As her altitude fell and her forward momentum slowed, Bower turned to land on her feet. She found herself reaching for the ground but not feeling it as she slowed to a pace no quicker than a light walk, drifting just inches from the platform. Finally, her feet touched gently on the ground. Sand crunched beneath her boots.
The three creatures that were once Stella wheeled around the edge of the platform some thirty or forty feet away. Their behavior was erratic, as was that of the crowd before them. Bower couldn’t help but wonder if they were appealing to the vast alien audience, telling them something about their harrowing escape from Earth.
After several minutes, they returned to her and Elvis and spoke as the crowd settled.
“You.”
“…Must.”
“……Speak.”
Elvis looked at Bower. She wasn’t sure what these creatures wanted them to say, and she felt a little cheated that Elvis had looked at her before she could look to him. Somehow, she’d been volunteered.
Bower raised her hand, hoping a flat palm was a universal gesture of openness and friendship, although she doubted that kind of body language extended beyond Earth.
There was considerable noise within the stadium, and Bower doubted her voice would be heard.
Thousands of alien creatures thronged the tiered platforms enclosing them, their fronds waving, slapping against each other and the ground as they moved around.
“Ah, hi.”
Bower cringed, but she took solace in the fact no one could hear her.
In that instant, the amphitheater fell deathly silent.
A blinding light shone down upon them as darkness descended on the stadium. Bower covered her eyes, struggling to adjust to the influx of light. She squinted, barely able to see Elvis less than a couple of feet from her. In that moment, the pitch-black darkness beyond the light seemed to stretch on into eternity.
She turned, but couldn’t see anything beyond the small halo of light surrounding the two of them. It was as though reality had dissolved, leaving them isolated.
A voice spoke, uttering one word.
“Why?”
The voice was male. For the first time, this wasn’t Bower’s voice repeated back to her. That one word echoed throughout the stadium, having come from all around them.
Elvis turned through three hundred and sixty degrees, half-crouching as he did so, as though he felt threatened. Bower felt it too. The tension in the air was unbearable.
“Why?” she repeated softly, aware the acoustics within the amphitheater were carrying her voice. Honestly, she felt this was a question these alien creatures should be answering. She wasn’t sure what they wanted to hear from her. One word could not be considered a sentence, let alone a question, while hers were the only actions she could speak to, so she cleared her throat and spoke with measured deliberation.
“We were trapped, captured. We had to escape.”
The silence within the stadium was eerie. Bower felt she had to speak, if only to break through the haunting quiet.
“We were imprisoned with your pilot.”
Was that it? Was that what they wanted to hear? Did they want to know what motivated her to help Stella? Even with Elvis standing just a few feet away, Bower felt alone, vulnerable. She felt as though the white light shining down upon them passed straight through her, as though this alien species was sitting in judgment of her.
“Your pilot killed our friend, but I knew… I knew there had to be more… I couldn’t believe she meant us harm… I couldn’t believe you had come all this way to destroy life…”
Bower paused, wondering how much they had understood.
“Why?”
Although it was just one word, the tone was different. A woman had spoken.
Bower was confused. She needed more context. A single word was not enough. They wanted her to explain herself, but she didn’t understand why she needed to. And there was no interest in how, no interest in what she and Elvis had gone through. Motive and intent were the only priority.
“Why did I help your pilot? Because that’s what it means to be intelligent. Anything less would have been wrong. Sure, I was frightened. I was afraid.”
Elvis spoke up.
“Fear makes people do stupid things, but we knew we had to help your pilot.”
Pilot or pilots? Was that an accurate description of the three Stellas? Did the term pilot translate? Bower wasn’t sure.
“War.”
Bower swallowed. At the very least, they were moving away from interrogatives and on to nouns, but she’d have preferred a noun that wasn’t so pregnant with meaning. She wanted a sentence, a conversation, a discussion.
“We were at war,” Elvis said. “You must understand war, the clash and conflict that follows power. But war is not our default. The war in Malawi was forced on us.”
Elvis paused. Bower could see he was looking for a response but none came.
“To have not gone to war would have been to give in to those who would abuse their power over others. War is never symmetrical. The strong prey on the weak. We chose to stand up against that wrong.”
Bower held her hand out, signaling for Elvis to stop. He may not have felt it, but she thought they were asking why humanity had waged war against them. She doubted they cared for Malawi.
For Bower, the terrifying thing about standing there in the light was the implication of the darkness. The pitch black beyond tormented her. She wanted to see them, to observe this alien congress as it made its deliberation, but instead she faced the cold night. For humanity, black had always represented death, but why? Darkness held the unknown. Darkness was beyond sight. Darkness was beyond control.
Stella and her kind were out there in the darkness. They weren’t dumb. They clearly understood English and could communicate, and yet they chose to get her and Elvis talking. Bower couldn’t shake the feeling her words were being weighed carefully, with judicious precision.
Elvis must have sensed that too, as he continued softly, saying. “When you arrived, we mistook your floaters for an invasion fleet, for an act of aggression, but that was a mistake.”
“Peace,” echoed out from the darkness.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Bower snapped, surprising herself. She wanted to see them, to address them in person and not from this prison of light. She slowed herself down, saying, “We heard you, but we did not believe you. We were afraid.”
She swallowed the lump in her throat. The thought of speaking on behalf of humanity as a whole intimidated her. The pressure bore down on her like a lead weight.
“You must have seen the hornets,” she began, pointing out into the darkness, gesturing toward where she imagined the tree of lights stood. “For you, arriving on Earth must have been like knocking over a hornet’s nest.
“All of life on Earth is hostile. Life fights to survive, surely that is the same elsewhere.”
The silence that followed her statement seemed to condemn her.
“But now we understand,” she said. “We’ve seen the tree of life. Your ship is one of discovery, a research vessel. We have had many such vessels ourselves. From the Santa Maria to the HMS Endeavor and the Beagle, we too have explored in peace. We too have sought to learn, to explore, to understand.”
A dark shape moved on the edge of her vision, staying in the shadows. Bower squinted, making out the silhouette of a man standing just outside the light.
“They are endemic, diseased,” the man began, speaking with a neutral English accent, one she couldn’t place. “They war against themselves, they decimate their own planet. They are barbarians, base and brute, to be culled for the better of all.”