“Damn.”
Slowly, their course took them in among the fleshy, hanging pods. Each appendage was easily the size of a skyscraper, and like a cityscape, no two pods reached exactly the same height.
As they drifted between these alien structures, Bower wasn’t sure who was upside-down. With their smooth curves and rounded tops, the pods looked fleshy. The two unwitting astronauts glided between the pods, curving around them as they moved closer to the body of the creature.
“I wanna go home.”
Bower thought they were her words, certainly she felt that way, but it was Elvis who had spoken.
“Me too.”
Elvis held her hand, squeezing tightly as their forward motion slowed and they drifted upward toward a dark, irregular shaped hole at the base of one of the appendages.
“You know,” Elvis said, with a change of tone that signaled an attempt at humor, “If I hadn’t seen Sigourney Weaver in Aliens, this would be quite exciting. Oh, God, please don’t let anything jump out at me from the shadows.”
Bower forced herself to make a nervous laugh as they passed into the darkness.
Distances were hard to judge. There were no points of reference, no familiar shapes with which to relate sizes. What’s more, the creature seemed to swell, with sections stretching and contracting, undulating and pulsating.
Darkness enveloped them, swallowing them. Elvis held her hand tight. Bower squeezed as hard as she could, focusing on the sensation beneath her fingers, assuring herself he was still there.
Slowly, their eyes adjusted to the night.
“We’re in the belly of the beast, now,” Elvis said.
“You’re not helping,” Bower replied, her heart pounding within her chest as they passed through a dark opening on the surface of the alien vessel.
They found themselves standing on the upper edge of the broad hole inside the vast creature. Instinctively, Bower stepped forward, wanting to move away from the dark chasm behind them. Her feet drifted lazily through the air.
Streaks of soft red light stretched out inside the empty, cavernous void. Faint strips of semi-transparent blood-red light moved in swirling motions, crisscrossing and intersecting each other as they faded into the distance.
Bower looked down. Her feet rested in soft sand. She crouched, but that act caused her to drift off the ground and she watched, fascinated as she drifted back to the sand in slow motion. Her boots barely made any indentation. Elvis still held her hand, but not as forcefully.
Bower picked up a handful of sand and stood up again, feeling as light as a feather as she bobbed up and down with even the slightest motion. She ran the sand through her fingers, watching as the fine grains fell slowly to the ground. Although they glistened like stars, the grains of sand drifted like snowflakes in no rush to end their fall.
The sand felt moist and was surprisingly warm.
Sand dunes rolled away before her.
A light breeze blew from her left, but the air felt dank, heavy. Bower couldn’t place the sensation, but the air felt thick. She wondered about its composition and pressure. There had to be oxygen, or they wouldn’t be able to breathe, but she was curious about the ratio. Breathing deeply, she felt no need to rush for another breath.
“What do you make of that?” Elvis asked, and she turned to him, seeing his eyes cast upwards.
Blobs of molten fluid floated above them, defying what little gravity there was within the creature. From what she could tell, each blob would have been thirty to forty feet in diameter. Although they glowed like lava, she doubted they were hot. She wasn’t sure why, but something about the appearance of these blobs suggested they were cool to touch. Perhaps it was the lack of any shimmer in the air. The blobs undulated, with soft waves rippling back and forth, causing their shape to flex and distort as they drifted onward.
Now her eyes had adjusted to the darkness, she could make out thin streaks of dim red light stretching across the sky like pathways, winding their way between floating islands of light sparkling in the darkness.
“Beautiful,” was the only word that sprang to mind, the only word to pass from her lips. Any fear she held evaporated with the wonder around them. In the distance, several more blobs of glowing lava-like fluid rose up in long strands before breaking free and drifting onward.
Stella appeared in front of them. Suddenly there were dozens of aliens swarming past. Their spindly, spiky carriages wheeled around them as they raced across the sand and into one of the transparent red strands that crossed the crest of a low hill. Bower watched in awe as each one was lifted up and whisked away by the light. It was as though they were leaves falling in a stream.
Three of the alien creatures paused before them. Which one was Stella?
“Come.”
“…With.”
“……Us.”
Elvis held out his hand, not sure which creature he should reach toward.
“I don’t get it,” Elvis said. “Stella?”
“Yes.”
“…Yes.”
“……Yes.”
“They’re smaller,” Bower said. “Not the frames, but the core.”
“I don’t understand,” Elvis said. “How can there be three of them?”
“I guess there was always three of them,” Bower replied. She laughed, adding, “We’ve assumed so much, too much. These things, these spindly structures, they’re like a life-raft. They must have pooled their resources, banded together.”
“I’m confused,” Elvis said.
“You’re confused? Me too. Imagine how they must have felt when we treated the three of them as a single individual.”
“Huh,” Elvis said. “So all these little critters made up three people.”
“People?” Bower asked.
“You know what I mean,” Elvis protested. “Three whatevers, three thinking personalities.”
“I guess so.”
Whatever Stella was, she seemed to understand their conceptual difficulties. The three alien structures reached out, touching each other, their fronds intertwining. To Bower’s amazement, the tiny creatures at the heart of the bladed structures swarmed back and forth, swapping between the frames.
“This is screwing with my head,” Elvis confessed.
“I think this is what they wanted us to see. They want us to understand what they are, how they operate, how they’re interchangeable, how their intelligence is comprised of numerous component parts.
“For us, it’s all too easy to get caught up in macroscopic life. We look at each other and we see eyes and hair, arms and legs, and we think these things define us, but they don’t. Our bodies are a projection of trillions of cells, each of them far too small to be seen by the human eye. What seems so alien to us is actually the norm. Microscopic biology has defined life on Earth for billions of years, and microbes like bacteria and archaea reside in swarms like these aliens.”
Bower crouched down, taking a good look at the mass of creatures switching back and forth between the three separate cores. She was sure they were listening, thinking, evaluating her words. They seemed as intent on observing her and Elvis as the two of them were on understanding these alien creatures.
“I’ve been thinking about Stella. Did you see the way she merged in with the swarm of other bugs?”
“Yeah, how does that work?” Elvis asked. “I mean, what was with that? Was she just part of some other, bigger creature? And what is she now? Is she like a team of aliens or something?”
“I don’t know,” Bower said, “but we’re not that much different. We like to think of ourselves as individuals, as a single entity, but we’re not. We’re composite creatures, made up of billions and billions of other creatures. Your body is an ecosystem in its own right, every bit as remarkable as the rainforest or the islands of the Galapagos. Boy, if only Salvador Dali had known, what paintings he could have created.”