ve been studying the different ones. You’re not going to believe it.”
She aimed the plane for one tank, at a gap that she had found while timing the ship’s shifts. While to the aliens the crack wouldn’t appear to them at all, to Tulip it was a gap wide enough for her ship to enter. Her ship had a resin-based heat shield that handled the transition into an actual, artificial atmosphere. They entered a blue-tinted tank that had actual clouds.
Tulip flipped a switch. All of the CO2 hissed out of the ship, which absorbed the oxygen that surrounded them. The ship engine roared in Tulip’s ears. Trees and clouds danced below.
“How did you figure out this tank has oxygen?” Sunny asked, impressed.
“I looked down,” Tulip replied. “If they can survive here, then so can we.”
“Wow,” Sunny followed her gaze. “Those look like . . . us. But from ancient times.”
Below, the people were no bigger than matchsticks. They had perfect square houses in grid neighborhoods. A few kids dressed in postage-stamp sized clothing were pointing at Tulip’s ship. She wasn’t close enough to hear their screams. She flew close to the glass ceiling. Then she did a loop to return to the gap.
“Our grandparents lived in houses like that,” Tulip said. “The aliens here must have taken these people from that time period.”
“But what if they had evolved and this was poison gas instead?”
“Then we’d just be short of carbon dioxide,” Tulip pointed out.
They exited the tank. The sound of the engine died. Tulip hit the booster and aimed the ship up.
“We can’t go out the way we came, but we can go up,” Tulip said.
They gained altitude.
“Tulip?” Sunny asked.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks. For saving me.”
“You’d do the same for me,” Tulip said. “I’m sorry about Jenny Wren.”
“We’ll mourn her once we return home.” Sunny’s voice shook. “She was a good ship.”
“The best for you,” Tulip agreed.
They found a gap near the tip of the orange-gold conical top. Tulip aimed her ship through, and they met the red dwarf’s glare. She adjusted the power, so that they broke the gravitational pull. Proxima B and the strange alien ship fell away. Sunny and Tulip both released a breath.
“Are we halfway?” Sunny asked.
“Yes, we are,” Tulip said. “Very halfway.”
Static crackled. The girls jumped. A familiar voice broke through.
“March Hare, this is Central Bernie. Come in. Over.”
“Central Bernie, I hear you. Over,” Tulip spoke loudly.
“Oh. Now you decide to check in,” Sunny said sarcastically. “We could’ve used your help several hours ago. Over.”
They waited. The gap between responses startled them. Then Tulip remembered that they were communicating with an asteroid several thousand miles away.
“So sorry about that. Some jokesters decided to coat central command in spray paint; the chemicals messed with the equipment and put them offline for most of the day. Are you girls okay? Over.”
“We are now,” Tulip said. “Was it Brainvita? Over.”
“It was. Dumb nut didn’t realize that we were Central Command. He’s long gone, though. What happened? Did you find something worth exploring? Over.”
The girls stayed silent. Then Sunny laughed hysterically. Tulip joined in. “Did we find something worth exploring!” she said.