Ayla

by Bill Bowler

Part 1 and Part 3
appear in this issue.

part 2 of 3

Zandox found it necessary to break both the instigator’s antennae at the base to halt transmission. The throwback shriveled in pain, but his howl of torment broke off and the signal went dead. Zandox clubbed him and threw him unconscious into the transport. The others stopped muttering and resumed boarding the vehicles. It was quite a lesson for me in discipline and crowd control.

Later, returning home, as I slid down the tunnel towards our living chambers, I noticed the portal across the tunnel from ours was open. Our neighbor had not been seen or heard from again since his arrest, but his mate had continued to live quietly in the chamber, hiding there, really, and emanating constant low-level fear, which seeped into the corridors and even into neighboring apartments, including ours. Something would have to be done about it.

Glancing through the opened portal into the dark chamber, I was surprised, then, to see not one, but two shadows, and to realize I was sensing not only fear and grief, but hope and pity emanating from the chamber, but from a second source. I paused at the entrance.

The sensations of pity and hope washed over me. The signal was not strong, but it swept through my receptors and surged through my system. I tried to focus on the source, and one of the shadows in the chamber came into the light and moved towards the open portal where I stood lurking.

“We’ve not met before?”

My receptors quivered on receipt of the transmission, its rhythmical frequency in synch somehow with my own. My discharge rate was accelerating and I was rapidly falling out of stasis into some turbulent unknown state.

“Who are you?” I asked, in growing confusion.

I felt the light, gentle touch of unknown antennae upon my own. At the moment of contact, a spark of energy flashed through me. I was in a panic, and yet, I wanted to move closer. I wanted more. When the touch was withdrawn, as gently as it had come, I desired only to re-establish and maintain contact. It was a feeling like thirst, but for what?

“My name is Ayla. My parents live in this chamber,” came the answer to my question. “One has disappeared. The other is in poor condition. I’m trying to do what I can to help.”

Just then, a strong proboscis wrapped around my thorax and pulled me away from the open portal,

“Come away from there, Gaag! Don’t seek trouble. It will find you, anyway.”

My father dragged me back across the tunnel towards our own chamber. The neighbor’s portal closed and I lost the transmission from the interior.

After a brief period of troubled repose, full of thoughts and images and fleeting memories of the strange Ayla whom I had but glimpsed, I resumed activity. Nobgop the Pure had invited the alien Ambassador to address the cadets at the Enforcement Agency Academy. I crowded with Zandox and the others into the large meeting hall and tuned my receptors. With the still unpleasant but now familiar alien gurgling sounds in the background, I processed the signals broadcast from the alien’s translator mechanism,

“... and on our planet, all men are considered equal. Our highest values are peace and goodwill towards all. We cherish freedom as the natural birthright of all. Aggressive war and violence are condemned as crimes...”

Suddenly, a squad of tattooed Enforcers and Special Deputies burst through the double entrance portal membrane into the chamber and seized one of the cadets. Before our eyes, the Deputies surrounded him, clubbed him into unconsciousness, and dragged him from the hall. The lead Enforcer broadcast an image of the arrest order.

Advanced Plan 9 screening of this cadet had revealed previously undetected mutation. These defects were so insidious they were virtually undetectable by previous methods, so closely did this type of throwback externally resemble the pure. Spread of infection would have been unstoppable without the new methods of detection.

A throwback in the Academy! Can you imagine? We were all ashamed; we felt unclean, shocked and saddened that our class, our generation, had first stained the purity of the Academy and its proud history and traditions.

The alien Ambassador had watched the scene from the podium and demanded to know what had happened,

“Was that a criminal? A spy?”

“No,” Zandox rose and spoke for us all. “Much worse. A defective inferior. A throwback. They are removed from the general population and transferred to training facilities in the frozen sectors as a matter of public health and safety.”

The alien Ambassador’s eyes narrowed. He grasped the podium with his upper pseudopods, leaned forwards and hissed, “I will inform my superiors. But my instructions are clear. Earth has a strict policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of your planet.”

The incident with the defective cadet had shaken my confidence. In growing doubt, I found my thoughts and feelings inexplicably turning to Ayla. Her gentle touch and her aura of pity for the world, which she emanated freely, towards all without distinction — these were stimuli to which I was not accustomed. I began to lose direction, to lose my way. I became confused. Not a good state of mind for a cadet Enforcer.

It was not long after the incident at the Academy that the second alien ship arrived carrying a delegation of alien scientists and engineers and a security escort.

Life was not easy for the aliens. The gravitational force was so much greater here than on their planet that the aliens found it hard to move about and tired quickly. Our atmosphere was also thin in the element the aliens required for respiration, causing them problems in maintaining their metabolism and obliging them to resort to portable containers of gas to support their continued activities.

Surface temperatures on our warm hemisphere, facing the great red sphere that perpetually filled our sky, were higher than the aliens were accustomed to and caused them significant discomfort. We learned they were used to rapidly alternating periods of light and dark and the continuous light, which we so craved, interfered with their periodic rhythms.

There was also one particularly serious incident of radiation poisoning when a Science Wing medical team had to shield a nest of aliens from a cosmic burst that would have burned through their thin surface coating and destroyed their fragile internal organs.

Shortly after the arrival of the second ship, Nobgop the Pure announced that high-level negotiations were in progress with the alien leadership. The alien Ambassador had conveyed information that his superior, the great ruler of Earth, an alien of exceptional wisdom and benevolence, in the spirit of brotherhood and mutual respect, wished to draw up a treaty with us. The treaty would declare the eternal friendship and cooperation between our two species, establish peaceful relations, and guarantee the territorial integrity of our planet in perpetuity.

Not long after the signing of the treaty, a third alien ship arrived, a massive transport vehicle carrying 20,000 alien settlers. They descended in waves to the surface and began to establish their own extensive network of walled nests, built of stone and metal. Some of us felt this was in technical violation of the treaty, but Nobgop announced that the treaty language had been amended to allow for a limited number of alien bases.

Cargo container ships from Earth began to transport alien machinery to our planet unlike any we had developed on our own. These great machines dug, ploughed, cut, moved and carried materials on a scale we could hardly grasp.

In drilling through mountains to the west of our nest network, the aliens became very excited to learn that one clear odorless liquid was present in great quantity in large pools and streams beneath the surface crust. We could not understand the cause of their excitement as this was a very common substance and of little apparent use.

Nobgop continued to ramp up Plan 9. Our enforcement squad activities, raids, roundups and transport of inferiors, became more frequent. Zandox and I and our fellow enforcers worked ceaselessly at the behest of the Control Group.

The medical research teams continued to develop more accurate screening for defects and mutation. More and more inferiors concealed among us were discovered and processed. There was, apparently, a certain rate of false positives in the results but it was generally agreed that the need to remove the large numbers of impure overrode the occasional unfortunate deportation of a false positive individual.

After a long and tiring session at the academy, a session of intense drilling in advanced crowd control, I parted from Zandox and my comrades and returned slowly along the central path back through the nest to my private chamber. Near the entrance to the main underground tunnel, I paused and looked out across the rolling dunes towards the mountains in the west and the dark curtain of mist that fell behind them, marking the border of the Grey Zone. Above me, the great red sphere shone, warming and comforting. I don’t know how long I stood there. Perhaps from fatigue, I slipped into semi-repose and my mind began to drift. Could the aliens be trusted? Could the inferiors be completely purged from among us?

I became aware of sensations of concern and pity. I realized my receptors were picking up a signal. Pity for me? But why? I had everything you could wish for. But still the sense of another’s concern for my well being washed over me. Ayla came out of the tunnel entrance and our antennae met,

“Your father...”

I grew alarmed.

“An enforcement squad came for him. Your friend, Zandox...”

“It’s not possible!” I wailed. “My father was pure!”

I rushed with Ayla into the tunnel. The entrance membrane to our chamber was ripped and stained with protoplasm.

“There was a struggle. He tried to fight, but there were four of them, all armed. They told him his test results had come back positive. He lunged at a deputy and Zandox scorched him.”

I saw the ashes on the ground and my thought structure collapsed. I drew my weapon.

“Don’t,” came the transmission from Ayla. “You’ll only make things worse.”

I lowered my scorcher. But I was stunned. If my father was, in fact, a mutated inferior, then what was I? Ayla’s cilia mingled with mine. Her soft antennae stroked my side gently, and I felt a bewildering surge of something I had never experienced before. Though unharmed, I felt some pain inside that I could not suppress or contain. As if through some fog, I realized I had sensed this non-physical pain before, but always from without, from the neighbor, from the deportees as we loaded them into the transit vehicles, from Ayla. What I had sensed in others was now a bewildering sensation rising from within myself.

Everything was ruined. I felt empty and hollow. Instead of clarity, there was confusion. I no longer felt pride or ambition but an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and futility. I stopped attending the academy and found myself idle, staying home, brooding, staring through our portal across the hall to the neighbor’s chamber, as if waiting for something. Hoping for something? But for what? For Ayla to come? For Ayla to touch me again? To radiate her pity on me? How absurd. I had become pathetic. If my enforcer comrades so much as suspected such ridiculous weakness in me, they would have laughed me off the squad.

I felt paralyzed. I was slumped gloomily against our portal, watching the hall, watching the neighbor’s chamber, waiting for nothing and expecting less. A dark gloom stifled my aura. I asked the question, why go on? For what? And no answer was evident. But at the darkest moment, when the thought of ending my own futile existence first entered the equation, a gentle wave of tenderness washed over me. On all frequencies, my sensors received a positive charge of selfless affection such as had emanated from my father in the very earliest stages of my development.

From out of nowhere, Ayla touched me. Her delicate proboscis encircled mine; her cilia brushed my own; her pity radiated out and encompassed the shadow of my own gloom, and I trembled.

“You’re asking the wrong questions,” she transmitted. “You’re searching in the wrong place.”

“I don’t understand,” I replied.

“It’s a paradox. What seems may not be.”

“NOBODY MOVE!” came the command. Enforcer First Class Zandox and a Special Deputy were moving down the tunnel towards us. The red sphere filled my mind.

Zandox drew his weapon and aimed at Ayla, “You. Come with us.”

Ayla’s pity enveloped Zandox, but he was incapable of receiving and processing this type of signal. She was calmly giving herself over to his control without a hint of fear or regret. But I felt growing alarm. Zandox felt it too,

“Stay out of this, Gaag.”

With no thought, no logic, only feeling, I drew my scorcher and carbonized Zandox’s central neuro-system control organ with one blast. Before the Deputy could react, I ended his existence, as well.

“No!” cried Ayla. “Look what you’ve done! You’ve only harmed yourself.”

I pulled Ayla quickly towards the tunnel exit overwhelmed by the urge to escape, to flee, without a thought towards what I had done, or why, or what the consequences might be.

We hid in the shadows. Avoiding all who came our way, we slipped down little used pathways, heading away from the center, away from all others, out of the nest. I sensed Enforcers behind us. A bulletin may have been broadcast. I clutched Ayla and we fled away towards the edge of light.

A squad of Enforcers followed us. Ayla and I maintained silence, offering only the faintest signal to track. Not sure of our exact location, the Enforcers transmitted orders in our general direction to halt for questioning. For three Thunborks, four, we were pursued and moved on without rest, without nourishment, never stopping; and on the fifth, we climbed to the top of a dune and saw in front of us the failing light and turbulent sky of the Gray Zone.

Proceed to part 3...