A hazy blue line traced the horizon, revealing how perilously thin Earth’s atmosphere was as seen from orbit. The gently curving planet looked serene. What little she could see in the darkness looked flattened, as though there were no elevation, no mountains or valleys.
Clouds and coastlines curved with the planet, catching her eye not because they were familiar, but because they looked stretched and elongated. A mesh of lights lit up a city off to one side and Bower wondered where they were relative to the various major cities on Earth.
She felt small.
The pitch black of space was ominous, foreboding. Even the stars seemed further away, which didn’t make sense to her, and yet there they were, static pin-pricks of light fighting off the eternal darkness.
Bower clenched at the straps running over her shoulders. Her knuckles were white with terror. She looked at Elvis. He’d opened his eyes and was staring straight ahead, trying not to look at anything in particular.
“Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck,” he repeated silently to himself.
It was only as she was looking at him she realized there was no seat beneath either of them. The straps she thought she was holding onto were the bunched folds of her own clothes. Bower put her hand down, wanting to touch the stiff, hard cushion beneath her, but her fingers grasped at nothing.
She was floating freely in space.
In her initial panic, she turned only to find she kept turning. Bower twisted the other way, trying to stabilize herself.
She watched as her hands floated up before her, drifting as though they had a mind of their own. Bower felt as though she were swimming, floating in deep water. Her body naturally moved into a neutral, fetus position, with her thighs out in front of her.
She breathed deeply, calming herself. She had drifted to one side and couldn’t see Elvis, but she could hear him still cursing under his breath.
“Hey,” she said.
Bower wanted to add something else but she was at a loss as to what. She was disoriented physically, mentally and emotionally, unsure quite what to think as the stars rolled past her blurred vision.
With each motion, the horizon shifted. Any notion of up and down dissolved. She reached out with her hands, stretching out her legs, trying to steady herself. If a skater could spin faster by drawing in their limbs, she sought to slow her motion by extending hers. Her heart was racing. She needed to calm down.
A hand rested on her shoulder, turning her gently to one side.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Elvis said, and she could hear him trying to suppress a gag reflex.
“Try to look at something in the distance,” she said. “Just like at sea. Try not to move.”
Elvis didn’t answer. He looked pale.
“Breathe slowly, and keep your eyes on some fixed point.”
Typical bloody doctor, she thought, great advice for someone else, but never advice you’ll take yourself. Bower turned slowly, trying not to subject herself to any quick motion. She tried to pick a point in the distance, but everything was in motion. She too was struggling with the urge to vomit. A sickening feeling welled up within her stomach. It felt as though her insides had become unhinged. Not only did her hands and legs float freely but so did her innards.
Elvis couldn’t help himself. He vomited. The contents of his stomach sprayed outward in a thick stream. Bower expected his spew to arc, but it projected in a straight line.
His stomach muscles contracted and he spewed again. Bower noticed he was drifting away from her. She reached out, grabbing at his loose shirt.
The sick continued to drift away. Bower watched, wanting to see what it would hit, but it simply kept going as though there were no boundary, no wall enclosing them, and yet that wasn’t possible.
Elvis wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Small drops of spew floated before him. The smell got to her, making her feel green. She couldn’t appreciate how remarkable it was to see fluids floating there undulating in globules of various sizes.
“I don’t understand,” Elvis said. “What’s happening?”
“Ah,” Bower began. “It appears we’re in orbit.”
“Where are they? Where’s Stella?”
“I don’t know,” she replied.
As she gazed into the distance, the spew faded from sight, drifting out into space. Distances were impossible to judge, but she figured she lost sight of it somewhere around a fifty yards.
“Are we still in the floater?” Elvis asked.
“I don’t know,” Bower replied.
“How can this be?” Elvis asked. “If we were in space, we’d die. There’s no air.”
“At a guess,” she said, “I’d say they’ve given us front-row seats and are distorting our view. They probably think they’re honoring us with a unique experience.”
“I’ll take a tin can any day,” Elvis replied.
Earth looked majestic, not that Bower could appreciate it as she struggled with the sense of disorientation coming from her swirling inner ear.
As they moved out of the shadows and into the light of a new day, they could see the alien mothership looming large hundreds of miles above the Pacific Ocean so serene below. Sunlight caught the underside of the organic vessel. What had looked like fine cilia from the ground were gigantic tubular growths protruding below the craft, casting shadows along what Bower assumed was the hull. Fat fingers, sprang to mind, and Bower found herself wondering about their function, not in a mechanical sense, but from a biological perspective.
The alien vessel rotated slowly along the length of its axis.
“That’s not a spaceship,” Elvis said softly, and Bower nodded.
As they passed beneath the craft, traveling along the length of the alien vessel, Bower felt as though she were looking at a bacterium under an electron-scanning microscope, only this bacterium radiated color. Like a beetle’s shell, the colors shifted with the light reflecting off the seemingly oily surface.
Below them, the curvature of Earth looked out of place. Whereas before they had been held spellbound by the sunlight reflecting off the azure blue waters of the Pacific, now the ocean seemed distant, as though it were incorporeal, a figment of their imagination.
The jagged coastline of South America came into view, with dark streaks of lifeless desert and rugged snow-capped mountains giving way to lush green forests, and yet their eyes were transfixed by the alien creature.
Creature, yes, thought Bower, Elvis was right. This was no spaceship, it was alive. There were no steel panels, no portholes or blinking lights. As if in response to her thoughts, Elvis murmured.
“How does this thing work? There’s no machinery, no rocket engines or engine bells, no heat shields or fuel tanks.”
“Nope,” was all Bower could muster in response, mesmerized by the dangling alien structures sailing by above them. For some reason, they reminded her of tonsils, or perhaps they were an enlarged version of the tiny papillae covering the tongue? Whatever these structures were, they had the chaotic mesh of life about them rather than the clinical, deliberate placement of mechanical parts.
The floater should have prepared them for this sight, but the sheer size of the alien vessel defied the imagination, and yet it was no vessel, not in any sense they had ever known. This was a living organism on a scale that dwarfed life on Earth. Was it a hundred miles long, two hundred miles?
They skimmed beneath the creature, in awe of the living structure drifting lazily above the thin blue atmosphere of Earth.
“How big is this thing?” Elvis asked.
“She’s bigger than either Switzerland or Belgium,” Bower replied. “Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, take your pick.”
“In US speak?”
“Ah,” Bower said, not taking her eyes off the craft as she added, “at a guess, I’d say bigger than Connecticut, New Jersey, New Hampshire, maybe even Vermont… I don’t know.”