Dark Beauty

Copyright © 2025. All rights reserved. The right of Peter Cawdron to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any other manner without the written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of quotations.

Disclaimer: No artificial intelligence (AI) was used in the creation of this story. Some would argue that no intelligence was used at all. I’ll leave that for you to decide. No AI training. The author does not permit the use of this book for training artificial intelligence or large-language models.

Cover Art: blue alien wearing a Vietnam-era US helmet from iStockPhotos.

Subscribe to my email newsletter to learn more about my writing, special deals and upcoming releases. Thank you for supporting independent science fiction.

Quote

I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over.

Out on the edge, you see all the kinds of things you can't see from the center.

Kurt Vonnegut

Forward

Dark Beauty is a tribute to the writing of Kurt Vonnegut and, in particular, his groundbreaking novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

There are a lot of great authors in the science fiction genre, but few have the gravitas of Vonnegut. Although he’s largely unknown to modern readers, his novels were unconventional and controversial in their time.

Vonnegut was brutally honest. He used science fiction as a critique of modern society, religion, war and authority. His writing is laced with satire and humor while demanding deep consideration. He wasn’t afraid to question the blind loyalty of patriotism and sought to stir the readers’ thinking, reasoning and imagination.

This tribute originally appeared as a novella authorized by the estate of Kurt Vonnegut in Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program with the title Suffer the Children. With the closure of Kindle Worlds, the rights granted by the estate were withdrawn, and the story was removed from circulation. Since then, all references to the fictional world of Slaughterhouse-Five have been removed and replaced with alternatives to avoid any potential breach of copyright. The style, mood and thematic approaches, though, are still closely aligned with Vonnegut, but to avoid copyright infringement, the story has been heavily altered.

Dark Beauty emulates Vonnegut’s brash, unvarnished approach to literature. If the writing seems abrupt, it’s because Vonnegut was abrupt. If this novel comes across as disheveled and unhinged, it’s because Vonnegut never wanted us to feel comfortable. If the plot seems convoluted, it’s because Vonnegut wanted us to think deeper, going beyond the words on the page to find the truth.

I hope this novel will inspire you to read Kurt Vonnegut’s writings with an open mind.

Tubes

Whoosh went the tube.

Nancy left her hand resting on the six-inch-wide cold sheet-metal pipe running from beneath the floor, along the wall and into the ceiling. She loved feeling the slight tremor as a dispatch shot up from her desk. Her article had been carefully rolled up and placed inside a specially designed plastic capsule before being sucked into the tube. Glass windows in the tube, spaced every ten feet or so, allowed her to watch her dispatch as it curved across the ceiling before joining a network of other pipes that disappeared into the far wall. Using touch and sound alone, she could track the motion of the tiny pod as it whizzed away from her out of sight, carrying her proof to the typesetters. There was something strangely satisfying about the finality of a pneumatic tube: the job was done.

It was the 1950s. A war that consumed the world had ended less than a decade ago, and yet the memory of those horrors had already faded. With barely twenty years between two world wars, the Korean War threatened to become the third global conflict, but with the Korean Armistice being signed, there was hope for peace and optimism in the air.

Her phone rang. An electric solenoid caused a tiny hammer to rebound between two bells, sending out a cacophony of noise and making her flinch. Nancy picked up her headset, slipped the steel band over her hair and positioned the black Bakelite conical speaker over her ear.

“Have we still got time to make the late edition?” a disembodied voice asked. Like all telephonic voices, Kurt Nobody’s drawl sounded tinny.

Kurt Nobody was the lead reporter for the paper and often joked about how his surname was an automatic conversation starter. In his words, Nobody was a name somebody had to have. Anybody could have had it, but nobody did, nobody outside of his family, that is, as his surname was a transliteration from the Cyrillic Hoбoдy.

Nobody’s father, on immigrating from Kazakhstan, hadn’t understood enough English to realize that nobody in the US had the surname Nobody—and with good reason. The confusion it caused Kurt in college when getting his driver’s license and while applying for a passport left him on the verge of changing his name, but nobody offered him a good alternative to Nobody.

Nancy asked Kurt Nobody, “Have you got something good?”

“Good is a matter of perspective,” Kurt replied. “Good for us, but not for the poor Joe who died because his wedding ring got caught in an elevator door.”

“Caught?”

“Yeah, sandwiched between the two steel doors as they closed. Then the lift went down, but he didn’t.”

Nancy had a sharpened pencil at the ready. She began writing in shorthand, scratching seemingly illegible notes as Kurt spoke. To the untrained eye, her scribble held no more meaning than hieroglyphics, but every detail she heard was captured. 

Whoosh went another tube beside her. Nancy paid no attention to the pneumatics. She was too focused on Kurt Nobody and his story.

Kurt was always telling stories. Some of them were true, some of them weren’t. Nancy could never tell, but if he was calling this in on his first day in the field, then it had to be true, didn’t it?

Nancy thought his tale was true, but really, what did it matter? No story was ever entirely true. There were always details that had been missed, perspectives overlooked and at least one cognitive bias introduced. All stories were fiction when you thought about it. Unless you were there, you never really knew what had been added, what had been omitted, and what had been embellished. Besides, what did it matter? Whether true or not, the purpose of news stories was to tickle the intellect to satisfy the human urge to know. Curiosity kills time as much as cats.

“What did his wife say?”

“His wife?” Kurt’s tinny voice asked in reply over the phone. “She doesn’t know yet. It only just happened.”

“Call her up. Get a statement,” Nancy barked. She had no regard—no compassion. The news came first. People had to know. Papers had to sell.

“What? Really?” Kurt asked, and for a brief moment, Nancy felt a pang of guilt, but only for a split second. Nancy prided herself on her professionalism. Morals are nothing if not subjective, and that night, she sold her soul with less regard than a prostitute.

“Tell her you’re Captain Finn from the Police Department. Say you have some sad news. And then tell me what she says.”

The line went silent.

“Kurt?”

She could hear breathing, so she knew he was still on the line. After a second or two, Kurt Nobody sighed and said, “Okay. Gimme a few minutes.”

And with that, the line went dead, as dead as that poor man squashed on the ceiling of an elevator as it descended into the basement. With blood and body parts strewn on the floor, he died not knowing he’d make the local news.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

~~~

Well over a sextillion miles away, on Arctrixmatria, cold eyes watched as the tube beside Nancy rattled. Whoosh went another story posted by some other reporter. As for Nancy, she sat there drumming her fingers, waiting impatiently for more details from Kurt Nobody, itching to type up the story, willing Kurt to call her back. Her fingers rested on the typewriter keys like a race car driver in pole position, waiting for the lights.

Arctrixmatria was a beautiful planet.

Tall spires reached up tens of thousands of feet within the cities, puncturing the thin clouds drifting through the poisonous atmosphere. Oceans of liquid methane, dark and black, lapped at the shore under a gentle wind. Cyanide renewed life rather than extinguishing it on this topsy-turvy world.

The trees were short, no bigger than shrubs on Earth, but they were distinguishable from Arctrixmatrian shrubs by their shape. Their conical points gave them the appearance of a miniature pine forest, never reaching above waist height. Black leaves absorbed radiation from the dim white dwarf star the Arcs called their sun. There was no grass, but the microbial diversity in the soil exceeded that on ten thousand other habitable worlds visited by the Arcs.

The Arcs loved Earth the way Earthlings love dead celebrities. There was an air of nostalgia, a fascination with an ill-conceived golden age. No age was golden if you lived through it. The Arcs understood that because they could see in four dimensions rather than three. Even so, their fascination with Earth was intense, beyond anything they’d experienced on any other world. And the reason was simple. Earthlings lived linear lives. There was a start and an end: birth and death. In between these two consummate events, humans ignored reality, pretending that neither birth nor death ever really applied to them personally. These notions existed only as some vague, abstract concept. They were events that happened to others, not to them. Instead, they surrounded themselves with trimmings and trappings as though the latest car, a fancy hat, or some tiny gadget unlocked the meaning of life.

As the Arcs could see through space and time, they enjoyed watching the breadth of human history, from the building of the pyramids to the colonization of Titan. Humans were tool fabricators. They loved building things they could hold in their feeble hands, something the Arcs found quaint. In particular, Earthlings loved to stare at tiny screens, flicking their fingers across slick glass, playing with pretend jewels that were nothing more than images made up of light. They treated this as a form of escape. For a considerable time, the Arcs found it difficult to distinguish between humans, cats, and ravens, as they all had a penchant for becoming distracted by shiny things. Their distinct body shapes were a giveaway, but at a psychic level, they were almost indistinguishable.

Arcs saw life for what it was: a spectrum of experience. Rather than being stuck in the moment, creeping forward like an inchworm in the grass, seeing only the next tall green blade, Arcs soared on high like an eagle. They could see a young boy chasing a bouncing ball through a meadow, his feet pounding on the fresh dew. They could see that for all the worm’s efforts to conquer the next grassy stem and achieve a milestone in life, that excited child would grind the poor creature underfoot without so much as a glimmer of realization.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

~~~

“What did she say?” Nancy asked as the Arcs watched from afar. Nancy was climbing a blade of grass.

“She was crushed,” Kurt Nobody replied. There was a hint of resignation in his voice, one that even Nancy couldn’t ignore. He seemed to regret his choice of words the instant they slipped from his lips, realizing how they echoed the very way the man died. “Ah... and she confirmed both his name and hers and that they were married.”

“And?” Nancy asked.

Kurt sighed.

“And she’s six months pregnant. One minute, she’s happily married; the next, there’s a phone call, and BANG! She’s a widow. How does that happen? How can life be so good one moment and so cruel the next? And in three months’ time, a kid is going to be born that will never know its father.”

Nancy didn’t answer. She barely batted an eyelid. She couldn’t see how easily this could have been her. The Arcs did. They knew she’d go home tonight and forget about the widow crying in anguish, turning off that saga as though it were a light switch in the hall.

Nancy always got home before her husband. Meatloaf—that’s what they were going to have for supper tonight. This morning, she left out a package of frozen ground beef to thaw. Nancy made the best meatloaf, her husband said so. The secret was a squirt of ketchup in the middle, giving the meat a slightly acidic taste after it was baked. When her husband came home, she’d greet him at the door with a kiss, and they’d talk about a vacation in Florida. Nancy had never been to Florida. Florida was nice this time of year. Even the Arcs knew that.

Like so much of humanity, Nancy was a contradiction. That contradiction intrigued the Arcs. Nancy was a nice girl. She cried when her girlfriend lost her job at the paper. She donated to the Red Cross and had even given blood. Once. Nancy wouldn’t hurt a fly.

“Did she say anything else?” Nancy asked Kurt Nobody.

“No.”

No wasn’t good enough. Nancy had a story to finish. Kurt needed to take his reporting seriously.

“She must have said something else,” Nancy said, pressing him for more details.

After a few seconds of silence, Kurt said, “She thanked me… She sobbed for a moment, and then she thanked me for letting her know about her husband’s death.”

The surprise in his voice was apparent, but Nancy didn’t understand the gratitude in the poor woman’s response. The Arcs knew. Even the newly crowned widow didn’t understand the emotions welling up within her, but the Arcs understood she was in shock, and shock renders the human mind like jelly. The poor woman had no idea what she should say to a strange voice telling her over the phone that her husband had died horribly in a freak accident, but society demands courtesy.

As Nancy typed up the story, the Arcs watched and waited. That was the thing about seeing through time: knowing the future was never enough. The Arcs needed to experience the moment as it happened. That was the only way to appreciate the past, present, and future. Like an art connoisseur studying gallery prints in a museum gift shop, they had to see the original to appreciate the workmanship. There was no substitute for being there.

The Arcs watched Earth for the same reason Earthlings read the newspaper: curiosity. Only the Arcs weren’t curious about events. They wanted to understand the breadth of human life. Like a gardener raising roses, they relished digging holes and pulling weeds, watching buds form and flowers bloom. One day, Nancy would bloom, but not today.

Whoosh went the story, rattling as it shot through the tubes. Nancy was pleased with herself. She’d made the deadline. She got up from her desk and got a fresh cup of coffee to celebrate.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

~~~

Seeing in four dimensions was radically different from seeing in three. Smear tried to explain that to Billy Crusader and Dakota Monroe, but he doubted they’d understand.

Billy and Dakota were the latest exhibits in the Arctrixmatrian extraterrestrial zoological gardens. They’d been snatched from their homes and whisked away to Arctrixmatria, a planet so distant it was not yet visible to human telescopes. Even if the scientists on Earth could have seen Arctrixmatria, they wouldn’t have known there was life there. From such a distance, methane would have been barely detectable in the atmosphere, and astronomers would have assumed the planet was similar to Titan. Arctrixmatrian technology was such that it left none of the signatures SETI looked for in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Smear was the name Dakota had given to one of the more friendly Arcs. If Dakota had to describe an Arc, she would have said that at first glance, it looked as though someone had left a musty leather glove sitting upside-down on an old plunger—the kind used for clearing a blocked toilet. Arcs were much bigger than that, of course, and far more dexterous, but their heads looked like a dismembered hand stuck on top of a thick pole with crablike feet around the broad circular base. It was as though a glove had partially melted on the leg of a corpse.

Instead of hair on their heads, Arcs had fingers. One big one on either the left or the right, depending on whether they were left or right-handed, and then four more in descending size as they spread out across their upside-down hand-like head. There were no fingernails, but there was an eye set where the knuckle of the middle finger would have been. 

Smear had a ruddy birthmark in the middle of his palm-like face, hence Dakota’s choice of name.

Dakota thought Smear was a cleaner at the zoo because he took care of the geodesic dome that protected them from a harsh environment that would have killed the two of them in seconds. Neither Billy nor Dakota realized Smear was one of the directors at the zoo.

Smear desperately wanted Billy and Dakota to see the world of Arctrixmatria more clearly. The two humans thought they were in a prison, just animals on display at the zoo for a curious public. The reality was they were esteemed royalty, ambassadors representing the billions of Homo sapiens that swarmed over their home world like ants on concrete on a hot summer’s day. No expense was spared to make Billy and Dakota’s habitat a home. Their comfort was of paramount importance to the Arcs.

Billy was scrawny by Earth’s standards. His thin arms and pale complexion would have been described as sickly by a bodybuilder. His hair was neither brown nor black but some nondescript shade in between.

Dakota wasn’t originally a Monroe. Her surname was actually Mondzadalia. According to Arc observations, following the death of her parents, she was the only person on Earth in that era with that particular last name. Looking through time, they could see the precise moment she’d changed her name to Monroe, but they didn’t understand why. There was an argument for convenience in contracting such a long name into something shorter, but aesthetically, there wasn’t any appeal to the Arcs. Nothing else about her changed, so why change her name, and what was in a name? Well, in Hollywood, everything. But for the rest of the known universe, there was nothing significant about someone’s last name.

Dakota was beautiful by any standard, with long blonde hair and azure blue eyes. Her full bust was apparently important for mating, or so the Arcs perceived from their observations, although they couldn’t discern any conceivable biological advantage her large breasts gave her over any other more modestly adorned woman.

When they first arrived at the zoo, Billy and Dakota insisted on being clothed, but the Arcs had no conceptual awareness of clothing and took the flimsy garments from them. As the zoo habitat was warm, what need was there for a shirt or shorts? Initially, the two humans were self-conscious of their kidnappers, but modesty soon gave way to practicality. Walking around with one hand covering the crotch all day simply wasn’t sustainable. Billy didn’t mind being naked, but Dakota hated it.

The Arcs thought both Billy and Dakota were beautiful, but then Arcs judged beauty by the entire breadth of a person’s life, not the arrangement of their features at a fleeting point in time.

The Arcs couldn’t understand why humans valued the fading beauty of youth when the beauty of the mind could blossom into old age. Humans were stubbornly persistent in their belief in meritocracy, only to ignore that whimsical standard and judge people based on appearance. A big nose, dark skin, acne, stocky legs or a rotund waist were enough to deem someone ugly, while thin legs, a slim waist and voluptuous breasts apparently made women beautiful. For the Arcs, it was paradoxical. Nothing had been accomplished by the bikini model, and yet she was lauded in society. The overweight woman with the scruffy hair may have saved a child’s life after a car accident, but she was ugly. Such cultural idiosyncrasies intrigued the Arcs. Humans thought of themselves as logical without any logic, and that perplexed the logical minds of the Arcs. 

Speaking to humans was hard for Arcs. Condensing the immensity of their thoughts into a single string of words spoken sequentially was nigh impossible. Still, for Billy and Dakota’s sake, they made the effort. A device not dissimilar to an electrically powered pipe organ had been set up inside the dome to allow the Arcs to approximate speech with the humans.

“Are you?” Smear asked Dakota. He’d meant to ask, ‘Are you comfortable?’ but speaking in three dimensions while living in four was never easy. Comfortable would come out later.

Dakota had coined the name Smear for the director because the birthmark on the oversized palm of his face made him quite distinct in a crowd of Arcs. Billy and Dakota had trouble distinguishing one Arctrixmatrian from another, let alone distinguishing between their five different sexes, which changed on a whim, but Smear always stood out.

Much to the surprise of the Arcs when they first discovered Earth, humans had appendages called hands that looked surprisingly like baby Arcs. These were attached to their arms. This bizarre example of celestial convergent evolution had taken the Arcs by surprise. From the perspective of an Earthling, the body of an Arc was comprised of a bunch of claws circling the base of a giant dismembered hand, some eight to ten feet in height. Arc heads looked like what humans would call a palm, while their arms looked like outstretched fingers coming out of the top of their heads.

Arcs had a single eye, which made depth perception difficult. Like any intelligent species, the Arcs had their quirks. On those occasions when they blinked or clapped, they appeared to be flexing their fingers. To Billy Crusader and Dakota Monroe, an Arctrixmatrian display of friendship or applause looked like a sea of hands raised in defiance. When they were exuberant, the Arcs would curl all but their middle fingers into their palms. It was as though an entire audience was giving her the finger.

“Happy?” Dakota asked, trying to guess what Smear had asked of her. “No, I’m not happy.”

Smear blinked, squeezing his fingers into a fist. Dakota shook her head in frustration.

The Arctrixmatrian Director of Operations at the zoo opened his massive hand, relaxing. He was struggling to understand why Dakota Monroe wasn’t happy. Wasn’t this the adventure of a lifetime? Wasn’t this the greatest privilege that could ever be bestowed upon her? How many other humans from her world would ever journey to the stars? From her age, there would be none. The Arcs knew humanity wouldn’t leave the solar system for another two hundred years and would struggle to reach the next star system within eight hundred. It would be almost two thousand years before they developed a spacetime displacement drive similar to that of the Arcs.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

~~~

Back on Earth, Kurt Nobody walked into the Chicago newsroom, past the pipes that carried tubes around the building, across the street to the printer’s office, and to various other nearby departments. He seemed curious about the tubes and their cryptic contents rushing past on the wall.

Whoosh went another sealed canister, zipping along unseen through the metal pipes, rattling as it shot along, flickering as it passed beneath viewports set into the tube to allow blockages to be cleared.

“Hey,” Nancy said. “Good job.”

The look on Kurt’s face suggested he didn’t agree. It wasn’t that he looked angry or sad. If Nancy had to describe his mood, she would have called it resigned.

“What did it look like?” she asked.

“It?”

“Him. You know. The guy in the elevator.”

Nancy was eating a Three Musketeers candy bar. The chocolate had melted, but the sugar buzz worked all the same. She chewed on the candy bar, trying to clear the sticky goo from the molars at the back of her mouth with her tongue.

“Did you see him?” she asked, talking with her mouth full. “What was left of him?”

Kurt looked tired. He told her what he’d seen, not sparing any details. His eyes darted back and forth between Nancy and her desk as he spoke. It took her a moment to realize he was expecting her to take notes, but the story had already gone out. She was just curious.

“Did it bother you?” she asked.

“Heck no, Nancy,” Kurt said. “I saw a lot worse in the Second World War.”

For a moment, the two of them were united in their macabre fascination about the tragedy that had befallen their fellow sojourner on that rather small lump of mostly molten rock swinging around a particularly dull, ordinary star in one of the hundreds of billions of seemingly indistinct galaxies within the universe. They could have been talking about baseball. Nancy could see that her enthusiasm swept Kurt along, breaking him out of his lethargy. That was good, she thought. He was taking this too seriously. After all, it was only news.

On Arctrixmatria, they sighed and waited. One day, Nancy would realize how her life unfolded like a newspaper caught in the wind. One day, Kurt would be someone rather than nobody, but that day wouldn’t come for over a decade.

What was it they needed? What would wake them from their slumber? That’s what troubled the Arcs. What was it that shifted the perspective of humans? What did it take for them to walk out of the darkness?

The Arcs had seen Gandhi rising from obscurity, inspiring others to be kind rather than violent, only to be gunned down on his way to prayer. And they’d seen Adolph herding gays and Jews and anyone who disagreed with him into gas chambers, burning their bodies as though they were wood. Oh, Hitler never sullied his hands. He never visited the camps that exterminated millions. He didn’t need to. All he needed was adoration.

To the Arcs, it seemed there were three forces at work in human society: love, hate and indifference. And out of these, the worst was indifference, as it always sided with hate.

Whoosh went another tube.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

Miracles

For Arcs, the most fascinating thing about Homo sapiens was their insistence on seeing their world as static. There was a status quo that humans embraced, but it was an illusion of their own making. They’d go to work five days a week and then relax on the weekend. Perhaps they’d take the kids to play sports or mow the lawn, and then another week would begin, just like the previous one. Humanity was blissfully unaware of reality. That their tiny planet is whizzing around a supermassive black hole at the center of their galaxy, drawing billions of stars into a massive bulge, didn’t seem to bother them at all. For a species that can barely reach the local Moon, the idea of travelling at 500,000 mph around the galaxy seems to have escaped their notice. 

During most weeks, those in the so-called Western world would travel anywhere from fifty to a hundred miles going to and from work, or to the grocery store, or out to watch a movie. At that same time, their world was anything but stationary, carrying them eleven million miles through space while they orbited a tiny star on the leading edge of a spiral arm within their modest-sized galaxy.

In the same manner, the Local Group of galaxies in which Earth was cradled by the Milky Way thundered through an astonishing 225 million miles of space while Earthlings complained about the price of gasoline and sought better mileage from their Prius Hybrids.

But the illusion didn’t stop there. The Arcs knew. Humans were ignorant of the complex biological processes that sustained their own lives. With each breath, millions of cells died so they could go on living. Smear tried to explain this biological contradiction to Dakota one day, but Dakota wouldn’t listen.

“I want to go home,” she said, standing in the geodesic dome on Arctrixmatria.

“Home?” Smear asked, telepathically activating the pipe organ vocalizer within her cage. “You are home.”

The enclosure spanned sixty feet in diameter with a curved dome reaching up thirty feet at its highest point. There was no privacy. The toilet and shower were located at the back of the dome, but that meant nothing. In practice, there was no back of the dome. That point of reference only existed in her mind because she thought of the living room as facing forward. In reality, Arcs encircled the entire dome in a swarm during the day. The bedroom wasn’t a room as such, being sectioned off from the kitchenette and the sunken living room by nothing more than a couple of steps. If anything, the bedroom afforded the Arcs their best view of her and Billy Crusader.

“No, I’m not home,” Dakota protested. Tears flooded her eyes. “I want to go home. To my home. Back on Earth.”

“Home is,” Smear began, but as usual, Dakota would have to wait for his reply. Where the heart is, she thought, finishing the cliché in her head. But her heart lay trillions upon trillions of miles away in Southern California. And being telepathic, Smear heard that thought. That wasn’t what he was going to say at all. Deciding what home was required considerable mental effort for an Arc. Home wasn’t a subject to be taken lightly.

The zoological gardens had closed for the day, with just a few administrators like Smear staying into the Arctrixmatrian night. Dusk had given way to early evening. A globular cluster rose above the buildings of the distant city. Tens of thousands of tiny stars twinkled in an area of the sky barely larger than the Moon as seen from Earth.

Arctrixmatria was almost a third larger than Earth but lacked Earth’s density, giving the planet roughly the same gravity.

The zoo on Arctrixmatria was located in the upper latitudes of the planet. This meant the 64 hour day on Arctrixmatria translated into absurd extremes that were disastrous to the circadian rhythms of Earthlings.

Billy and Dakota first arrived on Arctrixmatria in the northern summer and were subjected to 63 hours of glaring brightness followed by an hour of dusk before another day dawned. The Arcs quickly realized their prize exhibits would go crazy if they were subjected to such levels of sleep deprivation, so they arranged for a crane to lower a cover over the dome to simulate night. This led to the misconception that humans were lazy, sleeping most of the Arctrixmatrian day. To most Arcs, humans were cats.

Over time, the geodesic dome was upgraded with electro-luminous glass that could simulate day and night on command.

On Arctrixmatria, each year lasted 22 months, making the seasons extremely long by human standards.

It was autumn on Arctrixmatria, with daylight stretching to 32 hours, giving the humans two naturally lit days before their artificial lighting kicked in. By the time the winter solstice arrived, they’d have up to 63 hours of darkness, with their broad-spectrum lights providing a rough approximation of daylight every 12 hours. Dakota, though, didn’t mind winter. Methane snow was beautiful. It glistened like a thousand rainbows when it caught the light. Arcs loved winter. It was the one time of year they were more interested in playing in the park beyond the human enclosure than staring at her naked body like peep show voyeurs. Dakota savored the Arcs shifting focus, and she would often sit there watching with amusement as they played in the distance.

On those occasions where the human need for night aligned with the Arctrixmatrian night, the nearby globular cluster would arise as dusk fell. Dakota thought the stars looked like diamonds scattered on black velvet.

Like all celestial objects, when observed from the perspective of Homo sapiens, the stars within the globular cluster appeared static, almost painted on the sky. Gravity caused the stars within the cluster to dance the Samba with each other, but over the span of a human lifetime, nothing appeared to change. 

As beautiful as the cluster was, what took Dakota’s breath away was the wispy nebula, visible at this time of the year only in the darkest hours before the Arctrixmatrian dawn. She’d first seen the nebula in spring the previous year, but with her eyes still adjusting to the light, its full majesty wasn’t apparent to her until she’d woken during a winter night roughly four months later.

Dark chocolate brown clouds billowed through space, peppered with stars in the foreground, but it was the expanding bubble of superheated hydrogen encroaching on the nebula that gave the clouds their rainbow of hues. Like the oily film on a soap bubble, the nebula had an astonishing array of colors, from blues and greens to golden yellows and ruddy red hues.

To Dakota, it looked as though the nebula was close to Arctrixmatria. The billowing clouds were easily twenty times larger than the full Moon. Smear assured her the wispy clouds were well over a hundred light years away, spanning almost twenty light years in length, breadth and depth, but some nights she felt as though she could reach out and touch them.

Dakota never tired of the nebula, but still, she pined for the starry skies of Nevada, where, in violent opposition to her first name, she’d been raised. As beautiful as the nebula and the globular cluster were, Dakota longed to see the familiar constellations of Orion and the Pleiades.

It was no wonder the Arcs explored the heavens, she thought. The globular cluster and vast chocolate nebula called to them from the sky, a siren song luring them into space to explore their wonders. Smear agreed, although he never told her so.

Several hours had passed since night had fallen. Billy was asleep. Dakota was pretending to be asleep. She and Billy had just made love, and although they’d only rolled apart a few minutes ago, Billy was already starting to snore softly.

Dakota didn’t mind Billy’s snoring. It wasn’t obnoxious or in any way annoying. She found Billy’s light wheeze strangely comforting, something distinctly human in the midst of the madness of an Arctrixmatrian zoo. She could pretend she was asleep for Billy’s sake, but she couldn’t fool Smear. He could read the alpha/beta waves bouncing around inside her skull. He knew she was still awake. Perhaps she was trying to get to sleep, but Smear could tell it would be a while before she reached the delta waves of deep sleep. He was determined to finish his definition of home.

As he cleaned the glass windows on the geodesic dome, Smear looked up at the globular cluster and finally said, “Somewhere you can be safe.” For him, that’s what home meant.

Dakota opened her eyes for the first time in almost an hour.

Dakota Monroe was in the habit of making love with her eyes shut, but not because she didn’t find Billy attractive. She didn’t, but that wasn’t the point. They’d been thrust together in the alien zoo like pandas caught in the wild, expected to mate on demand.

Sex was more than a biological impulse to Dakota Monroe, more than an imperative. Romance demanded more than mere instinctive responses to a physical urge. For Dakota, there was a sense of longing, a desire to feel loved beyond just her sensuous body. She wasn’t sure what Billy felt, but for her, there was a need to feel love at a psychic level. She had to block out the distraction of being on the other side of the universe. She had to block out the Arcs observing their passionate thrusting motions with befuddlement. Dakota had to pretend she was back on Earth, lying in bed with a B-grade movie star stud on a cheap Hollywood set. That was the only way she could find release. Smear understood there was no love back there in the Californian foothills either, but for humans, nostalgia and love were easily interchangeable.

Dakota sat up on the edge of the bed.

Billy snorted.

“Safe? What makes you say that?” Dakota asked quietly, her voice barely a whisper.

She got up and went to the bathroom.

Sitting there beneath the globular cluster, she had to admit that the skies of Arctrixmatria were beautiful beyond compare.

Dakota walked down the two steps into their sunken living room. She wanted to wrap a dressing gown around herself, but not because it was cold. It wasn’t. The Arcs ensured the temperature within their enclosure was always balmy. Her desire to be dressed stemmed from habit. One of the few demands the Arcs made of Billy and Dakota was that they remain naked at all times.

Clothing was an affront to the Arcs. They couldn’t understand the human desire to cover themselves. Arcs had observed such Earthling swimwear as Speedos and bikinis and decided these scant strips of cloth were evidence of the absurdity of human clothing in general. They were token gestures of modesty. A business suit or formal ball dress was just silly and overly pretentious to the Arcs. They couldn’t understand how human society thrived with such a level of hypocrisy and pretense. Why the facade?

Dakota Monroe didn’t agree, and she told them so. Clothing was an opportunity to present oneself in a different context in life. Being naked was more than a physical state for humans. There were emotional considerations, and she hated being on display all the time, naked in front of the Arcs. There was no relief, no respite, no chance to retreat and recharge, but the Arcs didn’t listen. They heard her thoughts and felt the whirlwind-like intensity of her emotional outbursts, but they didn’t agree.

Dakota sat on the couch.

Smear listened to her. He was the only one who did, but there was little he could do. Smear was constrained by the edicts of the Arctrixmatrian scientists who had chosen Billy and Dakota for study. He was responsible for their comfort and well-being, but only within certain carefully prescribed limits.

“Home is somewhere you can be safe,” Smear repeated, tying the two concepts together for Dakota. Humans needed simple connections, or they tended to go off on tangents.

“You think this is my home?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“You’re safe here,” he said, speaking softly through the pipe organ in their enclosure, mimicking her volume to avoid waking Billy.

“I was safe on Earth,” Dakota said defiantly.

“Were you?”

Smear’s words took her by surprise. Of course, she was safe in her home in sunny California.

Dakota thought she could feel Smear reading her mind. She couldn’t. It was just her imagination. Although she couldn’t actually feel him probe her mind, he read her thoughts just the same. As a courtesy to her, though, Smear only responded to those thoughts she spoke aloud.

“I was safe in my home,” she said, remembering the eight-foot cinder block wall encircling her property and the iron bars on the windows. Was she safe only because she was protected from intrusion? Were those iron bars an admission of failure in themselves? An admission that she wasn’t safe at all?

“I was safe at work.”

Thinking about it, she realized that work only provided an illusion of safety. She wasn’t safe there either. She was exploited. Dakota may not have been physically in danger, but her dignity was violated, and what’s more, she encouraged it. Oh, she didn’t like the leering of producers and other hangers-on in the director’s office. Kissing and fondling for the cameras was odious, but you’d never know that by the way she smiled beneath the bright lights. She was happy to flirt and encouraged the notion that she enjoyed any and all attention.

Money.

Was that what made her safe?

“I was safe,” she insisted a third time, but she was unable to add a qualifier. Was Smear right? Was Arctrixmatria the first place Dakota Monroe could truly be safe? She looked at her trembling hands.

“I’m afraid, Smear.”

“Of what?” the imposing alien creature asked with tenderness in his pseudo-voice. “You’re safe here.”

“I’m afraid of dying.”

Smear was silent.

“I’m afraid I’m going to die here on Arctrixmatria and never see Earth again.”

“Everyone dies,” Smear said. “No one wants to, but everyone does, in every species we’ve ever encountered. But it’s not dying you should be afraid of.”

Tears flooded Dakota’s eyes. She sniffled, saying, “No? Then what should I be afraid of in this safe house on Arctrixmatria?”

Smear concentrated, focusing on the present, determined not to drift off into views of the past or the future. He understood how important this was to Dakota, and he wanted to complete his train of thought for her. Smear liked Dakota. He wanted her to understand.

“You should be afraid of the one thing every intelligent creature fears.”

“And what’s that?” Dakota asked, wiping her eyes as she sat there naked on the couch.

“Not having lived.”

Dakota heard a soft rustle behind her as Billy rolled over on the bed, which was not more than ten feet away. He clutched his pillow for comfort. Looking at him, she knew Smear was right.

Dakota Monroe loved Billy Crusader, but not because he swept her off her feet. And not for the corollary either, simply because there was no one else to love on Arctrixmatria. She loved Billy because she had to live her life to the fullest in spite of the glass prison that surrounded her. If Arcs could smile, she was sure Smear was smiling. She knew he was reading her mind.

“Life is a miracle few appreciate,” Smear continued softly. “With every breath you take, millions of your blood cells die, and that’s entirely natural. You think of yourself as a single entity, but you’re not—you’re a composite creature, made up of trillions of individual living cells and a whole host of other living organisms far smaller than you could ever see.

“Life is a privilege beyond compare, Dakota. There are hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies beyond. Just a single star among these contains enough material to form your body trillions upon trillions of times, and yet it never will. These arms, these legs, this magnificent body you have, eyes that see, ears that hear, a mind that thinks—they’re miraculous. Among the desolate excesses of a universe filled with a septillion lifeless stars, your intelligence shines brighter than any supernova.”

Dakota smiled, but not from happiness.

Dakota Monroe smiled because she understood.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

Seeds

Arcs loved the big moments in the history of Homo sapiens, but the points they considered to be the turning of the tide in human affairs were never recognized as such by humanity. Rather than being the domain of kings and warriors, the Arcs knew that big changes came from little people.

Napoleon, Roosevelt, and the likes of Martin Luther were important, but they were of lesser importance to the Arcs. The true heroes of human progress were ordinary people like Dr. John Snow and Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, people with unusual names overlooked by the history books.

On Earth, these men may have been obscure historical figures, but on Arctrixmatria, they were lauded as visionaries. The Arcs called them Snowballs, largely as a play on the name John Snow. Most humans in the 21st century equated John Snow with a fictional character in a make-believe world of swords and dragons. They were oblivious of the real man who lived hundreds of years before them, who shaped their future with his piercing insights. When a deadly outbreak of cholera threatened to consume London, the real John Snow saw something entirely unique. He refused to accept the superstitions of his day and saw a pattern.

John Snow defied the understanding of his peers, seeing a single water pump on a street corner as the source of the outbreak. After convincing the local council to remove the handle, much to the disgust of residents, the disease abated. But human nature is nothing if not shortsighted, and the passion of scorned humans to trend toward stupidity should never be underestimated. After seeing clear evidence of the link between the epidemic and the water pump, less than a year later, the handle was returned, along with misery and suffering. Eventually, common sense prevailed over stupidity, and the handle was once again removed.

The Arcs understood John Snow.

The Arcs felt he was more Arctrixmatrian than human.

In the 1800s, Ignaz Semmelweis saw thousands of women die after first-year medical students treated them. No amount of Hippocratic oaths could hold back the swarms of microbes these students carried after studying autopsies in the mortuary down in the basement of the building. They’d come from there to the maternity ward wanting to help with the birth of children, but instead of bringing life, they brought death. The women who Dr. Semmelweis cared for in his ward died at horrific rates shortly after the students cared for them—year after year. Like John Snow, Ignaz refused to accept the way things were. To the indignation of the medical council, he demanded that his students wash their hands. Outrageous. Such arrogance, they said. How could he demand hygiene? Who did Ignaz think he was? How absurd was it to claim there was some unseen, invisible agent of death on the hands of physicians? 

When Dr. Semmelweis suggested that all doctors should wash their hands in slightly chlorinated water, the medical council claimed he was accusing them of manslaughter through negligence. That he saved thousands of lives with his measures was immaterial. Ignaz was an affront to the medical community, and they hounded him, driving him into an insane asylum, but the Arcs knew. The Arcs understood. The Arcs honored Ignaz when his own people wouldn’t.

Within a hundred years, the work of John Snow and Ignaz Semmelweis would transform the human world, though few would realize the opposition those men faced during their lifetime. Billions would benefit from the indignation they suffered. To the Arcs, they were heroes.

Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis may have died in a mental institution, but the Arcs considered him one of the few sane people on the planet at that time. Just a few years later, hundreds of thousands of soldiers would die in the American Civil War, but not from bullet wounds or bomb blasts, from tiny infections that could have been prevented had anyone listened to Dr. Semmelweis.

The Arcs struggled to understand how General Patton could be better known than Edward Jenner or Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell. Why was it that human younglings pointed fingers at each other, pretending to shoot one another? Instead of pretending to kill each other, they could mimic those who saved millions of lives from being cut tragically short. Why not play-act with a pretend syringe instead of a gun?

“Stand,” said Smear. “And watch.”

Dakota got to her feet as Smear constructed a vision of Earth as it had once been, hoping not only that this would help her understand but that it would also help his four-dimensional thinking crystallize. Although she knew she was still on Arctrixmatria in her customized geodesic dome, Dakota felt as though she’d been whisked away across the universe, propelled through space and time at superluminal speeds to stand on another world.

She ran her fingers over the tall grass in front of her, feeling the soft blades bending beneath her fingertips. The wind caught her hair, blowing blond strands behind her. The sun felt hot on her naked skin.

A foul stench filled her nostrils. She struggled not to believe she had actually been transported from Arctrixmatria back to Earth. With the sun on her back, she stepped forward, following a beaten path through the dry grass.

“See,” Smear whispered inside her mind.

A young man lay in the shade of a small tree.

Dakota walked up to him, but he ignored her. She was invisible to him. Dakota had to remind herself that she wasn’t actually there. Smear was showing her something he wanted her to understand, reconstructing human history.

“Curse you, Ursa!” the man called out. He looked around, staring through Dakota at someone else coming down the track behind her.

Dakota jumped to one side as a woman roughly her own age came into the clearing. Dakota needn’t have moved. The woman would have walked straight through her as though she were a ghost. Perhaps, in some ways, she was.

Ursa had soft, brown skin. Her dark hair was long and set in a braid, but one that looked more functional than beautiful. She wore a leather tunic unlike anything Dakota had ever seen. Instead of treated leather, this was raw animal hide with fine strands of fur still clinging to it. The tunic lay flat against the woman’s skin, following the contours of her body, giving her the appearance of a chimera—half woman, half animal.

“Oh, Arak,” Ursa said, kneeling next to him and holding a bowl of water out for him. “Please! You must drink.”

Arak pushed her away, spilling the water. The cut on his forearm was infected. Pus oozed from the sore. Angry red welts had formed further up on his shoulder, suggesting blood poisoning.

“You must let me—”

“Be gone from me, woman!” he yelled. Beads of perspiration formed on his brow. “You have done this to me! You and you alone. The gods are angry. They will kill you. They should. They must.”

Arak was delirious, refusing Ursa’s help as he kicked at the dust with his bare feet.

He pulled a stone knife on her, but Ursa’s reflexes were quicker. He struck out at her, slicing through the air, barely missing her cheek. Arak swept his arm around, trying to catch her with the sharpened blade, but Ursa darted back a few feet, still crouching in the long grass as she faced him.

“No!” she begged. “I will help. Let me help you.”

“You! You did this to me!” he yelled, leaning forward and swinging with the knife again, but his efforts were futile. He could barely raise his one good arm. Arak fell forward into the dust, dropping the chiseled stone knife. For a moment, he lay still with his head in the dirt. Flies buzzed around him, settling on his infected arm, laying their eggs in his putrid flesh.

Ursa kept her distance, moving warily to one side, staying out of reach.

Arak rolled over and stared up at the cloudless blue sky, mumbling over and over to himself, “You. You. You… You did this. It’s your fault. You—will—pay.”

Ursa wept as Arak died.

Dakota was deeply moved by what she had witnessed. She didn’t know what had happened to Arak, but Ursa loved him. That much was clear. She could understand Ursa’s grief.

“Why are you showing me this?” Dakota asked Smear.

“Because this is when you awake,” the Arc answered with a voice that trailed on the wind.

Dakota didn’t understand what Smear meant, but that was no surprise when it came to Arcs. She was sure he didn’t mean to speak in riddles. He probably thought he made perfect sense. Dakota found it difficult to relate to someone who saw the past, present, and future as one might see the Colorado Rockies from a distance, taking in the entire panoramic vista all at once. Even though he was inside her mind, his reasoning was alien to her.

Several older men came running down the path, shouting at Ursa.

“You have killed him. You killed Arak!”

“No,” she pleaded. “I have done nothing.”

One of the men struck Ursa with the back of his hand, sending her reeling into the grass. Tiny flecks of husk and seeds swirled in the wind as she lay there crying on the ground.

“You have brought shame!” the other man yelled, spitting on her as she lay crumpled in the dust. Tears streaked her cheeks, leaving tracks running down her dirty face.

“You,” the first man bellowed. “You will pay.”

He grabbed Ursa before she could get to her feet and run. Seizing her roughly by the upper arm, the burly man dragged her through the grass. Ursa scrambled with her feet, trying to keep pace with him as he twisted her arm painfully.

“No, please,” she cried.

“Why are you showing this to me?” Dakota repeated, clearly distressed by the vision of Ursa being humiliated and hurt. Smear knew she was troubled by what she was witnessing, but he felt she needed to understand the origins of her species. As much as she didn’t want to watch, Dakota needed to see what would happen to Ursa. Dakota jogged after the big man as Ursa kept pace beside him with her head hung low.

“This is the beginning,” Smear said. “For your species, this moment marks the start of civilization. You are all children of this moment.”

“This?” Dakota asked, perplexed. She looked around, trying to grasp what Smear meant. She was surprised that the environment around her responded to her touch. She could feel the crushed grass beneath her feet, the sweltering sun on her face, and the wind in her hair.

Dakota couldn’t see anything that even remotely resembled civilization.

“This,” Smear repeated.

Black smoke rose lazily from a campfire.

The big man dragged Ursa on, half lifting her off the ground with his iron grip. Ursa was much shorter than the man. She struggled to keep up with him. Her feet barely caught on the dusty ground. The burly man ignored her as she cried out in pain.

“Merk. What is happening?” one of the women next to the campfire yelled, hurrying over to Ursa.

“Arak is dead,” Merk announced, pushing Ursa roughly and throwing her to the dusty ground. Ursa fell in a heap beside the fire.

A naked boy stood silently to one side.

Smear whispered. “See, he is the child. You are all her children. Understand?”

Dakota didn’t understand. The boy was stunned. Even he didn’t understand the correct response in this situation. Should he care for Ursa or cower in front of Merk? He remained still, frozen as though he were a statue. His arms hung limp by his sides. Dakota wasn’t sure about his age, but the boy couldn’t have been more than eight or nine.

“She must die!” Merk said.

“Don’t say that,” the older woman replied, taking Ursa and pulling her away. Another woman joined them, examining the red welt forming on Ursa’s upper arm.

“She should die to be with him,” Merk insisted, striking Ursa across the face with the back of his hand. Ursa reeled sideways. Murder haunted Merk’s eyes. He grabbed Ursa by the throat, his huge hands gripping her neck.

“Please, no!” the older woman yelled. She beat her hands feebly against Merk, but he refused to heed her pleas.

Ursa choked, gasping for breath.

A horn sounded, drifting through the trees.

Three men approached the camp. Two of them carried a dead antelope between them on a pole.

Merk snarled, letting out a huff as he threw Ursa to the dust. Even after he’d let her go, Ursa struggled to breathe. She knelt on all fours, leaning forward and coughing, choking as she fought for air.

Merk kicked her, knocking her on her side before turning to greet the returning hunters. A couple of scruffy dogs barked, racing around the men, excited by the kill.

What had looked like three men returning from a hunt was one man accompanied by two teenage boys. All three were as scrawny as Arak. Merk was the only one in the tribe who had any physical size. 

“What did she do?” Dakota asked of her invisible guide, knowing Smear was observing her as she watched these events unfold.

“What women have always done to deserve such treatment,” the Arctrixmatrian curator said softly.

Dakota spun around, unable to shake the feeling that Smear was peering over her shoulder. She wanted to see him. She wanted an answer, not a riddle. The answer came, but it wasn’t what she expected.

“Nothing.”

“But…” Dakota began to protest, wanting more by way of explanation. At that moment, the young boy ran through her to get to his mother. He passed through Dakota as though she were nothing but mist, a light fog on a brisk spring morning.

The boy threw his arms around Ursa’s waist and squeezed tight.

“My Mah. My Mah.”

Dakota understood. She had felt that way about her own mother once. Dakota remembered her mother and the feeling of being wrapped in eternity in her arms. Whenever her mother hugged her, Dakota felt enclosed within castle walls. Nothing could hurt her. Try as the boy may, Dakota knew that, at that moment, he couldn’t get the assurance he craved. For him, the illusion of refuge had been shattered. The boy needed Ursa as much as Dakota once needed her mother.

Dakota’s father was a drunk—not all the time, although it felt like it. Abuse was scorn heaped on her and her mom for the sake of the man’s pride. Saturdays were the worst. The week had ended, but the sanctity of the church on a Sunday morning and the need to appear perfect had not yet arisen. Her father would drink during the afternoon, watching college sports on a black and white television. Like a storm brewing as humidity built on a hot summer’s day, he’d become more and more beligerant, yelling at the television before yelling at her. And like a summer’s storm, once the dark clouds had formed, the rain would come. For Dakota, lightning would strike around six in the evening. Before then, she could lie low in her room. After then, he’d fall asleep in a drunken stupor, but around six, the fury of the wind and the rain was unleashed. Dakota would do all she could to avoid her home around dusk on Saturdays. And here was Merk, someone she didn’t know, someone she’d never met, someone who could have been her father. And Ursa, her mother. Is this why Smear was showing her this vision, to remind her of the turmoil of her own life growing up?

Ursa wept, running her hands through her son’s dark hair. A bruise formed beneath one of her eyes.

The other women gathered around. They reached out and touched Ursa’s arms and back, wanting only to show their support, their sympathy, knowing what still lay ahead. Merk wasn’t finished with Ursa. Dakota understood. She’d seen the same hatred in her father’s eyes.

Ursa took the boy by his shoulders. She looked deep into his eyes, trying to compose herself, trying not to sob as she said, “Oh, my dear Voh. Don’t be like them. Promise me. Promise me you will never treat a woman like this.”

Ursa sniffed, repeating her admonition. “Swear to me. Never. Not like this.”

“I won’t,” Voh said with tears welling up in his eyes.

“One day you will grow up to be a man, just like them,” Ursa said, pointing at the men celebrating their hunt. “But you cannot be just like them. You cannot live like them. You must not.”

The women surrounding the two of them whispered agreement, urging the young boy on with the admonition, “Promise.”

Tears ran down Voh’s cheeks as he swore to his mother.

“I promise.” His voice broke, barely carrying over the noise of the dogs barking in the background.

“When you grow up, dear Voh. Remember me. Remember this day. Remember your promise.”

“I will, my mah,” the boy said in anguish. “I hate them! I never want to be like them. They’re mean. Stupid.”

Ursa pulled his head to her chest, holding him tight and giving him what little comfort she could. Dakota could see her eyes staring into the distance, looking at Merk and the hunters.

“They’re going to kill her,” she said to Smear.

“She knows,” Smear replied.

Dakota shouted, “Run,” unable to restrain herself, but Ursa couldn’t hear her. “Why doesn’t she run?”

“Where could she go?”

“Anywhere,” Dakota replied passionately.

“Look around you,” Smear said softly. “What do you see?”

Dakota hadn’t thought about where she was or, more importantly, when. She could see that she wasn’t in any place remotely contemporary with her time. She wasn’t simply in Africa or India instead of America. There was something about the land and its rugged, untouched look, as well as the tribe and their clothing, that spoke of deep antiquity.

The camp was sparse. There were no huts or stone structures, even though the site had clearly been in use for years, probably for generations. To one side, a pile of seashells reached up over twenty feet in height, sprawling across the plain. Most of the shells had been bleached white by the sun over the decades. Those that hadn’t were scattered on one side of the heap like a stain.

The sun cast long shadows on the ground.

Worn tracks wove their way through the bush and trees behind the camp while a grassy plain stretched out on either side of the campfire. Several miles in the distance, the plain broke into rolling hills covered in forest. As Dakota listened to the shifting wind, she could make out the sound of waves crashing beyond the thicket. There was a slight salty taste in the air. The bushes were acting as a windbreak on some rugged coastline.

“Where are they?” Dakota asked. “Where do they live?”

“Everywhere,” Smear answered.

“But where do they sleep? How do they shelter from the rain?”

Smear was kind to her. “They sleep under the stars that gave birth to life on this planet billions of years ago. When the storms come, they shelter in the caves by the cliff.”

The dry grass beside the dusty campsite had been flattened. Straggly mats of straw marked where they slept.

“How long have they been here?”

“For three months,” Smear said. “They hunt and collect shellfish in the summer, but when autumn comes, they’ll follow the herds south.”

“Just a few months?” Dakota asked, surprised, looking at the worn rocks and chips of stone lying at the base of a fractured boulder.

“Yes,” Smear said. “They come and go, but your species has lived here for tens of thousands of years, always following the same pattern of life, always tracing the coastline in search of food.”

“Until now?”

“Yes.”

Dakota’s eyes settled on Ursa and her son, Voh. He was scrawny and reminded her of Billy.

“Can you help her? Can you protect her?”

“No. But she will help you in ways you cannot imagine. She will spare you from all this.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

The women fussed over Ursa and Voh.

“You must go,” one of them said.

The women around Ursa were speaking so fast that Dakota had trouble making out who said what.

“You must leave.”

“Merk will kill you.”

“And the boy.”

“Flee!”

“But where will I go?” Ursa asked, sobbing, echoing the sentiments of Smear.

“If you stay, you die.”

The older woman, the one who stood up to Merk, pushed a shell necklace into Ursa’s hand, saying, “Take this. May the gods be with you.”

Coarse, woven strands of flax had been beaten to form a thin braid of twine for the necklace. The centerpiece was a polished shell, glistening in the twilight with a rainbow of hues not unlike the nebula Dakota had seen from Arctrixmatria.

A young girl handed Ursa a leather pouch full of nuts, seeds and dried berries. Another woman pushed Ursa briskly behind her, hiding her from sight.

“Merk comes,” the woman whispered as the big man draped the kill over his shoulder as though it were his. The men beside him were boisterous, being greeted by the other young men in the tribe.

Ursa crept behind the large tree dominating the campsite, beckoning for Voh to join her.

Dakota crept beside Ursa. She needn’t have. Rather than an observer in real-time, Dakota was interacting with a vision that had no more substance than a dream. Smear had used telepathy to overwhelm her normal sensory inputs, rerouting the neural feeds from her ears and eyes so her mind processed his thoughts as though she were experiencing them herself.

“What is she going to do?” Dakota asked.

“Shape history,” Smear said. “Alter the future. Ursa will forever change the destiny of your species.”

Ursa pulled Voh from the track and into the thicket. Dakota followed her, watching her eyes dart around at the slightest sound from the creak and flex of the bushes around her. Dakota could see frustration creeping over Ursa’s face. Ursa was trying to predict the future—her future. It might have been clear to Smear, but for Ursa, there was no future. She was trying to survive the coming night, desperate to figure out what she should do next. She didn’t know what to do; that much was clear. Dakota could see that she wanted to flee, but she had nowhere to go. She must have been wondering if there was some way she could be reconciled with the tribe, perhaps through the intercession of the other women, but Merk had made that impossible. On her own, Ursa would be easy prey for lions and jackals.

Ursa was being blamed for whatever injury had befallen Arak and his subsequent infection, but Dakota thought Merk’s resentment of her ran deeper. Was there some other point of friction between them? Had Ursa said something that had offended his ego? It appeared to Dakota that Ursa was an intelligent, caring woman. Was that it? Was Merk jealous? Perhaps threatened by her intelligence? Did he feel he had to impose his will on her to retain the loyalty of the tribe?

Merk threw the carcass down in front of the fire, laughing and joking with the hunters, stealing their glory. Ursa hid in the long grass.

“We have done well. Tonight, we feast!”

He crouched, using a stone knife to begin skinning the dead animal. Dakota was fascinated. She expected blood to squirt from the carcass, but Merk worked the knife around the hooves, taking care not to cut too deeply. He peeled back the skin, working with the animal as though it were a piece of fruit like an orange. Merk exposed the hide and revealed the strips of muscle, fat and sinew. 

“You can go over there. You are free to watch,” Smear said. “They cannot see you because you were never actually here.”

Dakota wanted to believe Smear, but she felt compelled to be cautious so as not to betray Ursa. She crept up softly behind the trunk of the massive tree and peered around at the men dressing the carcass.

The animal had already been gutted, but most of the organs had been kept, with only the gall bladder, bowels, and lungs discarded. Red blood stained the hands of the women as they prepared the heart, liver and kidneys for the fire. The young men stoked the fire as the hunters set up a spit to roast the meat.

Merk worked on the skin, carefully peeling back the hide on each of the legs as he worked with his stone knife, all the while joking with the other men.

Out across the mountains, the sun set.

Night fell.

After roughly an hour, a silhouette emerged from the darkness, walking down the track toward their camp as the smell of roasting meat wafted through the air.

“It is done,” a deep voice said, and Dakota recognized the other man involved in the assault on Ursa after Arak died. “He is deep. No beast will reach him.”

“Good,” Merk responded, tearing a fleshy rib bone from the well-cooked carcass and tossing it to him.

“And the witch?”

“She has fled,” Merk said. “The lions will feast on her before the night is out.”

The men gathered around the fire laughed. The women were silent, waiting quietly with the children for their turn to pick at the bones.   

Merk moved the spit off the fire. The legs and ribs of the antelope were cooked. The muscled flanks had already been stripped of meat for smoking, allowing the tribe to preserve their catch. Long strips of cooked meat were hung out over withered branches, catching smoke from the fire. Men tossed bones and scraps of meat to the dogs. Flies buzzed around the camp.

The women gathered around the charred remains and began jostling for the scraps. They were excited. They didn’t seem to be bothered by the meager remains left to them.

Merk threw several large, leafy green branches on the fire. Within a few minutes, thick white smoke began billowing into the sky.

Dakota turned at the sound of twigs breaking behind her. The crackle of burning branches covered the sound of Ursa moving through the undergrowth beyond the camp. Ursa had hidden in the thicket no more than ten feet from the track that led to the cliff top and the ocean beyond.

Merk and the other men used the smoldering fern fronds to wave smoke around. They inhaled deeply, laughing at the night.

One of the young women must have heard Ursa in the bushes as she slipped away from beside the broad tree and took a strip of cooked meat to Ursa and her son. The girl couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen years old. Dakota could see that she was following the bidding of the oldest woman in the tribe, a grey-haired matriarch who was caring for the younger women.

The matriarch kept a wary eye on Merk as the girl crept into the shadows. There was a complex dynamic at play, one that fascinated Dakota. The women hadn’t spoken much since Ursa left the campsite, but that seemed to be out of fear of the men. Their sister had been exiled, and yet they couldn’t abandon her. Dakota felt as though she could feel their outrage simmering at the injustice, but the scales were tipped against them. Like Dakota, they were powerless to intervene.

The stars cut through the dark, moonless night. The fine pinpricks of light appeared brighter than Dakota remembered from her days in California. The Milky Way looked stunning—a splatter of white paint flicked across the sky by some ancient, wizened artist. There, much to her delight, was the constellation of Orion, sitting low on the horizon. The sight of this familiar shape warmed her heart.

The young girl returned to the matriarch. No words were spoken, but smiles were exchanged.

“Urrrrrrrsssssaaaa,” Merk called out, sitting in the haze of smoke drifting from the fire. He arched his back and leaned his head toward the stars as he yelled, “Urrrrrsaaa. Wheeeere areeee yoooou?”

“She is gone,” the matriarch snapped.

“Forget her,” one of the other men said.

“Oh, Urrrrrsaaaaaa,” Merk yelled into the night. He got to his feet, staggering under the influence of whatever cannabinoid was burning on the fire.

Merk rummaged around by the tree, kicking at wooden bowls and leather satchels until he found something he recognized.

“Here, boy,” he said, swaying slightly as he held a leather tunic for one of the dogs to sniff.

“Find her,” Merk called out, looping a leather thong around the dog’s neck to form a lead. “Gooooo! Find Ursaaaaa.”

At first, the dog didn’t respond. Merk tugged at the leash, pulling the dog roughly as he commanded. “Find her. Where is she?”

Dakota felt her blood run cold. Ursa didn’t stand a chance. The dog would lead him straight to her.

Merk grabbed a spear as the dog began sniffing around the campsite, quickly picking up Ursa’s scent trail.

“Come on, dog,” Merk ordered.

The dog began sniffing at the ground. Its body stiffened, and it pulled away from Merk, pulling the leash tight.

“I’m going to kill you,” Merk yelled at the dark sky set ablaze with thousands of stars.

The dog dragged Merk forward, almost pulling him off his feet as it sought to run down the path beaten through the grass. It sniffed around, caught in a moment of indecision as it sought to determine fresh scent from stale. The path it took led to where Arak lay buried, and Dakota hoped the dog would lead Merk away, but it turned back to the campfire.

“I’m coming, Ursa. I’m coming for you!”

Although the dog had turned back toward the camp, Merk still faced out into the night, yelling at the distant hills as he swayed on wobbly legs.

“Uuuurrrrssssaaaa.”

The other men laughed. Several of them lay on their sides, drowsy from the effects of the smoke. 

Dakota found her heart racing. She wanted to say something, but she kept quiet.

Ursa dragged her son out of the thicket, pulling him by the hand as she led him back behind the big tree, moving closer to the tribe. Voh fought to get away, to run into the darkness, but Ursa was strong. She would not allow herself to be separated from her son.

“What is she doing?” Dakota said under her breath, unable to contain herself. “Run!”

“URRRR.... SSSAAAAA,” Merk bellowed, wheeling around in a stupor with a spear in his hand. Leather bands held a sharpened stone knife on its tip.

The matriarch saw Ursa crouching behind the tree just a few feet away. Words were exchanged in a whisper. The women closed ranks as Ursa and Voh slipped between them into the middle of the huddle. In the flickering light of the fire, the women dusted off skins and made themselves busy picking at the remaining meat on the bones.

Dakota understood what Ursa was doing. She couldn’t run. With a dog hard on her trail, Merk would easily track her down. The best she could hope for was to bluff by hiding within the camp itself.

The dog dragged Merk toward the cluster of women, and Dakota held her breath. She could see the women controlling their panic. Their eyes were wide with terror, but they continued to ignore Merk. Ursa crouched low, pulling Voh close and whispering to him.

“Shhhh,” she said as Dakota moved over by the tree. “Hush. Be quiet. Everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to be all right.”

She was lying. Dakota knew that. She had told similar lies to herself over the years, not knowing what lay ahead but hoping for the best.

Ursa buried her son’s head beneath her arm, holding him tight, trying to shield him as best she could. Although she was crouched in the middle of the women, her eyes never left Merk. If she was going to die, she was going to die looking deep into his eyes.

Merk stumbled forward, dragged toward the thicket by the dog. He yelled, “WHERE ARE YOU, URSA?”

The dog peeled away from the women and over to the track leading through the thicket to the cliff top.

“Ursa! Come out, Ursa. I won’t hurt you.”

Merk prodded the dark bushes with his spear, sending the stone tip plunging violently into the shadows.

The dog sniffed along the track before turning back to the women again, dragging Merk toward the campsite.

“Urrrrrsssssaaaaaa.”

Voh cried, whimpering as his mother tried to keep him quiet.

“Shhh.”

The matriarch stood up, standing her ground between Merk and the women. Flames licked at the darkness behind her. Sparks rose into the night like stars in the sky.

“Enough of your silly games, Merk.”

“Where is she, woman?” Merk was enraged, bringing the tip of his spear up to the old woman’s throat, but the matriarch wasn’t intimidated. She batted the stone head away.

“You and your stupid dog! You couldn’t find a shit in the woods!”

“I’m going to kill her,” Merk said, slurring his words.

“She’s there,” one of the men yelled. He rocked unsteadily, pointing at the women huddled together and swaying as he called out, “She’s right there!” And with that, he promptly fell to the dust beside the campfire.

Merk laughed.

“She’s gone,” the matriarch insisted. “Your dumb dog runs you in circles. He makes a fool of you.”

“Ha!” Merk responded, pulling the dog away from the women. The dog continued trying to reach Ursa, but Merk gave a single, brutal tug on the leash, and the dog yelped, forgetting about its prey.

“She plays with you,” one of the men laughed.

“She will be eaten by the wild ones,” another called out.

“Or she’ll starve.”

Merk staggered, kicking up dust as he walked back to join the other men. He turned toward the matriarch, and for a moment, Dakota thought he’d seen Ursa crouching beside the old woman. Their eyes appeared to meet, but the dull glaze in Merk’s stare said otherwise.

Merk slumped to the ground, leaning up against the big tree not more than five feet from the women. His eyes closed. The women stopped what they were doing, falling silent, watching as Merk drifted off to sleep just like Dakota’s father would do on one of those stormy Saturday evenings. The dogs settled, curling up by their masters. They’d wake with the slightest change in sound or with the scent of a lion on the breeze, but for now, they, too, went to sleep. Still, the women waited.

Hours passed, but that didn’t bother Dakota. She felt for Ursa. She wanted to see her escape and was content to wait.

The Moon rose slowly over the horizon.

Dakota felt an affinity with the women. Theirs was a harsh life, a cruel life, but they looked out for each other.

Voh whispered, “Is it—”

“Shhh,” his mother replied, stroking his hair.

The sound of insects filled the air. The crackle of the fire slowly faded as the flames withered, and still, the women waited. No one spoke. They relaxed, but no one went to sleep. Dakota was neither bored nor impatient. Like the matriarch, she, too, kept watch.

It must have been well after midnight when Ursa found the courage to lead Voh away. A few of the younger girls had fallen asleep, but none of the women. Silently, they bid Ursa farewell. Tears were exchanged in place of words. The frail old matriarch squeezed Ursa’s hand with a vigor that belied her age. Ursa nodded and mouthed the words, “Thank you.”

With painstaking stealth, Ursa led Voh away from the camp. She crept silently through the long grass, not daring to take her eyes off the smoldering remains of the campfire, the sleeping men and the restless dogs until she was well over a hundred yards away. Dakota could understand her reluctance to turn her back on Merk. He snorted, turning in his sleep. As Ursa inched away from the camp, a lone figure stood in the shadows, that of the matriarch bidding farewell. One of the dogs stirred but didn’t wake.

Once the campfire was a dull red glow beyond the grass, Ursa turned and began walking at a rapid pace. With every yard she put between her and Merk, she felt the urge to move faster. By the time she’d gotten to what felt to Dakota like a quarter mile, she and Voh were running.

Dakota was impressed with the endurance of Ursa and Voh. For over an hour, they kept up a light jog through the plains.

Voh tired as they started up the long, meandering slope of a grassy hill. Ursa kept close to the trees, not wanting to give herself and her son away as they crossed the brow of the hill. Dakota stayed with them. How? She wasn’t sure. Somehow, Smear weaved his magic and the illusion was maintained. She could see Ursa had no idea where they were going, only that they had to get away and that she had to put as much distance as possible between them and Merk before dawn.

It had been hours since Dakota had heard from Smear. He’d been silent ever since sunset, but that didn’t bother her. Although she knew this experience wasn’t real, being no more than the Arctrixmatrian equivalent of a technicolor movie, she felt personally invested in everything that was happening. Dakota had to be there for Ursa.

Ursa slowed, and Dakota understood why. They were exhausted. The night had been long. Slowly, the sky lightened, revealing a soft, ruddy pink hue as dawn approached. Voh had been silent, but now he spoke.

His voice quivered slightly as he said, “It’s going to be okay, Mah.”

And Dakota smiled. She’d said the same thing to her mother after they’d fled their home following a violent, drunken rampage by her father. They crept out of the house in the dead of night and walked for miles to get to a friend’s home on the other side of town. Thousands of years may have separated her and Voh, but it seemed nothing had changed. A child comforting a mother was a peculiar sight, but it spoke of the love and hope they shared.

“Yes,” Ursa replied. “It is going to be okay.”

Both Dakota and Ursa understood the child’s anguish. Although he’d made a statement, they both knew he was posing a question. He wanted to believe everything was going to be fine, that the dawn of a new day would bring new life. And like Dakota, Ursa wanted him to believe that, too, even though it was yet another lie. Perhaps lie was too harsh a term, Dakota thought, but there was no guarantee as to what the future held. Smear might see the future as just another dimension, but humans don’t. Dakota felt nervous for Ursa and her son. Regardless of how hard their lives had been, they would be worse on their own.

“We’re safe now,” Ursa said as they walked along a ridge line miles from the camp, ducking and weaving between trees. Occasionally, a clearing would allow them to look back at the coast, and Voh would gaze into the distance. The tribal tree, which had seemed so large, looked small from the ridge. The thicket hid the cliff top, but the waves of the sea beyond were capped with white spray. Ursa would not allow herself the indulgence of looking back at Merk and the tribe.

The two of them walked on, following an animal trail through the undergrowth. Suddenly, Ursa froze on the edge of a large clearing.

Dakota stopped beside her, not seeing anything out of place. She couldn’t hear anything other than the wind in the leaves.

Voh took his mother’s hand.

“It’s a camp,” Ursa said, pointing.

Dakota hadn’t recognized the subtle signs, but Ursa was right. There was a fire pit behind the bushes. Long grass had been matted down. Animal bones lay loosely stacked to one side.

Ursa crept forward. Without taking her eyes off the track leading away from the camp, she bent down, touching at the black charcoal.

“Cold.”

“Will they be back?” Voh asked.

“Not until after the snow,” Ursa said.

“We should rest, Mah.”

“Yes. We should.”

Dakota could see that Ursa was curious about the campsite of another tribe. She could see Ursa’s fingers moving as she whispered to herself, pointing at the various parts of the camp. In her imagination, she must have been thinking about where the men would have slept, where the women would have gathered, and where the dogs would have been kept.

There were several flat stones set to one side. Dakota recognized them. She’d seen women grinding seeds on them back at Merk’s camp. Tiny sprouts grew up out of the rough ground around the rocks. Ursa sat down. She seemed lost. She passed her hand gently over the new growth, running her fingers over the fine tips. Dakota could see she was lost deep in thought.

“This is it,” Smear said softly. “This is the moment.”

“This?” Dakota asked, not recognizing anything of any significance in Ursa’s motion.

“This marks the ascendance of your species. Your first step toward the stars.”

Dakota watched as Ursa pulled a few seeds from her leather satchel. She wasn’t going to eat them, but she clearly relished the feel of them under her fingers. She placed her seeds on the ground beside the sprouts, examining them closely, lost in the moment. Intelligence shone in her eyes. In that instant, Dakota could see Ursa had a glimpse of the future, a vision of hope, a belief in what was possible on a grander scale.

“See?” Smear said with a note of triumph in his voice. “This is the moment! After almost two million orbits around your star, this branch of the Great Apes finally steps forward into the future. For two million orbits, you have made stone axes, you have controlled fire, you have gathered berries and hunted game, you have made sculptures and painted animals on the inside of caves, but you only ever scraped by. You never tapped into the abundance of life around you. You fought each day to survive, never able to sit back and reflect, but all that will change with this one woman and her son.”

“She’s going to grow crops,” Dakota said as the realization dawned.

“Yes. And within twenty thousand years, you will walk on the Moon. That may sound like a long time, but it is less than one percent of the years your kind has spent wandering these grassy plains. Were it not for this woman, her son, and those that follow after, your species would still be struggling to survive these nomadic pilgrimages along the coast.”

“And Ursa?” Dakota asked. “What will become of her?”

“It will be a hard winter for this woman. She will suffer, scavenging for food, but she will not eat those seeds, even though Voh will beg her. And when spring comes, she will plant them. She will care for them, for they are all she has, and when the harvest comes, for the first time, she will have more than enough. Next year, she won’t have to hunt. In the years that follow, others will hunt for her. Others will tan hides and cure meat for her, all so they can learn from her and share in her harvest.

“And she will build fences to keep wild animals away from her crops, but they will get in. And then she will realize she can trap them there. She’ll realize the hunt can be conducted over just a few feet instead of ten to twenty miles. And others will see. They will learn. They will copy her.”

Voh sat down next to his mother. She pulled him close, hugging him. He curled up on the soft grass and drifted off to sleep. Ursa lay there, staring at the seedlings as her eyelids slowly grew heavy. Under a sky full of stars fading with the coming dawn, she found peace.

Dakota lay facing them. She, too, was exhausted. She closed her eyes, wanting to stay with them but knowing she would awake with an artificial sun shining down on her in her Arctrixmatrian prison.

~~~

Whoosh went the pneumatic tube beside Nancy, rattling as another story shot through the pipes. Typewriters clacked around her as fingers madly struck keys and small metal levers swung back and forth, pressing inked ribbons against sheets of paper as dozens of reporters labored around her in the smoky room.

Nancy tidied her desk, getting ready to go home. The clock on the wall ticked slowly, dragging out the seconds until five o’clock finally came.

“Are you working on anything interesting?” Kurt Nobody asked, sitting on the edge of Nancy’s polished wooden desk.

“Yes,” Nancy replied. “I got to write a short archeological piece for the Saturday Tribune called Mystery in Mesopotamia.”

“Why, you’re a regular Agatha Christie,” Kurt said, smiling in delight. “Next, you’ll be cranking out detective novels.”

“I wish,” Nancy replied, straightening a pile of paper on the far side of her desk. “Some poor woman was struck in the back of the head with a stone axe. They found her buried in a shallow grave with a pretty shell necklace around her neck. The odd thing was that there were piles of seeds and sheaves of grass scattered all around her, but scientists say her molars revealed that she ate mostly meat and berries during her lifetime. They said she was a hunter, not a farmer. They put her age at forty, which was a long life in those days.”

“Why would they bury her with food?” Kurt Nobody asked. “Even back then, they must have known the dead don’t eat.”

“Perhaps they were like the Egyptians,” Nancy suggested. “You know, preparing the dead for the afterlife.”

“Someone must have cared deeply about her,” Kurt replied. “They must have wanted to make sure she was comfortable in the grave.”

Nancy shivered at the thought. “Comfortable?”

“I wonder who did it?” Kurt was thinking aloud. “The murder, I mean. What drives someone to take another person’s life? Was it envy? Jealousy? Or just plain greed during a robbery?”

“She was struck from behind,” Nancy said. “So whoever it was, they were a coward.”

“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Kurt replied. “To think these people lived lives just like ours, only thousands of years ago, when there were no planes or trains.”

“I wonder what she was like?” Nancy said. “I mean, what did she do with her life? Did she have kids? What did she enjoy? What did she struggle with? What did she love and hate?”

She paused for a moment before adding, “What was her name?”

“Dunno,” Kurt replied. “I guess she was our first Jane Doe.”

“Guess so. It’s sad to think that bones can endure for thousands of years, but names are lost forever.”

On Arctrixmatria, they knew Kurt and Nancy were talking about Ursa.

On Arctrixmatria, they understood that humanity would never recognize the fine web of advances that would eventually lead a bunch of hairless apes to venture out among the stars. Most Earthlings would never know how easily they could have continued carving stone axes and picking berries for another million years had it not been for a brave woman and her young son. 

On Arctrixmatria, they mourned Ursa.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

Teapot

“What’s wrong? What have you done to her?” Billy Crusader asked, watching as Dakota Monroe lay asleep on the floor in front of the couch.

Smear was silent. He stood outside the dome, silhouetted against the stars during a long, bitter Arctrixmatrian night, but Billy knew he’d heard him.

Billy reached down and lifted Dakota’s head gently, slipping a pillow beneath it. He thought about picking her up and carrying her back to bed, but she rolled away from his touch. She seemed content where she was, almost as though she were shunning him.

Billy knelt beside Dakota, gently stroking her hair. He’d been asleep, but he was woken by her cries. At first, he assumed she was still lying beside him, having a nightmare, but when he reached over to comfort her, he knew she was gone. That realization caused him to wake with a start, sitting up naked on the bed.

Even though it was winter outside and -290F, the interior of their geodesic dome was a balmy 85F. Sleeping naked was quite comfortable beneath the stars.

Billy had looked around and seen Dakota sleepwalking. He called out to her, but she hadn’t woken. He’d read somewhere once, long ago, that you shouldn’t wake someone sleepwalking, that they could get hurt. He’d heard sleepwalkers acted out their dreams, and it was best to let them tire, to watch over them and make sure they didn’t injure themselves, to allow them to settle over time, so he’d sat there watching, listening to what sounded like half a conversation. It wasn’t until Dakota finally collapsed on the floor that Billy suspected Smear’s involvement. Normally, the big Arctrixmatrian keeper would head home after cleaning the glass on their enclosure. That he’d stayed was curiously out of character, as was Dakota’s sleepwalking. Billy Crusader was sure the two were linked.

“I know you can hear me, Smear,” he said with anger in his voice. “What is wrong with her?”

“Nothing,” the tree-trunk-like creature with multiple limbs protruding from its head answered, speaking remotely through the pipe-organ device in the enclosure.

“Do you know what I find hardest about life here on Arctrixmatria?” Billy asked. There was no reply, so he continued. “It’s not that I’ve been snatched from Earth. It’s not that I miss my family or miss watching a ball game on TV. The hardest thing for me to deal with is the lies.”

Smear stood still.

From where Billy was, the creature looked like the bottom half of an old tree, flattened and smashed with a mallet. It was as though someone had come across a magnificent oak, one that reached up forty or fifty feet in height, with branches stretching out all around it, and they’d attacked it with a chainsaw. In their fury, they’d lopped off the limbs and branches, leaving only a thick trunk standing some ten feet tall, denuded of all but five of its stumpy limbs. To Billy, the dark outline of this intelligent alien was like being lost in a haunted forest. The slightest movement of its limbs was terrifying, as though this enchanted tree would snatch him up and carry him off. His thoughts were irrational—he knew that. The Arctrixmatrians had already snatched him, plucking him from his home in the middle of the night. If they were going to experiment on him or hurt him, they would have done so by now, but they seemed content to leave him alone in his enclosure.

“Why did you bring me here?” he asked.

There was no answer. No words were spoken through the pipe organ vocalizer. Smear didn’t appear to move, so Billy had no idea if he’d ever get a response. Body language didn’t exist for Arctrixmatrians. If it did, Billy couldn’t read it.

As Arcs communicated telepathically, there was no way to read emotion or intent in their physical movement. Billy hadn’t realized how much he’d relied on body language until he reached Arctrixmatria. Unless Smear spoke, Billy had no idea what was going through his Arctrixmatrian mind.

Life on Arctrixmatria made Billy realize how important body language was to understand another intelligent being. A slight twitch of the eyes, the tightening of the forehead, the curl of the lips, or the dart of someone’s gaze, all added shades and layers of meaning to a conversation. It was only in hindsight that Billy saw how much he’d relied on body language back on Earth.

Billy was a man plucked out of time. As much as he loved Dakota, he should have been old enough to be her grandfather—should have, if they weren’t both dragged through spacetime to the far side of the universe.

Billy was born in 1925, while Dakota was born two generations later in 1968. Billy enlisted to fight the Nazis at the age of 17, easily a quarter of a century before Dakota was born, and yet somehow there wasn’t more than three years difference in their ages. Billy was snatched from his home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on May 14th, 1955, just after his 30th birthday, more than a decade before Dakota was born. She arrived on Arctrixmatria five weeks later, telling him she had been kidnapped from Laguna Beach in California on April 1st, 1995, at the age of twenty-seven.

At first, Dakota thought their Arctrixmatrian enclosure was a practical joke. She was famous—an actress—although Billy didn’t know that. She kept asking about Candid Camera, something that confused Billy. For him, candid meant honest, but Dakota said it was an awful prank.

Over the years they lived together on the Arctrixmatrian home world, Dakota told him about all the things he’d missed on Earth. She sang a few rock and roll songs and spoke of strange names that, to her, were common but, to him, seemed alien. Who was Elvis? Why would the most popular band in the world name itself after insects? How could there even be a band without brass instruments? Dakota told him he would have liked Star Wars and said she’d seen creatures like the Arctrixmatrians on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Billy hadn’t even heard of the first generation. Her anecdotes about Kirk and Spock, Data and Picard were meaningless to him. She told him men had walked on the Moon, which he would have never believed if he hadn’t been whisked away to an Arctrixmatrian zoo in another galaxy. She said there was a space plane. A plane that could fly into space. But it was a discussion about US Presidents that surprised him most. For him, the greatest President was FDR. He thought she was teasing him when she said that for her, it was Ronald Reagan. The film star? The idea of an actor becoming US President seemed preposterous.

It was body language that brought Billy and Dakota together. When she first arrived, she was appalled at being stripped naked. For days, she insisted on hiding from the Arctrixmatrians, sheltering beside the bed or behind the couch. As the enclosure spanned 360 degrees, there was no escaping their curious captors, but she tried, covering her genitals and breasts with her hands and arms. Her behavior, in stark contrast to his, caused a sensation among the Arctrixmatrians, and they flocked in record numbers to see this strange, timid beast, which was precisely the kind of attention Dakota was trying to avoid. Finally, she realized it was impractical to be continuously shy. Billy tried not to stare at her stunning hourglass figure and voluptuous breasts, but she was far more appealing than the Arcs to look at, so he’d sneak a peek whenever she walked by.

One day, she sat down beside him, rubbing her arm gently on his as she leaned against the couch. Although they’d slept in the same bed for a while, Billy had been polite and not so much as touched her in passing. On that day, though, touch spoke more than words ever could. Touch was a language the Arcs knew nothing of and couldn’t interpret, and that gave them a tiny victory over their captors. They made love, and Billy felt overwhelmed. He’d never been with anyone as passionate and energetic as Dakota. He’d had orgasms before, but Dakota seemed to fly through the stars as she came. She’d grab at the pillows or the mattress, clenching the fabric in her fists, and flex and scream as she found release. Smear never said anything. Billy was curious about what the Arctrixmatrians thought of sexual love. As best he understood their species, they had no equivalent, with sex being merely a means of procreation for them. For humans, sex was about being alive.

When Dakota felt down, she didn’t have to say anything, just a look, or sometimes the absence of a quick glance was enough for Billy to know. Even simple things, like the touch of her fingers, could convey entirely different meanings. Soft and fleeting meant friendly but in need of some space. A slight linger, the need for comfort. The scratch of nails, the desire for love. A squeezed hand provided an offer of reassurance when he needed it. Billy wasn’t sure if Dakota loved him. If they weren’t in an Arctrixmatrian zoo, she probably wouldn’t give him the time of day. For that matter, if they weren’t in an Arctrixmatrian zoo, he would have probably been a golf buddy with her grandfather.

Billy was a simple man, haunted by a war he fought when he should have been dating girls like Dakota. For him, body language separated truth from lies. During the bombing of Dresden, it had been the timid, crouching posture of the Nazi guards that told the US prisoners of war that the pounding above was no ordinary air raid. Giants unleashed their anger on Earth.

As both German guards and American prisoners sheltered beneath the crumbling concrete remains of slaughterhouse-five, the POWs had no idea whether the howls they could hear outside were from the wind or those dying in the firestorm. The guards were afraid. Whatever position of power they held was gone. To the Nazis, the eerie sound itself was something to fear, like the cry of a ghost, and their fear kept the prisoners subdued.

It had been the tight lips and clenched fists of those same guards that damned poor Edgar Derby two days later. He’d picked up a teapot from the desolate ruins of Dresden after the bombing when the ground was still warm to touch. Billy remembered the look of amazement on Derby’s face when he found that teapot. The smoldering ruins of the city looked like the scarred, pitted surface of the Moon. There was no color, just a dull grey. Even among the survivors, all trace of color was lost. Concrete dust coated everything, getting in people’s hair, on their faces, and clinging to their clothes. If it weren’t for the blue sky above, Billy would have sworn he’d been transported into a black-and-white film.

Edgar Derby’s face lit up when he found the teapot. Red roses adorned the shiny white glazed pottery. When he pulled the teapot from the debris, it looked pristine, as though it had never been used, let alone bombed. Perhaps that’s why the soldiers noticed. Edgar tried to slip the teapot into his rucksack, but the guards challenged him.

Looting was a capital offense, they said. Edgar pleaded for his life. His body language showed he was truly full of remorse, that he hadn’t meant anything malicious by taking the teapot, he was simply trying to save something beautiful among the devastation, but that didn’t matter. Tight lips and narrow eyes didn’t believe him. If anything, the tortured expression on poor Edgar Derby’s face, along with the gaunt look in his weary eyes, suggested he was innocent of any real crime.

Their prison detail had been searching through the rubble for days. They’d been clearing away bricks and prying open basement bomb shelters, hoping to find families huddled in the darkness, but all they found were corpses. In Edgar’s mind, he was saving something that had survived the fire bombing—a teapot. He was rescuing someone’s keepsake from the ruins.

The Germans shot him then and there among the rubble. Billy thought the guards themselves were in shock after seeing their city devastated. Dresden had gone from a place of refuge to a hellish nightmare in less than a day. Most of the other prisoners thought the guards wouldn’t go through with it, that at the last minute, poor old Edgar Derby would be given a reprieve, but Billy knew different. He could read the bitter intent of the soldiers in their dull, thoughtless motions. They were going to kill Edgar Derby because that’s what they were supposed to do. After the bombing, all they had left was mindless obedience.

Edgar’s lifeless body slumped against a shattered concrete wall. Brilliant red splashes of blood provided the only evidence of life in those hellish ruins.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

Dreams

Billy Crusader sat on the floor of his Arctrixmatrian prison with his back against the couch, watching Dakota Monroe sleep peacefully on the rug in the nude. Smear still hadn’t said anything. Billy wished he could read Arctrixmatrian body language like Arctrixmatrians could read minds.

“You told me there was no reason you chose me, but that’s not true, is it? You kidnapped me for a reason.”

Smear moved around in front of Billy. He need not have. Billy couldn’t read his body language, and even if he could, he wouldn’t have been able to make out anything in the dark. Besides, Smear spoke through the pipe organ in the enclosure. Regardless of where he stood, his words always came from precisely the same spot behind Billy.

“Everyone lies,” Smear finally said.

“Not everyone,” Billy insisted.

“Everyone,” Smear repeated.

“Why did you bring me here?”

By conceding to the alien creature, Billy hoped to get a straight answer.

“To learn.”

Typical Arctrixmatrian response. Smear answered the question without explaining anything of substance. Billy knew the creature could read his mind. He wasn’t surprised when Smear elaborated, clarifying Billy’s doubts.

“So we could learn. So you could learn.”

“We learn from reading books,” Billy said. It was a good point, he thought. Why did these strange alien creatures feel they had to learn about humanity by abducting him and keeping him in an interstellar zoo? “I’d rather you read about me and I simply read about you.”

“What is reading?” Smear asked, only not in a manner that suggested he didn’t understand the concept, but rather one that implied another, deeper level of comprehension was required.

Billy thought about his reply for a moment. “Reading is a connection between minds.”

“Yes,” came the reply, uttered so quickly it almost cut him off. “Black marks on a white page. The same letters are repeated over and over again. Twenty-six characters—that’s all you have—and these can only be arranged in pre-agreed groupings called words. No random assortments are allowed, and yet your species has amassed hundreds of millions of books, each with thousands upon thousands of words.

“No one can hope to read more than the tiniest fraction of these in a dozen lifetimes, and yet still more books are released. They come at a rate of thousands a day. The output of just one week is more than you could ever possibly read in a lifetime, so why? Why are there so many books? Why do your writers persist? Surely, everything has been said. What could you possibly hope to achieve from so many books?”

A single phrase drifts from Billy’s lips. “To see through another’s eyes.”

“We have read all of your books, Billy. Every one of them. Every one that has ever been and will ever be written by your species. From dull scratchings on Babylonian clay tablets to quantum entangled poems swapped between lovers in star systems you are yet to colonize, but it is not enough. Your books are a shadow. They’re an echo in a dark cavern. We long to understand you.”

“I’ve never written a book,” Billy said.

“Your life is a book,” Smear replied. “We chose you because your life lay at the crossroads of your species. Your life is a random sample from the age in which your species first ventured into the sky and then beyond into space.”

“What about Dakota?” Billy asked. “Why did you choose her?”

Dakota had been captive for almost two years now. Initially, she vacillated between shock and depression, being both terrified and defensive. It took her some time to accept that Billy was all she had on this crazy, topsy-turvy world. Billy and the silver locket that hung around her neck were her only connection with planet Earth.

“We didn’t.”

“I don’t understand,” Billy replied.

“She came from your dreams,” Smear said softly.

For a moment, Billy was confused. Then it struck him. Dakota Monroe was in every man’s dreams. Like all actresses and models, Dakota was cursed with being more beautiful on the silver screen and in the glossy print of a magazine than she could ever be in real life. Although he’d never seen her on a billboard, she’d told him all about the photo shoots in Malibu, the movie scenes filmed on a Hollywood sound stage, the glamour of an opening night at the theater, and the Oscar ceremonies with their camera flashes all but blinding her. She was everything he ever imagined in a movie star, and that’s why they plucked her out of her bed in the early hours of the morning on a dreary, overcast first day of April. She was to be his April Fool.

“Me?” Billy said softly. His heart sank.

They’d kidnapped her to please him. Oh, this was not what he wanted. She’d been plucked from Earth and transported trillions upon trillions of miles through spacetime because of some crazy dream he didn’t even remember.

His mind rushed to the movies she’d told him about. Dakota knew the lines of the various scripts by heart, and in the boredom of an Arctrixmatrian zoo, she had Billy role-play with her to kill time. Acting was a form of escape. A chance to imagine another life. Although Billy had never seen any of her films, he knew all the titles. Tango in Vegas. Where the Heart Lies. Lost and Alone. Last Chance for Love. Billy didn’t think any of them had anything in common with his fantasies, but the Arcs had tapped into his dreams, confusing them with his conscious desires.

Billy was glad Dakota was asleep. He was glad she hadn’t heard what Smear said. He felt ashamed. Ashamed of himself for having imagined her. Ashamed of ruining her life.

“She loves you,” Smear said, subtly reminding Billy he could read his mind. Was that true? As he could read minds, Smear would know. Or was this yet another lie?

“That’s not the point,” Billy said, knowing an Arc could never appreciate love as humans did. Arcs wanted to understand love as a noun, but love was a verb. Love couldn’t be separated and analyzed in a laboratory. “She didn’t love me. She loves me now, but only because she has to, not because she wants to. That’s not love. Not really.”

Billy slumped back against the couch, stretching his legs over the carpet beside Dakota as she slept soundly.

“She had her own life!”

“She would have died,” Smear said. “If we hadn’t brought her to you, she wouldn’t have passed thirty of your Earth years.”

“How do you know that? You can’t know that for sure?” Billy protested, but deep down, he knew it was true. The Arcs saw in four dimensions. They saw the past and the future as clearly as he saw to the left and the right.

In the quiet moments after they’d made love, Billy and Dakota would reminisce about their time on Earth. He told her about his life in the army and how he was captured by the Germans when his position in a bombed-out church was overrun, and then about his job as a reporter after the war, and about his best friends Kurt and Nancy.

In turn, Dakota told him about her life, reveling in wild parties, expensive champagne, rampant sex and heavy drugs. She’d prop herself up on his chest, resting her forearms across his sternum and gaze into his eyes, telling him how she found herself falling into depression on Earth. She felt trapped, as though she were caught in a rip tide at the beach, being dragged out into deep waters. Dakota knew how to die. Pills. Take one or two with a glass of champagne, and the pain faded. Take a dozen, and life would end with barely a whimper. She’d tried it once, only she vomited before they took effect. She passed out on the floor and woke up covered in sick and bile the next day.

Dakota longed to escape from her life of fame and fortune—and then one day, she did, although not in the way she expected. Instead of running from her old life, she was snatched away into the stars. 

“She deserves better,” he said, absentmindedly.

“Everyone does,” Smear replied.

Billy sat there silently, leaning against the couch. Dakota looked peaceful. Her long blonde hair fell past her bare shoulders onto the carpet. The gentle curves of her arms and back gave way to her smooth, sensuous buttocks and long, slender legs. Not a single blemish marred her porcelain skin.

“She wanted to see,” Smear said. “She wanted to understand, so I showed her.”

“Showed her what?” Billy asked.

“How the children suffer,” Smear said.

“Suffer?” Billy asked, surprised by Smear’s description. “I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

Suddenly, the floor dropped away.

The couch Billy was leaning against disappeared, and he found himself plunging into the darkness. He screamed. Faster and faster, he fell. There was no wind whipping by, and yet he felt as though he’d stumbled out of a plane in Jump School, waiting that fraction of a second for his static line to engage, but he was naked. There was no parachute to deploy.

A rush of adrenaline caused his hands and feet to tingle. His heart thumped in his throat. On he fell. For Billy, the entrance into an alien illusion was like a nightmare where he found himself plummeting headlong from a cliff.

Billy cringed, waiting for the jolt that would either jar him awake or commit him to death, but neither the ground nor the soft springs in his couch brought relief.

Billy flailed around with his arms, grasping at the darkness, trying to grab hold of something, anything. The faster he fell, the more dread welled up in his chest. A sense of impending doom swept over him. He couldn’t help but anticipate the sickening, fatal thud from striking the ground. Billy was going to die. There was no way he could survive this fall. He was falling too fast.

In his panic, Billy hadn’t noticed the stars around him. Whereas he was used to seeing stars twinkle in the hot, humid nights on Earth, these stars were static and motionless. Like glowworms in a cave, they surrounded him on all sides.

It took a moment, but Billy finally realized he wasn’t falling. He was floating. Well, he thought, both floating and falling at the same time. The sensations were indistinguishable.

Something large loomed overhead.

Billy hadn’t noticed the spaceship at first. He was too panicked by the shock of being dropped into free fall to pay attention to anything other than what he thought were his last moments of life.

He twisted, reaching out with one hand and touching the silver edge of the craft. Rather than arresting his fall, it felt to Billy as though the craft was falling alongside him.

His eyes and his inner ear violently disagreed with each other, and Billy fought not to be sick. Bile washed up into his throat. His eyes told him he was stationary. Nothing seemed to be moving, not the spacecraft or the stars, and yet his stomach rose within his body. The sensation of plunging to his death was overwhelming, but there was nowhere to fall to. As much as his other senses screamed of doom, his eyes saw only the serene shape of a sterile spacecraft floating beside him. The craft turned lazily about its axis like some high-tech robotic pig on a spit. He took a firm hold and began moving with the craft.

Large black panels stretched out on either side of the spacecraft. The craft itself was too small to house any occupants and looked nothing like the saucer-shaped UFOs of Arctrixmatria.

Gold foil wrapped around sections of the fuselage, glittering in the distant sunlight. A long antenna reached out to one side, while the craft itself was an assortment of cylinders, boxes and dishes. A faded image on an aluminum panel revealed a logo he’d never seen before: a sky-blue circle with a red ribbon set over the acronym NASA. These were English letters, but what did they mean? Beneath the logo was a description: Stardust - Wild 2 Comet Intercept and Collection Mission.

“Look closely,” Smear said, except Smear wasn’t there. Billy looked around for his Arctrixmatrian keeper, wondering how he was doing this. He was astonished at how real the experience felt, but he knew this had to be some kind of mental projection.

Billy followed Smear’s instructions even though he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. The space probe looked like nothing Billy had ever seen before. Pipes wound their way around the vessel. Silver panels covered sections of the craft.

“It’s a bug,” he said, thinking the contorted craft with its crushed foil coating reminded him of a crushed Volkswagen he once saw in the ruins of burnt-out Dresden.

Billy found German cars quaint compared to American Jeeps. Their engines were compact, mounted in the rear of the vehicle instead of under the hood. The bug he’d seen in Dresden had been crushed by bricks and folded into a rough metal cube beneath the weight of fallen debris. Dresden was a graveyard following the raid by Allied bombers. The US prisoners of war would have never found the VW bug if they hadn’t been drafted into a work detail to search for survivors.

Most of the homes in Dresden had bomb shelters in their basements. The German Army thought these shelters would protect civilians from the Allied bombardment, but they were wrong. Billy remembered pulling burnt cross beams and bricks away from the rubble as they dug through the smoldering ruins. Most of the bomb shelters had broad, quarter-inch-thick steel doors. Some were still warm to touch. At first, there was a sense of euphoria on opening them. Billy and the others would pry the doors apart, throwing them open with a clang, and calling out, “Hello.” Hello was one of those rare words that transcended culture, although the Germans pronounced it ‘Hell-hole..

Billy dropped into the first shelter with a flashlight. A family of four lay on a mattress up against a brick wall, sleeping peacefully. His light flickered across four content faces. Mom was pretty, with curly hair and flushed cheeks. Dad was wearing a woolen business suit, the kind that made your skin itch through a freshly starched shirt. The kids were, maybe, eight and ten, a girl and a boy.

“Hey,” Billy said, grabbing the man’s shoulder and rocking him gently, hoping he wouldn’t freak out too much at an American voice. The man’s body rocked like an armchair, pivoting from the ground. Rigor mortis had set in. The firestorm brought on by the Allied incendiary bombs had sucked the oxygen out of the bomb shelter. After the third or fourth dead shelter, the POWs stopped going inside. They’d simply call out from above. If there was no reply, they marked the iron doors with chalk, writing the German word Krypta for grave.

It was late in the day when they came across the bug, a crushed VW. The Balkenkreuz symbol was still visible on one side: the black cross used by the Wehrmacht. To Billy, it looked like a plus sign. Only there were no positives to being captured by the German army. The vehicle must have rolled several times as it was crushed on all sides. Wheels, engine, seats, wiring, exhaust—all the components were recognizable but useless. The Stardust space probe, though, was built like this on purpose. Somehow, it harnessed what to him looked like chaos.

Billy’s fingers rested on a small square that looked out of place on the interplanetary spacecraft. A piece of shiny metal roughly the size of a quarter had been stuck on the side of the probe. It got his attention as it didn’t seem to have any function. Everything else on the Stardust probe looked complicated. Each piece was deliberately and intricately intertwined with some other section, but this one tiny square, the size of a postage stamp, had been glued in place by itself.

The focal point of Billy’s eyes shifted in response to Arctrixmatrian science. To Billy, this was magic, although he knew there was alien technology behind the vision. That was the thing about scientific advances—to the uninitiated, science was the work of alchemists and wizards.

Fine lines had been carved into the tiny square patch, forming intricate etchings. As he looked, his vision magnified beyond anything the human eye was capable of resolving. To his surprise, the squiggles on the wafer resolved into words as the patch of silicon magnified under his gaze. Printed on this thin golden wafer were millions of names, but his eye was drawn to just one by Smear: Glenn Andreotta (SP4/ARMY).

Billy didn’t know who Glenn was or why his name was etched on the side of a human spacecraft, but what seemed complex to him was often simple to the Arcs. No doubt it made sense to them.

The spacecraft rotated slowly, gently pulling Billy Crusader with it. The distant sun caught his eyes, blinding him momentarily.

Rotor blades beat at the humid air, thundering overhead and pummeling him within an artificial whirlwind. Sweat ran from his forehead.

Suddenly, Billy was standing on the skids of a helicopter, easily a hundred feet off the ground. His hand hadn’t moved, but what had moments before been a rail on the side of the Stardust probe was now the upper door frame of a chopper.

Terror gripped him. The wind whipped through his hair. Every muscle in his body seized as his white-knuckled hands held on for dear life. There were three soldiers inside the cramped bubble-shaped cockpit.

“Hey!” Billy yelled. No one heard him. As he was naked, having suddenly appeared on the side of their helicopter, facing in toward the cockpit, that was probably a good thing.

The helicopter banked to the left, and Billy’s feet dropped with the skids of the chopper. His heart jumped in his throat.

“AHHHHH!” he screamed over the sound of the engine and the thumping of the rotor blades.

The thin frame of the OH-23 Raven helicopter turned as the chopper banked. The three soldiers seemed to stare right through Billy’s naked body. They couldn’t see him. Was he really there? Or was this more Arctrixmatrian magic? Was this what Dakota experienced while sleepwalking? Some exotic vision of Earth? Although Billy knew Smear had created some kind of illusion within his mind, the reality he was faced with was so overwhelming he didn’t dare risk loosening his grip on the open door frame.

Billy tried to slow his breathing. He panicked. It wasn’t that he was afraid of heights. Billy Crusader had never been afraid of being up high. There were a lot of things Billy was afraid of, but heights had never been one of them. Spiders, snakes, ghosts, even the thought of drowning, but not heights. Billy had been the kid who would climb a tree as soon as his parents turned their backs, but this was different. The motion of the scout, its fragile airframe, the roar of the engine, the howling wind, and the rapidly changing altitude, all sent his bravado spiraling to the ground so far below.

Billy had seen helicopters before. After the Allies took Dresden, he’d seen a US general flown into camp in a Sikorsky R-4. These helicopters, though, were far more advanced and seemed to be flown by soldiers rather than brass. At a guess, Billy figures he’s been shown something that happened after he was snatched from Earth, but probably not hundreds of years into the future, perhaps just a decade or two.

A lush, green rainforest stretched away from him into the distant mountains.

Two larger UH-1 Huey helicopter gunships banked behind the Raven, following several hundred yards to the rear of the tiny scout chopper as it flew over cultivated farmland.

Rice paddies stretched out across the narrow plain leading down to the bright blue sea. Palm trees swayed in the downdraft of the chopper. The deep green of the jungle was like nothing he’d ever seen. Dirt roads cut through the long grass. A muddy river wound its way through the rice paddies like a snake. Small wooden huts dotted the feudal landscape, clustered together in groups of five or six.

The soldier closest to Billy sat in the doorway of the chopper, dressed in jungle fatigues with a helmet loosely perched on his head. Dark sunglasses hid his eyes. He was manning an M60 machine gun mounted on the airframe. The machine gun swiveled as he scanned the ground, looking for the enemy. The embroidered patch over his left chest read: Andreotta.

“Too damn quiet,” Andreotta yelled over the sound of the engine.

“Yeah,” the pilot responded. “I thought this place was supposed to be crawling with VC.”

“I’ve got nothing but villagers,” the gunner on the far side called out, struggling to be heard over the rotors.

The pilot keyed his microphone, apparently talking to the larger Huey helicopters behind them.

“Not picking up any incoming fire. Making another pass to the south.”

Billy couldn’t see the name tag on the gunner sitting on the far side of the chopper, but he could make out the pilot’s last name: Thompson.

“Hey, I’ve got a civvy over here,” Andreotta called out over the thumping of the rotors. “She’s wounded.”

“I see her,” Thompson said. “Pop some smoke.”

Billy watched as Andreotta pulled a pin on something that looked like a Coke can, but without any of the normal red markings. He dropped the can. A stream of green smoke began billowing from a small hole in its lid. The can bounced on the dusty track, skipping across the ground and into a ditch near the woman. Brilliant fluorescent green smoke drifted through the air.

Thompson spoke over the radio. “We’ve got a wounded civilian down on the approach to village four, marked for medevac.”

Below them, US soldiers walked along the raised dirt embankment between the rice paddies, not more than a hundred yards from the woman. Billy could see she was crawling away from them. A dark stain marred her dress, just above her hips. She’d been shot, but help was on its way.

Billy was getting the hang of Thompson’s flying. He’d hover for a few seconds before easing away, dipping the nose of the chopper as he flew on. Billy had only seen a few helicopters before, but he’d been in plenty of airplanes, including one that crashed into a mountainside, almost killing him. Billy thought those other pilots could learn a thing or two from Warrant Officer Thompson.

“You see that?” Andreotta asked.

“Yeah, I see it,” Thompson said.

Billy saw it, too. Bodies had been piled up in a ditch beside one of the small hamlets that made up the network of villages. Arms and legs were twisted and contorted with each other, making it impossible to distinguish one person from another. Dark, bloody stains soaked into the dusty ground.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

“Jesus!” Andreotta recoiled, pointing back at the green smoke rising from the marker he’d dropped a few minutes earlier. The soldiers had found the injured woman, but they were kicking her as she lay helpless on the ground.

The Raven flew low over a dike and hovered above a paddy field not more than a hundred feet from the rickety village.

An American soldier pulled out his pistol and fired, but with the noise of the chopper, the distant scene appeared to unfold in silence. The woman stopped crawling. Her body slumped to the dirt. Instead of one dark stain on her back, there were two.

“What the hell?” Andreotta yelled.

“This ain’t right,” Thompson answered. “This is messed up.”

The far gunner said something, but Billy couldn’t make out his words over the noise of the chopper.

Billy Crusader felt sick, although that could have been motion sickness, with the swaying of the chopper being similar to that of a boat on an ocean swell. In the oppressive heat and stifling humidity, a chill ran through him at the sight of US soldiers towering over a dead woman.

The Raven banked, moving around above the American soldiers. Billy thought they looked like soldiers from any war. They didn’t look like murderers or war criminals, but that’s what they were.

Thompson spoke into the radio.

“It looks to me like there’s an awful lot of unnecessary killing going on down there. Something ain’t right about this.”

Warrant Officer Thompson paused as though he were awaiting a response. It was apparent that there was no reply because he continued describing what the other pilots must have also seen.

“There are bodies everywhere. There’s a ditch full of bodies that we saw. There’s something wrong here.”

“I’ve got movement,” shouted the far gunner. “There are people still alive down there.”

“I see it too,” Andreotta pointed at dozens of bloodied bodies lying in another ditch on the edge of a raised bank. “Jesus, it’s a turkey shoot down there!”

Young women, old men and children lay strewn like garbage. Bloodied arms and legs piled on top of each other made it impossible to count them. On the embankment above the carnage,  straw hats lay abandoned on the dirt along with spades and garden hoes. Empty wooden buckets lay on their sides, having spilled water over the rocky ground.

“We’ve got to put down,” Thompson said, already approaching the dusty path between the lower rice fields.

On the ground, American soldiers shielded their eyes from the stinging rocks and pebbles kicked up by the Raven’s rotor blades. The skids of the Raven touched gently, bouncing across the dirt for a few feet before the helicopter came to a rest. Thompson powered the rotors down to an idle, allowing the blades to continue whipping overhead but with less vigor than when they were in the air. Billy felt the irrational desire to duck as the guillotine-like blades sliced through the air some ten feet above the ground.

Warrant Officer Thompson clambered out of the cockpit, leaving Andreotta beside the Raven. Billy followed along, trailing a few feet behind Thompson, wanting to understand what was happening. Naked and barefoot, he was glad no one could see him.

“What the hell is going on here?” Thompson yelled over the sound of the chopper engine idling behind him.

“None of your business,” a sergeant replied.

“We’ve got wounded civilians,” Thompson protested, pointing back at the ditch. “Can we be of any help to them?”

“Only if you’re going to put them out of their misery,” the sergeant answered.

Billy could see the anger on Warrant Officer Thompson’s face. His lips pulled tight. With his eyes narrowing, he was on the verge of saying something else when a lieutenant marched over. The lieutenant had the air of an asshole in command.

“What’s going on here, lieutenant?” Thompson demanded, and Billy saw that the warrant officer’s fists were clenched. His arms hung by his side.

“This is my business,” the lieutenant said with indifference.

Billy Crusader had run into commanders like this lieutenant before during the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. They were drunk on their own egos. Power was an aphrodisiac. No drug in the world had the ability to make a man as drunk as the bars on his collar or the patch on his sleeve. Billy realized long ago that rank was a persona. Strip a colonel bare in a delousing chamber, and he was no different than a private. Rank was as much an instrument of war as a gun or a bayonet.

“What is this?” Thompson asked, gesturing around him.

Billy Crusader liked Warrant Officer Thompson. Courage wasn’t found facing down an enemy. For the most part, that required little more than blind loyalty. No, Billy Crusader thought, this was true courage—facing down your friends.

“Who are these people?” Thompson demanded, pointing at the bodies in the ditch.

“Just following orders,” the lieutenant said, ignoring his question.

“Orders? Whose orders?”

Billy Crusader thought Warrant Officer Thompson was about to throttle the lieutenant.

“Just following—”

“But, these are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.”

And there it was, the deference necessary to an officer. Billy knew that respect all too well. In his experience, a good officer was one who didn’t get you killed. Beyond that, they were all pretty damn lousy. In Billy’s admittedly limited army life, most officers seemed hell-bent on making the worst decisions possible. If their piss-poor thinking hadn’t cost so many lives, it would have been comical.

“Look, Thompson,” the lieutenant said, resting his hands on his hips. “This is my show. I’m in charge here! This isn’t your concern.”

“Yeah, great job,” Thompson replied, conceding to the age-old right of the military to put idiots in a position of authority. Billy wondered, didn’t the Bible say something about that? He should know. He’d been a chaplain’s assistant as a teen. Fools sit on horses, while princes go on foot—it was something along those lines, and here it was again, playing out exactly the same way thousands of years later. Nothing had changed.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

“You’d better get back in that chopper and mind your own business,” the lieutenant barked, pointing at the Raven.

Thompson turned away. He took a few steps before turning back and pointing at the lieutenant, yelling, “You ain’t heard the last of this!”

Billy followed the warrant officer as he jogged back to the waiting chopper. There was no way Billy Crusader was staying on the ground with this murderous bunch. Although he was naked, he climbed on the skid of the helicopter, feeling like part of the crew. Life on Arctrixmatria had made Billy strangely comfortable with being naked. To Billy, it seemed as though everyone else in their combat uniforms and cloth-covered helmets had something to hide.

By leaning against the side of the canopy, Billy could hold on to the steel airframe with one hand and the open door of the chopper with the other. He could hear Andreotta and Thompson talking as the rotors came up to speed. Thompson was pissed, yelling above the whine of the engine.

“This is murder! This isn’t war. This is nothing but cold-blooded murder!”

The two Huey gunships hovered above the fields, watching from a distance. Their downdrafts flattened the rice paddies, kicking up a fine spray.

The Raven lifted off. Instead of disappearing into the blue sky, Thompson circled the embankment, never drifting more than a few hundred yards from where he’d touched down. Billy could feel his anger. Thompson’s frustration came through in the harsh motion of his chopper. The fluid, bird-like grace with which Thompson had once flown was replaced with a sharp, aggressive style. His blood was boiling.

“They’re shooting them like fish in a barrel,” Andreotta yelled, pointing at the ditch. Below, several US soldiers stood on the dusty trail with their rifles pulled hard into their shoulders. Muted cracks cut through the air as the soldiers fired at the sprawl of bodies in the sodden ditch.

“Jesus H. Christ!” came the cry from the cockpit, but Billy couldn’t be sure if it was Andreotta, Thompson or the far gunner who had given voice to the anguish they all felt inside.

Billy had been to war. Billy had seen death. He’d seen the shriveled, charred remains of men and women in the ruins of Dresden, the execution of poor Edgar Derby over a stolen teapot, and the heartache of watching several young girls drift by face down in a muddy German river, floating by so peacefully on a hot summer’s day. They should have been wading in the water, laughing and playing, splashing each other as they frolicked in the shallows, but there they went, drifting on, forever dead.

Billy Crusader had always been surprisingly relaxed and nonchalant about death. At the age of seven, he was vaccinated against diphtheria. He remembers an outbreak at his school the following year. Five kids in his class of twelve were at school on Monday and in the grave on Friday. “So it goes,” is all his teacher would say, but for Billy, that seemed hollow.

Billy saw the rise of horror movies in Hollywood. He barely batted an eyelid at the scariest movie ever made, Nosferatu, even though his girlfriend had nightmares for weeks afterwards. Vampires may have made others squirm in their seats, but Billy knew something they didn’t. Death was never theatrical. The horror of death came not in the slash of a knife or a splash of blood. It came from knowing that life could be cut down as easily as plucking a flower from a field. One moment, there was a glimmer in someone’s eyes; the next, a corpse with no more hope for tomorrow than a rock.

As the chopper banked, Billy spotted a child lying face up between two huts made from wood and dried grass. A boy of maybe ten years old lay forever looking into the clear blue sky with eyes that could no longer see. Blood seeped out onto the ground, darkening the dirt, trickling away from his mangled stomach. 

“Why are you showing me this?” Billy yelled at Smear from the skids of the Raven, well over a hundred feet off the ground. “Why?”

Smear answered, speaking inside his mind, “Because you wanted to understand.”

“Understand what?” Billy asked, but there was no reply. Typical damn Arc. Billy was furious. “That children suffer? Children have always suffered. Why show me this?”

The Raven flew low over another series of huts. Bits of flax and dried palm leaves flew off the roofs, scattering across the ground in the downdraft.

On the ground, American soldiers converged on panicked villagers, herding them from their huts. Old men, frail elderly women and children not more than five or six years old were driven toward what, from the air, looked like a fire pit, a homemade bomb shelter dug below ground level to hide the occupants from the shrapnel of an exploding bomb.

“We can’t let this happen!” Billy Crusader yelled over the noise of the engine.

We?

No one answered him.

Billy’s heart sank. He was a bystander, a witness, a patron in a cinema run by aliens. No one could hear him, but Warrant Officer Thompson seemed to be thinking the same thing. He set his bubble-shaped helicopter down between the Vietnamese villagers hiding in their shelter and the advancing US troops. Yet again, he powered the Raven down to an idle so its rotor blades turned lazily overhead.

Thompson climbed out of the cockpit.

“Y’all cover me,” he said to Andreotta and the other gunner. For the first time, Billy saw the name of the second gunner: Colburn.

“If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them.”

Andreotta’s M60 was already pointing out over the advancing US soldiers.

“Promise me!” Thompson implored.

Andreotta nodded, snatching at the bolt on the side of his M60 machine gun, double-checking that a round had already been loaded into the chamber. Colburn moved over next to him, loading his M-16. This is crazy, thought Billy. Thompson was asking the impossible of his men. Having fought in World War II, Billy Crusader understood the unwritten bond of camaraderie soldiers had for each other. You didn’t need to share a foxhole, just a uniform. Thompson was asking Andreotta and Colburn to betray every rule they’d ever been taught about soldiering, to betray every patriotic impulse they’d ever felt for their own troops. He was asking them to do what was right regardless of what may come.

It was a strange, curious thing, Billy thought, and one incomprehensible to civilians. Just the color of a uniform, a neatly sewn flag on the sleeve, and names written in the same manner on each chest. These were all that was needed to have a man live and fight and die by your side, and here Andreotta and Colburn were set to betray that fraternal bond. That had to be tough.

Would they do it? Would they fire on their own troops to protect a bunch of foreigners? Well, the villagers weren’t foreigners. This was their land. It was the Americans who were estranged from this world.

Would US soldiers fire on other Americans to protect a people and culture still struggling to leave the Dark Ages?

Having been a prisoner during World War II, Billy had seen soldiers from both sides fight with honor, and he’d seen his fair share of assholes in both American and German uniforms. His old POW commander Edgar Derby had called them megalomaniacs, but Billy preferred asshole. Assholes were easy to understand. They’d shit on you. Megalomaniac was a fifty-dollar word—one that Billy eyed with suspicion.

Billy had been imprisoned with British, French, and Russian soldiers, and although they struggled to communicate, there was one thing they all had in common: photographs of their families. Even the German guards would pull out photos of their wives and kids and laugh and smile, comparing them with the American pics. That was the peculiar thing about war—it was a clash of ideologies that most of those on the front line barely understood. In the rice paddies of Vietnam, there was no front line, blurring the meaning of war like never before.

Billy waited in the awkward silence of an idling helicopter as Thompson and Andreotta locked eyes.

“Promise,” Andreotta finally replied.

The look in Andreotta’s eyes said this was no bluff. Billy had seen that same look in the eyes of Edgar Derby just moments before he was executed by a German firing squad in the desolate, rubble-strewn ruins of Dresden. It wasn’t the cold, callous look of a killer. It was the look of a man resigned to his fate, the look of a man who knew the future was settled before it came to pass.

There was a hint of defeat in Andreotta’s eyes. Billy had no doubt Andreotta would fire. He wouldn’t want to, but he would do it all the same. That’s what separated him from these killers. Andreotta would hate himself for pulling the trigger, but he’d do what was right, even if it cost him his life.

Thompson slapped him on the shoulder.

“Good man.”

Warrant Officer Thompson turned and jogged the better part of a hundred yards over toward the approaching troops. Billy ran behind him, past chickens in pens, pigs tied to stakes, and woven mats holding fresh fish fillets drying in the sun.

“Hey,” Thompson called out, with his hands held high in the air as though he were surrendering to the soldiers. “Hey, listen. Hold your fire.”

He dropped his hands as he approached to within a few feet of the US soldiers.

“I’m going to try to get these people out of this bunker. Just hold your men here.”

“Yeah, we can help you get ’em out of that bunker,” the officer said. “With a hand grenade!”

“Just hold your men here,” Thompson said, his arms out in front of him, gesturing for calm. “I think I can do better than that.” 

The officer was flustered. He must have seen Andreotta and Colburn with their machine guns pointing at his troops.

“Just gimme a minute,” Thompson said. “Stay here.”

Warrant Officer Thompson jogged over to the bunker. The wooden door looked flimsy. It wouldn’t have stopped a rifle round, let alone explosives.

“Hey,” Thompson said, prying open the door, not knowing if there was anyone armed on the other side, waiting with a rifle to defend their children.

Scared eyes peered out from the shadows.

“It’s Okay. We’re going to get you out of here. Do you understand?”

Thompson crouched, reaching in and taking one of the women by the arm. The woman pulled away from him, but there was no room in the shelter. She couldn’t retreat.

“You’re going to be fine,” Thompson said. Billy doubted the villagers could understand what Thompson was saying, but he was unarmed, and his tone of voice was calm and reassuring. “Come on. Let’s get you out of here.”

Slowly, he coaxed the woman outside. A scared child huddled beside her, clinging to her dress. Several other women and an old man joined her. They looked nervously at the American soldiers in their village. To Billy’s surprise, the soldiers appeared unusually relaxed. Several of them sat on the steps leading up to the huts. Most of them were smoking, standing around and talking with each other.

“Over here,” Thompson said, guiding them.

Andreotta joined him, taking one of the women by the arm and leading her behind the Raven. Colburn waved with his arms, urging the villagers to come over to a flat expanse on the outskirts of the village.

“Now what?” Andreotta asked Thompson.

“We’ll get the Hueys to conduct evac.”

“They’re gunships,” Andreotta said, grinning. “You’re beating swords into ploughshares.”

“I know.”

Thompson grabbed the radio in his chopper and began talking to the pilots of the two Hueys. A few minutes later, the Hueys set down on the edge of the village and began loading civilians onto their helicopters.

Billy couldn’t believe what he was seeing. For a US serviceman from World War II, it was surreal to see Americans rescuing civilians from other Americans. Billy had to do a double-take. Throughout the whole morning, there had been no sign of anyone he’d consider the enemy. The only people Billy had seen carrying guns were US soldiers.

Billy watched as one of the gunners from the Huey picked up a naked Vietnamese boy and plopped him on the steel deck of the helicopter. The gunner was smiling like a kid himself. Just following orders, Billy thought. The airman couldn’t have realized what was happening down here and was just following the lead of his pilot. That was the awful irony of the moment. Both groups of soldiers were following orders, blindly doing what they were told. One to save lives, the other to kill.

“It’s the children that suffer,” Billy said softly, but he wasn’t looking at the young child in the back of the helicopter. He was looking at the baby-faced soldiers in the village. They were kids. Most of the soldiers he’d seen couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t drink. But they sure as hell could kill. They could die for their country. And he’d seen the same thing in World War II—children with guns.

Andreotta ran over to Thompson, saying, “That’s the last of them.”

No sooner had Andreotta spoken than the sound of automatic gunfire erupted in the distance. The US troops didn’t flinch. They were able to distinguish the sound of an M-16 from the AK-47s of the Viet Cong.

A couple of the soldiers were sitting with their backs against the village well, not more than twenty yards from the Raven. Billy recognized the look in their eyes. He’d seen this in Germany: they knew it was the good guys firing, so they relaxed while they could. Barely any thought was given as to who their compatriots were firing at, so long as it was the good guys firing, not the enemy, everything was okay—only it wasn’t.

“We need to get the hell out of here,” Andreotta said as the Hueys lifted off the ground behind him, climbing high in the sky.

“We’re getting low on fuel,” Thompson said, climbing into the bubble-shaped cockpit of the Raven.

Billy climbed onto the skid of the chopper. As they gained height and the ground rushed away from the thumping blades of the Raven, Billy felt numb. This wasn’t the way wars were supposed to be fought. Where was the enemy? Where were the Germans with their distinctive helmets and sharp uniforms? Even after Dresden had been firebombed and transformed from a city of culture into a shattered, lifeless moonscape, German soldiers could still be seen in their proud, dust-covered uniforms. Here, though, there was nothing but villagers.

There were rules to war. Perhaps he was being naïve, but he thought there should be limits. Sometimes civilians got caught in the crossfire, but it was never intentional, and yet in Dresden and now in My Lai, all pretense was thrown away. Death had never been as cruel as it was in those bloody ditches lining the rice paddies and sunken fields.

“I’ve got movement,” Andreotta yelled, pointing as Thompson pulled the Raven through a long, sweeping arc. Hundreds of bodies lay crumpled in a muddy, bloody ditch beneath them.

“There’s no room to set down,” Thompson said. “We’ve got to get back to base. We need to refuel.”

“Just get me close,” Andreotta yelled over the constant noise of the engine and the maddening pulse of the rotor blades.

What was he going to do?

What could he do?

The chopper hovered barely five feet above the ground. Andreotta jumped from the skids of the Raven onto the dusty track overlooking the bloody ditch. Billy followed close behind him. Tiny pebbles, specks of dust, and dirt were whipped into a frenzy around them by the rotor blades of the Raven.

There was no time to think. Andreotta had to be moving on instinct. Billy Crusader slid down the loose embankment behind him, sliding into a scene from hell. Hands reached out for Andreotta, grabbing at his boots, pulling at his pants. Bloodied fingers tugged at his camouflage trousers as the dying men and women beneath him begged for mercy.

“I—I can’t,” Andreotta said, stepping between bodies. He was trying not to step on anyone, but that was impossible, with shattered body piled upon bloodied, broken body.

Blood, shit and piss dripped from his boots.

“I can’t help you. You’re too badly hurt. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Andreotta was right. Billy had seen this before. Dead men still clinging to life. If Andreotta had dragged any of them up the steep embankment, it would only have been to watch them die in the sunshine.

“Please. Please,” voices pleaded, but Andreotta had eyes for only one survivor, a young boy in a torn shirt lying half-buried beneath his dead mother. How he picked him out from the air was something Billy couldn’t understand. Billy hadn’t seen him until Andreotta plucked him from the arms of his mother. Blood dripped from the boy’s fingers, but it was his mother’s. He was unscathed.

“Please,” others begged as Andreotta climbed back up the shifting, muddy bank.

“I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

Andreotta never looked back. Billy understood. He couldn’t face that man-made hell again, either.

Thompson kept the Raven hovering just off the ground. Andreotta laid the child in Colburn’s lap and climbed back into the helicopter. For the first time since he’d jumped from the Raven, Billy got a glimpse of Andreotta’s face. No greater look of pity had ever crossed a man’s features. His downturned lips trembled. Tears washed the dirt from his cheeks, falling from his hollow eyes.

Billy Crusader was in shock. He stood there stunned. He’d seen a hell far worse than anything Dante or Milton could imagine. No torment in flames or cries from burning brimstone could compare with the carnage in that ditch. Billy struggled not to vomit. He stood there on the narrow bank as the Raven lifted off, climbing high overhead. Slowly, the whimpers from the ditch beside him fell as silent as the rotor blades of the chopper disappearing into the azure blue sky.

“Why?” Billy Crusader yelled, screaming into the humid wind. “Why are you doing this to me, Smear?”

The only answer came with the eerie rustle of the trees and the birds calling in the fields. A couple of soldiers from Charlie Company walked up behind Billy, not seeing him. After all, Billy Crusader wasn’t really there. All this was just some Arctrixmatrian nightmare.

One of the soldiers peered over the edge of the ditch before walking on, kicking stones with his boots. The other soldier talked about his girlfriend. Billy couldn’t help but think the lives they destroyed that day included their own. Oh, they may not have known it then, but they would never be free from the hell of this moment.

“Why are you showing me this?” Billy asked with tears in his eyes. “These are my people, my soldiers. We aren’t monsters. We’re supposed to be the good guys. The ones that fight the monsters.” 

He pointed at the two soldiers walking in the distance.

“These are my people. These are my neighbors. They’re my cousins, my friends, my brothers. This is us at our worst.”

“On the contrary,” Smear finally said. “It is the dark of night that allows the stars to shine.”

All Billy could see was one star in the brilliant blue sky above him.

“Look around you,” the invisible Arctrixmatrian said.

Billy turned his head. A soldier walked down the narrow track between the fields with an injured villager, a teenage boy who had been shot in the leg. Blood dripped from a compression bandage the soldier had wrapped around the boy’s thigh. The soldier held the boy’s arm over his shoulder, helping him walk. Behind him, two other soldiers carried a wounded woman on a stretcher. Their boots scuffed the gravel on the ground. Their heads hung low in the stifling heat.

On the other side of the rice paddy, another soldier knelt beside an old man. His helmet had a large white circle with a red cross displayed prominently on the hardened steel, marking him as a medic. He bandaged the man’s shoulder as the withered old villager leaned against a tree trunk in the shade.

“This is you at both your worst and your best. This is you standing up against yourself, unafraid to confront your own demons.

“The greatest enemy your species has ever or will ever face is itself. And your salvation lies not in the stars, not in fleeing to other planets. It lies in waking up to see what you have done on your own small, rocky world.”

As he watched, Billy realized there were troops walking the other way, heading back toward their trucks. Their shoulders were stooped. Several muttered about being recalled. It seems Thompson had gotten through to someone back in command, and they’d aborted the mission. The returning soldiers looked defeated, and they were, but not by any enemy, by their own conscience. Nothing would ever erase the stain of the blood spilled that day, but the killing had stopped. Lives were spared.

Smear said, “You can no more eradicate evil than you can fly like a bird, and yet you soar through the sky in metal substitutes. In the same way, the hope of your species lies not in ridding your world of evil as much as in exposing that which is wrong, in refusing to bury and ignore such atrocities, in caring for the weak and vulnerable. This must become the crusade of your people, for there are none so blind as those who willingly close their eyes. You humans must see yourself for who you really are, not who you imagine yourself to be.

“Teach your children about Thompson, Andreotta, and Colburn, and you’ll never visit these blood-soaked fields again.”

Billy was confused. He didn’t have any children. Not on Arctrixmatria. He hadn’t seen his kids in years. Billy couldn’t teach anyone anything. Smear was passionate and focused, which was unusual for an Arc, and Billy sensed there was some deeper, more profound truth bothering the strange alien. As articulate as Smear sounded, he was struggling to express himself.

~~~

Whoosh went the pneumatic tube as another news story shot through the pipes to the typesetters in the next building. The felt padding must have been worn because the capsule rattled and clanked as it shot along the pipes. Like so much in the City News Bureau of Chicago, the pipes were old.

Nancy was an old hand now. She’d been working for the bureau for well over a decade. News stories came and went with the regularity of sunrise and sunset. Kurt was one of the few reporters she knew from the early days in the 50s. Like her, he was a lifer, sticking around until he could retire. Rumor had it that the pneumatic tubes were going to be replaced. Nancy would miss them. One day, she too would be replaced, but that was a realization for another day. She saw Kurt Nobody coming back from the editorial floor. He was a fancy reporter now, writing political opinion pieces and covering criminal trials.

“Whatcha been working on?” Kurt asked, walking up to Nancy’s old scratched wooden desk in the typing pool. He was chewing gum, causing his mustache to ride up and down with the rhythm of his jaws. Curly locks of brown hair sat on his forehead. Dark, penetrating eyes stared at Nancy, and she wondered what he was thinking. His warm, friendly smile seemed at odds with his beady eyes catching every detail.

“Ah, it’s been a big day,” Nancy said, faking a smile. “Yet another offensive in Indochina. The battle of My Lai. The enemy body count is high. Not too much detail on the wire, but it sounds like we got over five hundred of those damn commie bastards.”

“Well, that’s good, right?” Kurt asked.

“Yes, it is,” Nancy said with an air of confidence that lacked any substance.

Five hundred was just a number, but it was a good number, Nancy thought. There was a war on. We have to win. Too many people were protesting and complaining about the war. Didn’t they know? We’re the good guys.

On Arctrixmatria, they groaned and waited.

One day, Nancy would awaken, but not today.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

Dark Beauty

Billy Crusader blinked, and the sweat and stench and oppressive heat of Vietnam disappeared. The dusty ground beneath his bare feet transformed into a mattress. Instead of standing on the edge of a drainage ditch clogged with bodies, he was perched on the queen-sized bed in his geodesic dome on Arctrixmatria, standing at the highest point in his zoological cage.

Billy felt stupid.

Was it all just a dream?

“No,” Smear answered, talking softly through the electrified pipe organ vocalizer in Billy’s enclosure. That was one of the few times any Arc had ever responded directly to his thoughts. Normally, they kept up the pretense of conversing verbally with their naked captives, making out as though they wouldn’t invade that last bastion of privacy, but Billy had always known they were reading his mind. He wasn’t sure how he figured that out. Perhaps it had simply been instinctive, but he knew the Arcs understood far more than they ever let on.

Reading minds must be awful, thought Billy. He waited for Smear to disagree, but the lumbering creature with its hand-like head and Cyclops eye remained motionless in the silence outside the dome.

Reading minds would rob society of individuals, Billy thought. Again, there was no reply. Perhaps Smear was being polite, but from Billy’s perspective, such extrasensory perception would be crippling. There could be no individuality, no room for deliberation before stating a position, and no opportunity to reflect and ponder an idea without every thought being laid bare. Was that why Smear came to see them alone each night? Was that the real reason he remained behind to clean the glass when all the other Arcs had gone home?

For Billy, telepathy would be torture. Even back on Earth, he didn’t want to hear the cacophony of voices around him with their pleasantries and faux-interest in him, let alone the banging and clanging of every thought that rattled through their heads. It was a jaded perspective, but Billy thought everyone was interested in one person and one person alone, themselves. Oh, he knew everyone had someone they loved, someone to pull them away from themselves, but the human ego has more gravitational attraction than most gas giants. To read the minds of others would have driven Billy insane. He was sure of it. Thousands of voices clamoring inside his head would be maddening. One voice was more than enough, he decided.

“I agree,” the imposing alien replied.

Billy smiled, but only briefly. He was still troubled by what he’d seen in a country he barely knew from a map of the Pacific Theatre of War.

“So this is how the children suffer?” he asked.

“We are all children,” Smear said. “We always will be. We just forget that from time to time. It matters not how old we get, only that we remember who we really are.”

Dakota Monroe rolled over on the carpet, getting comfortable on her pillow.

Billy hopped down from the bed and stepped from the bedroom into the lounge. Starlight bathed the dome in soft, muted grays.

“Hey,” Billy said, seeing Dakota’s eyes open.

Dakota was startled to see Billy. A single spasm jerked through her body as though she’d been hit with an electric shock.

“No!” she screamed, springing to her feet and wheeling to face Smear. “You can’t do this to me. You have to take me back! I need to be with her. I need to see what happens to Ursa and Voh.”

Smear was silent.

Billy was confused. He had no idea what Dakota Monroe had seen in her Arctrixmatrian vision, but he understood how vivid and overwhelming such a vision could be. His cheeks were still wet from the tears he’d shed watching the Raven disappear into the azure blue skies of Southeast Asia.

“Please,” Dakota pleaded with the alien. “I need to know. Does she make it? Does she live?”

“Everyone dies,” Smear said, speaking through the pipe organ.

“But what happens to Ursa? Does Merk find her?”

“Does it matter?” the Arctrixmatrian creature asked.

“I need to know if she lives.”

“No one lives forever. She, Merk, Arak and Voh have all been dead for tens of thousands of years.”

Billy didn’t recognize the names, but he could see the emotion in Dakota’s face. Her eyes were on fire. That Dakota was distraught, upset Billy Crusader. Perhaps it was because his own emotions were so frayed and fragile from all he’d experienced in the rice fields of Indochina. He reached out and took her hand. The tension in her fingers was out of character when compared to her normal soft touch. All the muscles in her body were taut.

“It matters!” Dakota insisted, stamping her foot. “It might not matter to anyone else, but it matters to me.”

In the blink of an eye, Billy and Dakota found themselves standing on the edge of a clearing, holding hands. Grass swayed in a light breeze. Although the sun was warm on his back, this wasn’t the humid tropics Billy had endured in Vietnam.

Before them lay an open grave. The sides of the pit weren’t sharply defined. Sections had collapsed and been scooped out again, with mounds of dirt piled to one side.

“No,” Dakota whispered. She let go of Billy’s fingers and raised her hands to her mouth, repeating, “No. No. No. Poor Ursa.”

A teenage boy, not more than sixteen or seventeen years old, carried a small woman in his arms. He stepped over the mound of dirt and laid her gently on the ground beside the grave. Slowly, he lowered himself into the pit. The wall of dirt reached up to his chest. He pulled the body closer, getting a good hold before laying the corpse on the hard, rocky ground at his feet.

“Goodbye, my mah,” he said, resting the deceased woman’s head on a folded leather tunic. He repositioned a shell necklace so it sat in the center of her chest. The woman appeared at peace, as though she were sleeping. Had it not been for the bloody stain on the back of her head, she could have easily been mistaken for someone unconscious rather than dead. The color in her cheeks was vibrant. Her hair had been carefully braided with bits of shell. Several strands on her forehead had been pulled through fine, hollow bone beads.

“Oh, Voh,” Dakota said, watching as the young man climbed out of the grave. “I’m so sorry.”

Billy put his arm around Dakota’s naked shoulder, holding her tight. Dakota leaned into him. She was shaking in the warmth of the summer day.

“He was just a little boy,” Dakota said, looking at the teenager standing at the head of the grave. He seemed to grow in stature with each passing minute.

Slowly, a procession of men and women walked up to the graveside. Each one paused, looking down into the pit. One by one, they knelt and poured a handful of grain or dropped a sheaf of what looked like wheat next to the woman’s body. When they stood, they offered Voh comfort before moving on.

“Who are they?” Billy asked Dakota.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them before. These aren’t the people I saw. There are so many of them. They’ve come to pay their respects to Ursa.”

“She must have touched a lot of lives,” Billy said. Although he didn’t know Ursa, he knew Dakota, and if she was moved to tears by this woman’s death, then Ursa must have been remarkable.

“She did… More than you know.”

Billy wasn’t sure what Dakota meant by that and went to ask her about it when she addressed their invisible guide.

“And what of Merk?”

Billy didn’t know anyone called Merk. He thought Dakota was speaking to him and started to respond when Smear spoke.

“Look to the hills.”

They turned and looked across several poorly defined fields with their clumps of wheat-like grass growing in patches. Stones had been laid out in rows to form crude walls, keeping grazing animals at bay. Smoke drifted from a fire, but unlike the nomadic campsite Dakota had previously seen, this was from a more permanent structure. There was an oven of sorts, just a simple pit with rocks piled up on three sides to keep the wind at bay. A slab of rock acted as a cover against the rain. Woven branches formed a semi-permanent shelter facing away from the prevailing wind.

The hill behind the camp was covered in thick bushes. Vultures circled overhead. Several of the large winged scavengers were on the ground, tearing at a carcass, stripping the meat from the bones.

“What happened?” Dakota asked.

“Ursa survived that first bitter winter. She grew her crops. For the first time, she had more than she needed, far more than she and Voh could eat. With the passage of time, she began trading with other tribes. They held her in high esteem and sought to learn from her. Merk was jealous. When the opportunity arose, he murdered her in the fields, but he did not escape. The tribesmen cornered him, and Voh who executed revenge.”

“Voh?” Dakota asked, surprised. She needn’t have been. To survive in such a brutal world demanded that boys become men before their time. Voh stood there silently, looking at his mother lying in the grave. The dark look in Voh’s eyes told Dakota all she needed to know. She finally understood what Smear meant when he spoke of the children suffering. Children should be allowed their childhood, but such a luxury would not come to be for thousands of years. Even in Dakota’s time, childhood was a luxury only some would enjoy. In America, kids played with plastic toys. In Africa, they held AK-47s.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

“What will become of him?” she asked.

“He will go on to lead these tribes,” Smear replied. “He will feed them from these fields. He will unite them, and what they have accomplished here will spread. Voh sheds no tears. He understands. He knows what his mother has given him, but he can’t know how far this act will carry humanity. Rather than continuing to scavenge by the sea, your species has taken its first step toward the stars.”

In the blink of an eye, Billy and Dakota were standing again in the geodesic dome on Arctrixmatria. It was hard to believe they had never left their alien prison.

“I don’t understand!” Dakota exclaimed, addressing the dark monolithic creature on the other side of the glass. “If you can see through time, why do you stand idly by? Why not use this wondrous gift of yours to save her?”

As usual, there was no reply from the alien.

“Please,” Dakota whispered, taking Billy’s hand as she pleaded with Smear. “Save her.”

“We did,” Smear replied.

The alien’s words sent a chill through Billy, causing the hair on the back of his arms to stand on end. Dakota must have sensed what was happening through the slight tremor in his fingers as she turned to him.

“What does Smear mean?”

Billy understood how difficult this was for Smear. Smear wasn’t human. He didn’t have the deep emotions or feelings of the hairless apes from planet Earth. His alien species was aloof from physical displays of affection, and that seemed to translate to their emotions as well.

In all his time on Arctrixmatria, Billy had never seen Arcs touch or hug, which was strange for beings that looked like hands with fingers instead of arms. Even on Earth, people struggled to express their emotions to one another, but Smear struggled more than anyone Billy had ever known. He had dragged Dakota to the distant past, he’d pulled Billy to the rice paddies of Vietnam, and all because he was struggling to articulate his own thoughts. It seemed to take these overpowering experiences to bring Smear to the point where he could speak in a linear fashion, in a way humans could understand.

“We saved you—so the children wouldn’t suffer,” Smear said through the strange pipe organ in their enclosure.

“I don’t understand,” Dakota replied.

Billy whispered to her, speaking in a soft voice. “It’s you, Dakota… All of this is about you.”

“Me?”

“You,” Smear said.

“I—I don’t…” Dakota wasn’t looking at the giant alien creature. There were tears in the corners of her eyes as she looked at Billy.

“It’s always been about you,” Billy said softly, taking both her hands as she faced him. Her silver locket rested between her breasts, but at that moment, Billy didn’t see her in any sexual sense, not even as his lover. All he felt was compassion.

“Me?”

“They couldn’t save Ursa,” Billy replied. “But they could save you.”

Dakota’s mouth opened. She was trying to speak, but no words came out. Tears rolled down her cheeks.

“I don’t know how,” Billy said, trying not to lie, not feeling comfortable with the truth. “I don’t know why, but they kidnapped you to spare you from a fate like that of Ursa.”

Dakota sobbed.

“It’s okay,” Billy said, and he believed that. For the first time in his life, Billy Crusader believed everything was going to be okay. “You and me. We have everything we need.”

A rush of emotion well up within him, choking him.

Billy had never been okay.

Billy went to war in Europe expecting to die.

After being separated from his unit in the heat of battle, Billy trudged through the snow-covered fields and forests of Germany, expecting to be shot at any moment. He and Roland Weary had slipped away from the fight in the darkness. When they circled around and looked for their squad, they found Wermacht soldiers in their foxholes. They walked for miles looking for American troops. Hypothermia set in. Billy begged Roland Weary to leave him to die in the cold. The crunch of snow underfoot, the lifeless trees, and the chill in the air robbed Billy of any hope. He could have died then and been at peace, but not because of any grand accomplishment or heroic feat. Billy was at peace with his shortcomings. It wasn’t that Billy didn’t think he’d ever amount to anything. It was that he didn’t want to amount to anything. In those dreary, dark woods, with the sound of artillery crashing like thunder in the distance, Billy accepted that his life was meaningless.

Roland Weary saved Billy Crusader, but not because Billy needed saving. Roland needed purpose. Roland had always had a grandiose air of importance about him. He was a five-star general in the uniform of a private. With his oversized woolen coat and thick combat boots keeping out the cold, Roland ordered Billy to march on for miles through the woods and thickets. Roland Weary was—by God—going to save someone in this bloody war. Billy was going to be the rousing story he told over one too many drinks in a sleazy Chicago bar, but Roland never made it back to Chicago. Roland Weary saved Billy Pilgrim, but his prized boots were stolen by their Wehrmacht captors in a bombed-out church on the outskirts of Dresden. Gangrene set in, and Roland died before the bombing of the city.

Even after the war, as a successful reporter, Billy felt that life was shallow and hollow. He had a beautiful wife, a beautiful car, and beautiful kids, but none of that held any meaning for Billy. Being snatched by extraterrestrials seemed somewhat typical of Billy’s luck.

Standing there before Dakota Monroe, both of them naked, changed Billy Crusader’s heart and soul. He had nothing to hide. Billy had been in love before, but he’d never felt loved. He could see love in Dakota’s eyes, in her tortured smile and trembling lips. Billy might be resigned to his fate, but Dakota wasn’t. Dakota Monroe gave Billy Crusader a sense of purpose.

“It’s you,” Billy said. “As crazy as it seems, the Arcs care about you, about us.”

Dakota replied, “I—I think I understand what Smear has been trying to say to us—these visions. I think I know what he’s struggling to express. He’s clumsy and ham-fisted, but he means well. I think he cares. He must have known before.”

“Before what?” Billy asked.

Dakota took his hand in hers and placed it gently on her naked stomach.

“I’m pregnant.”

Dakota smiled, kissing Billy gently on the lips. Tears slipped silently down his cheeks. His hands trembled.

“We can never go back, can we?” Dakota asked.

“No,” Billy said softly.

For once, Billy didn’t want to go back to Earth. For Billy Crusader, being with Dakota Monroe was akin to living with an angel in heaven.

“I want to go home.” Dakota’s eyes were heavy with sadness. “I want to raise my child—our child—on Earth.” She turned to face the alien. “Take me home. Now! Right now!”

“Now?” Smear replied in a curious tone. “You don’t understand. You’re too distant. You’ve come too far. Our spaceships traverse both space and time, negating some of the effects of relativity while amplifying others. You are billions of light-years from Earth. The very concept of now holds an entirely different meaning here than it does on your tiny planet.

“Walk to your refrigerator for some iced tea, and that physical act sees a hundred years pass on Earth. With those few steps, billions of people are born and die. Countries fall. Entire cultures are transformed.

“Get your drink, and as you walk back into the living room, time unwinds. Those billions of dead are alive again, and those lost countries still have hope.

“Climb the stairs to the bedroom, and you’re suddenly in sync with Abraham Lincoln as he sits in the Ford Theatre listening to Hail to the Chief. You see, now is meaningless. All of this is happening right now.”

“But,” Billy stuttered. “But that’s impossible.”

Smear replied, “Your own scientists have confirmed this. Time is elastic, but not even us Arcs are immune to the river of time. We see through spacetime, but we, too, are locked in step with the moment.

“For us, nearby worlds are but a blur, a flicker. For you, plants, trees, houses, and hills all get smaller as they stretch toward the horizon, but the further we look, the more we see. Earth is so distant it’s a feature-length film for us, something to be savored and enjoyed with popcorn.”

Billy loved popcorn. He knew exactly what Smear meant, which is probably why the lumbering alien used that term, as Arcs didn’t have popcorn. Billy had asked them for popcorn time and time again.

“Your unborn daughter, she will know nothing of Earth. That saddens you, but think of all she will never see—the suffering of children.”

“But there’s joy too,” Dakota said. “There’s hope on Earth.”

Smear sighed. “But here, there’s no evil. Your child will never know hurt or harm.”

Dakota’s lips quivered. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, she knew the strange alien being was right, and yet the desire to be free, even if it meant enduring sorrow and heartache as both Ursa and Voh had, weighed heavily on her heart. For her, there was no choice between tranquility in a cage and freedom with misery. Like a caged bird longing to fly, she’d choose freedom every time.

Dakota knew Smear was reading her mind. She knew he disagreed. She also knew she’d never step outside her enclosure, but hope is needed for the heart to go on. Perhaps her daughter would one day know freedom. Or maybe she would feel the opposite sentiment. Maybe for her, the norm of knowing only Arctrixmatrian kindness would mean it was Earth, with its sorrow and suffering, that was truly alien.

Dakota smiled, not that Smear would have understood why. For her, having a child would bring its own freedom.

Life is but the flicker of a flame dancing above a candle.

~~~

There was no whoosh of the pneumatic tubes, no rattle as a story raced to the typesetters in Chicago, and no rush of reporters running to make a deadline. The newsroom was silent. Most of the typists had gone home for the night.

Nancy gathered her plaid-covered bag, umbrella and hat and walked toward the door leading to the foyer. Kurt got the lights. As he flipped each switch, sections of the vast news floor fell into darkness, disappearing from sight.

Nancy was in a hurry. She needed to get home and prepare dinner. As much as she loved her husband, he was prone to anger. He’d hit her once. He was drunk at the time and apologized afterwards. Her mother told her to leave him, but Nancy was pregnant. She didn’t want to raise a child alone.

“Do you ever think about our stories?” Kurt asked.

Nancy was preoccupied, looking at the rain lashing the windowsill, thinking about her future. Her umbrella was old. One of the steel ribs was bent, while another had ripped away from the flimsy frame, tearing the fabric. It was only good for a light shower.

“Sure,” she said, half-hearing his comment, wanting to be polite. Nancy was going to get soaked on the way home.

“I think about them,” Kurt Nobody said. “There have been a lot of stories over the years, but there are a few that have stuck with me.”

“Which ones?” Nancy asked as they walked down the stairs to the main entrance.

“Well, I think about that poor guy in the elevator and his wife, the widow. Remember that?”

“Oh, yeah,” she replied. “I think that was one of the first stories we worked on together.”

“And what about those bones they found in Israel or Iraq or wherever. And I wonder about that body count from Vietnam. Five hundred is just a number, you know. It rolls off the tongue without a care. It’s like we’re talking about a batting average or something.”

Nancy hadn’t really thought about their stories that much over the years, but Kurt was right. There was more to life than words on a page. If anything, reducing life to just a few paragraphs in a newspaper was crazy. Would her life end up like that? No. Not her, she thought, but one day her life would be reduced to just a few words etched on a gravestone, and that realization hurt. Would anyone ever understand her? Would anyone care? Oh, her husband would. And, given she was six months pregnant, her child would too, but to most people, hers would be just one more name within the cemetery.

“Do you ever feel like we’re being watched?” Nancy asked as they walked down the stairs. Outside, cars raced past, splashing water from puddles onto the sidewalk.

“You mean by God or something?”

“No. More like we’re animals in a zoo,” Nancy replied.

“Hah,” Kurt Nobody said. It was clear he’d never thought in those terms before.

“I’m serious,” Nancy said, resting her hand on her bulging belly. “I mean, I know bad things happen to people all the time. And they’ve happened to me. But I feel like someone is watching out for me. I feel as though there’s someone there making sure things never get too bad.”

“Like an angel?” Kurt asked, but the tone of his voice suggested he was taking her seriously.

“I guess so,” Nancy replied. “I feel as though there’s someone there ready to whisk me and my child away should anything really bad happen.”

“Like it did to the guy in the elevator?” Kurt asked. “Or those people in Vietnam?”

“It sounds silly when you put it like that… No one helped them, did they?”

“I think we’re on our own,” Kurt said, but he always was pragmatic.

“Does life have meaning?” Nancy asked, standing in the foyer, looking out at the rain, not wanting to walk outside. 

“Life has to have meaning,” Kurt said. “The elevator guy, the murder victim in Mesopotamia, and all those numbers in Southeast Asia. They all mean something to someone somewhere, right?”

Nancy was silent.

“To us, they’re stories, but to their friends and family, they were real.”

Nancy said, “I guess we’re all just stories in the end.”

“I guess so.” Kurt got the door for her, pulling on the large brass handle and letting her walk out in front of him.

“If there is someone watching,” he added as she stepped out into the rain. “I bet they’re smiling.”

Nancy laughed. “Night, Kurt.”

“Night, Nancy.”

He turned into the driving rain. As tempting as it was for Nancy to turn the other way and head for her car, she wasn’t finished with their discussion. There was more she wanted to say.

On Arctrixmatria, this was a moment to be savored, not one to be recounted on a grubby page of newsprint. Smear understood. Kurt and Nancy might never realize what lives were lived and lost among the billions of people on their planet, but Smear did, and yet out of all those billions, the two of them had stopped to think a little deeper, to consider their acts in a little more detail, to slowly peer at life from another angle, to think in terms of kindness. They were awakening to see the brilliance of dawn. On Arctrixmatria, this moment was one brush stroke on the vast canvas of life, a masterpiece in the making. Like Billy and Dakota, Smear knew Kurt and Nancy were taking small steps. Small steps lead to big changes.

Nancy popped open her umbrella. Kurt wrapped his coat around him, warding off the storm. He ducked under a bus shelter outside the entrance. No one else was there. Rather than walking away, Nancy stood with him. There was something she had to say, something she didn’t want to say, but something she knew she must say.

“I’m leaving.”

“Leaving? Leaving the news bureau?”

“Leaving Chicago,” Nancy said. “Mark got a job out in LA.”

“When are you leaving?”

Nancy had been putting this conversation off for far too long. If asked why, she would have struggled to answer. It was Kurt. Nancy loved Kurt the way a student loves talking to their favorite lecturer after class, or the way a young boy looks up to his grandfather, or the way a young girl loves dancing in a field full of wildflowers.

“Tomorrow is my last day.”

“Oh,” Kurt said with resignation.

The bus pulled up, splashing water onto the sidewalk.

“I’ve, ah,” he said, pointing at the open door.

“Talk to you tomorrow,” Nancy said.

“Yeah. Tomorrow…”

Kurt hopped on the bus, paid the fare, shook the rain from his jacket and took a seat near the window. Nancy watched. Nancy waited. Her car was parked in an empty lot two blocks away. She should have rushed along the street to avoid getting too wet, as that wouldn’t be good for her unborn baby, but she had to wave goodbye to Kurt. With a smile and her petite, gloved hand waving beneath the umbrella, she caught Kurt’s eye. He waved back.

Kurt wasn’t a nobody. That might have been his surname, but to her, he was somebody. Nancy wanted to honor Kurt in some way, to remember him as more than a work colleague. She had no idea whether her unborn child would be a girl or a boy, so she decided to settle on a neutral name for them. She thought about what she knew of Kurt’s life. He was from a small rural town called Pierre, but it was a state capital.

“Dakota,” she said, looking down at her extended belly with warmth flooding her heart. “I think I’m going to call you Dakota.”

Time has no end

Afterword

Dark Beauty is a tribute to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five: The Children’s Crusade, a science fiction novel written to deconstruct the Hollywood myth of the war hero. For Vonnegut, the senseless firebombing of Dresden removed any notion of war as a romantic, virtuous endeavor. There was nothing glamorous or liberating about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in the closing year of the Second World War.

The title Dark Beauty comes from the name of the Vietnamese hamlet where US  soldiers killed 500 civilians in cold blood. Mỹ Lại (美 黎) is one of several settlements making up the farming village of Sơn Mỹ in South Vietnam, near the coast of the South China Sea. The population was primarily composed of poor people who were engaged in fishing and rice farming. Vietnam was and is a melting pot of Asian cultures. As such, its language draws from regional influences. Mỹ comes from the Chinese word for beauty, while Lại means ‘mixed’ in Bunong and Mon-Khmer. In Cantonese and Vietnamese, Lại can be translated as dark or black. Based on this, I named this novella Dark Beauty as a play on one of the comments made by the alien Smear, when he said, “It is the dark of night that allows the stars to shine.”

The sections with Kurt and Nancy, including the poor guy killed when his wedding ring jammed in an elevator door, have been adapted from anecdotes Kurt Vonnegut gave about his life as a reporter in Chicago.

As much as possible, I’ve tried to adopt Kurt Vonnegut’s tone and writing mannerisms as I’ve woven together my interpretation of his message—that heroism isn’t found down the barrel of a gun, but rather in standing up for what is right.

One of the wonderful aspects of Vonnegut’s original novel is the way he blended fact and fiction. In reading Slaughterhouse-Five, you’re never really sure what has been made up and what’s real. In the same manner, I’ve blurred the lines of fiction with actual historical events.

It may surprise you to learn that some of the scientific concepts described in this story are entirely real, like walking to the fridge as hundreds of years pass elsewhere in the universe. This is an accurate portrayal of how the effects of relativity are amplified over extremely large distances. For more information on this concept, check out The Fabric of the Cosmos by physicist Brian Greene, pages 134-139. This is known as the Andromeda Paradox. It’s one of those strange-but-true aspects of Relativity that defy reason. In practice, no one could ever exploit this phenomenon due to the restriction of the speed of light. The Andromeda Paradox is a curiosity, a strange byproduct of our strange universe that is far more strange than anything science fiction writers can conceive.

Although Ursa’s story is fictional, were it not for some distant ancestor awakening to realize the potential of farming, we could still be hunters and gatherers. The agricultural revolution of the last ten thousand years is the blink of an eye in evolutionary time. It represents barely 5% of the time Homo sapiens have been a distinct branch of Hominids.

In Dark Beauty, I’ve portrayed Ursa’s life as one possible scenario by which agriculture may have arisen out of desperation. Once agriculture arose, however, humanity had the opportunity, the time, and the space to develop in other ways. Slowly, we crawled toward the stars. We’re not there yet, but we’re closer.

The dramatization of the My Lai massacre in this novella is fictional but is based on the account of Hugh Thompson, as described in The Forgotten Hero of My Lai by Trent Angers, and Thompson’s personal account of the My Lai incident at Tulane University in December, 1994. If the language in this section feels stilted, it’s because these are the words spoken by Thompson and his crew, as recorded in the official documentation of the incident.

Although 500 people were killed, the entire population of the hamlets being targeted by US troops numbered over 2,500. There is no doubt that Thompson’s intervention saved lives. Toward the end of his life, Thompson revisited My Lai and was greeted as a hero. And he got to meet the children and grandchildren of those he saved in the bomb shelter on that fateful day.

Fiction often oversimplifies war. Whether it’s the white knight of some medieval drama or Darth Vader cloaked in black, authors go to pains to separate good from evil. We want war to be black and white, like the pieces in a game of chess, but it’s not. War is a muddy grey. Edgar Derby really was shot and killed over a teapot in the ruins of Dresden. Roland Weary died after his boots were stolen. Kurt Vonnegut searched through the smouldering rubble of a bombed city for survivors.

War is often a necessary evil, but make no mistake, it is evil nonetheless and should never be considered desirable. There’s no doubt the vast majority of soldiers serve with honor, but the service we demand of them requires the vilest of acts—taking another’s life in service to an ideal.

War atrocities are far too common, and yet even among the shattered ruins of Dresden, in the rice paddies of My Lai, and in the darkened halls of Abu Ghraib, there is a flicker of hope. Vonnegut felt the horror of those bombing raids. Others, like Charles Hanley, felt the same thing in a different setting, using pictures to expose the humiliation of Iraqis held in Abu Ghraib’s grotesquely named Camp Redemption. In the same manner, Hugh Thompson, Larry Colburn and Glenn Andreotta stood against their own troops to protect the innocent in My Lai. In each of these situations, we have a glimpse of evil being thwarted by ordinary people deciding to do the right thing. They could have cowered and caved, but they didn’t, and their courage saved lives.

We must teach our children to be strong. We need to teach our children to have a solid moral compass and not fall foul of blindly following those in authority. We must teach them about Andreotta, Vonnegut, and the likes of Witold Pilecki, who broke into the prison at Auschwitz to reveal the horrors of Nazi occupation. These and so many others lie in silence when they should be revered as the true heroes of our wars.

In 1790, John Philpot Curran said, “The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance.” Vigilance demands transparency and honesty. It is the nature of war to foment tragedy and hide horrors. No nation is exempt. Organizations like Amnesty International might be a pain in the ass for the United States, the United Kingdom and the Australian government, but it’s a pain that’s deeply needed to keep civilization on track.

Winning wars is easy if you’re prepared to drop enough bombs. Winning the peace is hard. Winning peace requires rebuilding what has been torn down. It requires the courage to correct the mistakes of Dresden, My Lai, Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray, to name but a few.

War is never just, but it can be fought according to the dictates of justice, and that requires accountability for drone strikes on weddings, the wrongful imprisonment of captives, and the murder of civilians, reporters, aid workers, doctors and nurses.

One of the great shames of My Lai was the presidential pardons for those convicted of cold-blooded murder. These men killed hundreds of defenseless, innocent civilians and never served more than a day in jail, even though they were found guilty. We have to do better.

What makes America, or any other country, great isn’t its conquests in war; it’s the way it deals with its own mistakes, exposing rather than burying its faults.

If we are ever visited by an intelligent extraterrestrial alien species like the Arcs, this will be the yardstick by which they will measure us: have we sought justice for those most vulnerable among us?

I suspect an intelligent species like the Arcs would be confused as to why some humans struggle to convince other humans that yet another group of humans needs to be treated as human when that’s clearly who they are. It’s time to look beyond skin color, ethnic background, religious beliefs, sexuality, gender or any of the other crazy ways we divide ourselves and come together as one. If this means I’m woke, then I hope you’ll stay awake with me.

Thank you for taking a chance on an obscure Australian science fiction author hailing from Auckland, New Zealand. Your support of my writing is deeply appreciated. By purchasing this book, you’re giving me the opportunity to write the next one, so I’m grateful for your enthusiastic support.

If you’ve enjoyed this story, please leave a review online and tell a friend about it. If you’d like to chat about this or any of my novels, feel free to stop by my virtual coffee shop.

If you’d like to learn more about upcoming new releases, be sure to subscribe to my email newsletter. You can find all of my books on Amazon. I’m also active on Facebook, Instagram and BlueSky.

Peter Cawdron

Sunshine Coast, Australia