HUFFINGTON POST NEWS WATCH, AUGUST 23, 2019
The fire sputtered and never reached the roaring stage, no matter how much leafy stuff they piled on it. But it gave them a bit of light, as well as a bizarre shadow against the Beehive wall . . . which turned out to be rover Buzz on approach.
All five of the astronauts were going without helmets now. “This troubles me,” Taj said. “We’re exposing ourselves to this environment.”
“What choice do we really have?” Zack said. “If we had to rely on our consumables, we’d be back on the surface by now. Besides, it doesn’t matter what our bodies are exposed to. Our suits are totally contaminated. Venture has tools for dealing with lunar dust, not Keanu’s organisms.”
“This does nothing to cheer me.” Taj shuffled off, taking his Zeiss camera.
Tea and Zack pulled a few food items from the rover. The vehicle also gave each of the astronauts a bit of privacy. “Thank God,” Zack said. “My diaper is beginning to chafe.”
“So sexy,” Tea said.
But there was nothing in the way of clothing or blankets. “The rover wasn’t designed for camping,” Tea said.
As the newly undead continued to sleep, Zack ordered Natalia and Tea into the vehicle for a rest. “We’re going to need our energy for recon.”
Taj was back in earshot by now. “What recon?”
“We’ve got a whole new world here. We ought to take a look while we can.”
“Zack, Keanu’s in orbit now. Let the next crew do it. They’ll have the proper equipment.”
“NASA can’t mount another visit for at least a year, and I don’t think the Coalition can, either.”
“What difference does a year make? This thing has been traveling for ten thousand times that!”
“It hasn’t been alive, like this,” Lucas said. He raised his arm toward the landscape, now looking more like an Amazonian rain forest . . . except that the “trees” were no more than a few meters tall. All of it bathed in the near-twilight cast by the strange little glowworms. “It’s like . . . the Garden of Eden.”
Taj grunted. “Which makes us what? The Serpent?”
“Hardly,” Zack said. “The environment seems optimized for humans.”
“For a while, at least,” Taj said. “It clearly wasn’t optimized for the Sentry.” He nodded at the sleepers. “I wonder if our . . . newly alive could eat anything that’s growing in here.”
“Speaking of them,” Lucas said, “what do we do with them? No matter what kind of exploring we do, we have to leave in a day or so!”
Zack had been worrying about this. “Well, Venture has room for one passenger. And Camilla is only half the weight penalty of a full-grown human—”
“Are you insane? You can’t be thinking about taking these two back to Earth!”
“You bet I’m thinking about it—”
“Just because one of them looks and sounds like your wife? Zack, you’re too tired to be making these decisions!”
Zack was very tired, but he’d been in similar states of exhaustion several times in his life. He believed it helped him think more clearly. He took Taj by the arm and turned him toward the sleepers. “For the record, I’m not at all sure who or what that person is. But all the evidence tells me it’s my dead wife, somehow restored to life by some pretty goddamned advanced technology. So, allowing for that, what do I do? Leave her?”
“For the next mission, yes.”
“How is she supposed to survive? She and the girl?” Zack pointed back to the Beehive. “Or the rest of them.”
“I think my commander believes Keanu will provide,” Lucas said.
Taj was usually a serene individual—Zack had never seen him truly angry. But at that moment the vyomanaut shot his Brazilian crew member a look of such loathing that Zack got to his feet, afraid that he had to prevent a fistfight. “I am trying to protect my mission and my crew!”
“We both are,” Zack said, using a voice he had perfected in refereeing fights between Megan and Rachel. “This situation is unusual—”
But Lucas wasn’t ready to give up. “You both keep looking at this like it’s a malfunction in a sim! This world is sending us a message! It welcomed us! It has changed its environment to suit humans! It has revived and rebuilt the dead! And even if one of them were someone we knew, it would be significant. Three makes it mind-blowing, possibly biblical!”
Zack was happy to hear Lucas say it—it saved him from doing so.
“Ah, yes, this could be God’s work. But tell me, my friend, how does a Catholic explain this?” Taj said. “As I recall, you believe that eventually humans will be raised up body and soul after Jesus returns.”
“Yes.”
“Jesus has not returned.”
“Not that we know of,” Lucas said. He smiled. “We haven’t quite finished exploring Keanu.”
“You guys are loud,” Tea said, joining them.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Zack said.
“And miss all the excitement?” She brought a drink box from inside the rover and offered it to Zack. She had drinks for Lucas and Taj, too. “Hydration?”
“Sorry,” Lucas said.
“Don’t be. No one should be sleeping when there’s a whole dang planet to explore.” Tea caught herself and nodded toward the two bodies around the fire. “Except for them.”
“You should be part of this debate,” Taj said. “I’d wake up Natalia if she didn’t need the sleep. We’re trying to understand what we face. Our Brazilian friend cites Jesus as a possibility.”
Never much of a Lucas fan—certainly not a player in his World’s Greatest Astronaut game—Tea couldn’t help being sarcastic. “As in ‘Jesus, take the wheel?’” she said, singing a phrase from an old country song. “Is he driving the Chariots of God?” She turned to Zack. “Am I remembering that right?”
“Chariots of the Gods, plural,” Taj said, sneering. “And that was a popular explanation for the Pyramids, how they’d been built by alien visitors. Not really applicable here.”
Lucas refused to be baited. “I’m not suggesting anything like that. But given what I’ve seen today, how can any of us rule anything out?”
“But surely this violates your beliefs,” Taj said.
“Catholics don’t believe that after death they will simply regain their bodies. That never made sense. Which body? The one that was filled with cancer and killed you? The body that was torn apart in a plane crash? After death, we will be transfigured. We will become something new.” He stood up, and pointed to Megan and Camilla. “Very possibly we will become like them. Which suggests to me that if you didn’t believe in God, now would be an excellent time to consider it.” He smiled his beautiful smile.
Zack could tell Taj was holding something back. “Come on, Taj . . . everything is on the table here.”
“There is, in my tradition, a version of what might be happening here. The Vedas, our sacred Sanskrit texts, mention the akashic records—a library of all human experience. What if that exists? What if the universe is nothing more than a giant akashic record . . . and these aliens somehow access it.”
“And you think my religion is crazy,” Lucas said. He got up and headed for the rover.
As they watched him go, Taj shrugged. “Saying it isn’t the same as believing it. And even if he’s convinced himself, at least he has a strategy: He will treat these things as transfigured humans. It’s more than I have.”
Tea knelt by Zack. “Talk to me, because I’m worse off than Taj here . . . I’m totally lost.”
Zack looked at the two sleepers. “Speaking to them as if they are revived humans is fine. But when it comes to actions? I’m still not sure this isn’t some kind of ruse.”
“So they’re artificial.”
“It would make sense. But why would anyone make duplicates of specific humans—”
“To make us trust them.”
Zack pointed to the sleeping Megan. “I would trust that creature more if it didn’t claim to be my wife.”
Tea touched his hand, the only physical contact they’d had since she had buttoned him into his suit.