“Spread your wings, babe.”
Elvis was beside her.
How did he do that? He was flying beside her. He reached out and steadied her, helping her orient her body in the direction of travel. Bower breathed deeply, calming herself. Her muscles relaxed, and that seemed to be the key to flight within the slipstream.
She smiled. She could do this. She could fly. Was this a daydream? A childhood fantasy come true? She laughed, feeling like a kid.
“Pretty darn cool, huh,” Elvis said.
“Pretty darn cool indeed,” she replied, as they raced above the dark, rolling sand dunes.
The distant strands converged on nodes in the sky, like roads leading to Rome. In her mind, Bower found herself making comparisons to the way the cardiovascular system worked, certainly the red pathways reminded her of veins converging on arteries, all leading back to the heart. They were sinuous, meandering, not taking the most direct route.
The three alien creatures drifted by, spinning idly so as to dismiss any notion of any one particular direction being upright for them. As they soared along the floating highway, Bower found she had some directional control by twisting. That must have been how Elvis had been able to reach her.
As they gained height, she could see numerous hubs or nodes running the length of the craft. The nodes spidered in irregular shapes, reaching out with thin veins cutting through the air. Thousands upon thousands of alien creatures like the three Stellas raced along the various pathways, hurriedly going about their business. Rush hour in orbit.
Together, Bower and Elvis passed through a central node and emerged into the light. They had broken through cloud cover, coming out from the darkness into the bright light of day.
“What the hell is this thing?” Elvis asked, soaring beside her. “I mean, it’s not a spacecraft, not as we’d think of one.”
“Why leave your planet?” Bower asked, “when you can take it with you.”
Dark cloud-tops rolled beneath them. They were still inside the vast alien ship; that much was obvious from the transparent dome stretching out easily ten miles above them. Here and there, lines were visible, crisscrossing the dome, providing some sort of structural support.
“Are those stars?” Elvis asked, pointing at several massive clusters of light further down the body of the vast creature. Bower couldn’t bring herself to think of the alien vessel as a spaceship, it was a living organism, or at the very least, an ecosystem.
“I don’t think so.”
There were dozens of clusters, each one rising above the clouds with thousands of tiny lights glowing like the sun.
As their path took them closer, they saw that what looked like thousands of miniature stars resolved into hundreds of thousands and millions of fine pinpricks of light, all tightly grouped together in structures that reached up for miles above them.
“They’re trees,” Bower said.
“Trees?”
“Yes, look at the structure, look at how they’re connected.”
As they wove their way between the gigantic structures towering over them, Bower could see fine, silk-like threads grouping the lights together, banding them into twigs, branches, limbs and various central trunks.
“Trees?” Elvis repeated, clearly struggling with her analogy, but that was all she could come up with to describe what she was looking at.
Each tree of light spanned several square miles, reaching up at least a mile or two in height. They were lopsided, lacking symmetry, often with vast blooms of light in one area or another, while other sections were hollow, devoid of light, allowing them to see through to the interconnected core within.
Around each base, roots spread out across the cloud tops, a tangled mess set in stark contrast to the neatly branching structures reaching up toward the lights. In some cases, the roots of several trees were interconnected. In almost all cases, the lights on the roots reached out beyond the farthest branch.
“Understand,” Stella said, although Bower wasn’t sure which Stella had spoken.
They slowed as they came up to an irregular tree standing on its own. Millions of pinpricks of light spread out through its root ball, reaching for miles beyond the largest of the branches. The inside of the tree looked dead, with just a smattering of lights at various junctions, but the outer branches teemed with life.
Life, that was it. Bower understood what she was looking at.
Slowly, they drifted to within a few feet of the various twigs stemming from the branches of the largest limb. Bower reached out and touched at the lights, half-knowing what to expect.
A beetle.
At least to her it looked like a beetle, and it wasn’t quite what she expected, but it was life. She’d figured she would see something associated with terrestrial life.
Floating before her was a beautiful scarab beetle with six spiky legs, its iridescent shell glistening in the sunlight.
“I don’t get it?” Elvis said. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a beetle,” Bower replied.
“I know it’s a beetle, but what’s a beetle doing in space?”
Bower heard his reply, but his words didn’t register. She ran her hand over the other pinpricks of light. She watched with childlike amazement as the image of various beetles appeared above each of the fine pinpricks of light. The beetles varied in size and shape, their colors, the textures on their shells, and the length of their legs, but the variation was ordered. If she moved in one direction, the beetles changed in coloration while their shells slowly elongated.
Bower was fascinated by the beauty before her. Hints of turquoise gave way to scarlet red, shades of orange and yellow. The specimens were ordered, clustered together on various related twigs and branches.
As her hand left each section, the beetles there disappeared from sight, returning to pinpricks of white light.
Bower found she was neutrally buoyant, weightless. Reaching out, she could propel herself by pulling on the stiff structure. As she skimmed slowly along the surface of the tree, barely half a foot away from the glowing lights, beetles continued to appear before her. Their abdomens would swell in one direction, while their mandibles and antennae would increase in another, and always with an astonishing variety of color. For her, it was as though the insects had been dipped in a rainbow.
Elvis came up beside her as she examined one of the beetles in detail.
Bower found that if she worked with her hands she could enlarge, rotate and manipulate the three-dimensional image before her. Zooming in, she found the view before her continued to expand. She was able to zero in on a single strand of hair on the head, and from that point, closed in on the insect’s compound eye.
“As freaky as that is,” Elvis began, “it doesn’t look out of place here.”
Bower moved closer, and the hundreds of segments within the eye slowly increased in size until she had focused on just one dark panel.
Bower was smiling like a kid on Christmas day as she said, “I think I understand what we’re looking at here.”
Elvis was quiet.
She was sure he was itching to ask her to explain further, but, like her, he was in awe of the view around them. Within seconds, they were at the resolution of an electron microscope, and still she could zoom further, constantly plunging her hand in close to the point of focus and then slowly drawing back. What had looked like the smooth, curving outer wall of a single eye segment now looked ragged and pitted, like the surface of the Moon.
Bower zoomed still closer.
Slowly, cells came into view, and then cilia on the cell walls along with a clearly defined nucleus within. There were ribosomes, mitochondria, lysomes, all the various elements she remembered from her university days. And, coiled up in the nucleus, there were chromosomes. Moving closer, the tightly wound double helix was visible, as were the individual nucleic acids linked in lumpy pairs, forming rungs on the ladder of life.