Chapter 53
The man who had stepped off the ship took a few more steps forward.
“Hello!” he called out a bit louder, and quite a bit slower, than the first attempt. “I hope you can understand me. My name is Matthew Jackson. This is a ship that came from planet Earth. We think you also came from Earth. We want to introduce ourselves, share our background with you and you with us, and learn how to get by on this planet. Hablo un poco de español. ¿Hablas español?”
Marvella’s growls were starting to get louder. Jim held up a finger to his lips, hoping the animal would understand.
“No, I don’t speak Spanish,” Jim called out, still standing behind the tree. “But I do understand you. In fact, I’m surprised to hear your accent, since I thought most of the people on this planet came from someplace besides Texas.”
“Well, I don’t mean to disappoint you, but I’m not from Texas,” the man standing next to the ship called out. “But it’s close. I grew up in the Oklahoma Panhandle. Texhoma, as a matter of fact. So, I guess some might consider you partially right. What’s your name, friend?”
“Texhoma, Oklahoma, eh?” answered Jim. “I’ve actually heard of it, but never had a chance to visit. How did you end up here?”
“It’s sort of a long story, actually,” Matthew Jackson replied. “Let’s just say I was in the wrong space at the right time, hitched a ride to get me out of a jam, and here I am.”
“And where, exactly, is ‘here’, as far as you are concerned,” Jim asked.
“Same place where you are,” Matthew answered. “Look, I can tell you aren’t so sure about me since you still haven’t told me your name, let alone shown your face. I don’t have a weapon. The ship doesn’t have weapons. And I don’t think killing the first human we encounter is the best way to get to know the neighbors. If you don’t trust me, feel free to run off. But if you’d like to keep the conversation going, do us both a favor and step out and say hello face-to-face and we can get to more interesting parts of our stories.”
Jim took a deep breath, looked at Marvella, and shrugged. “One of us has to be a bit more trusting and I’m guessing it won’t be you,” he said in a hushed voice to his animal companion. “So, here goes nothing.”
The former farmer stepped out from behind the tree and took a step into the clearing. “My name is Jim. James Kauffman. I grew up and lived in Seneca, Kansas all my life.”
Marvella started to hiss-bark from behind him.
“Hello, Jim,” Matthew said, looking past him warily. “Sounds like someone, or something else is with you.”
“Yes, that is my new friend. I’m calling her Marvella. She’s one of the animals on this planet,” Jim said.
“Amazing!” Matthew exclaimed. “You’ve been here long enough to begin to domesticate the local critters. How long did it take?”
“About a half-hour, I would guess,” Jim said. “But I don’t have a clock or a commblock to keep accurate time, so I’m not sure.”
“No commblock? How do you keep in touch with the other humans? I’m guessing there are other humans here, aren’t there? How many people came here with you? How long have you been here? How far are we from your community? And why didn’t others come here with you?” Matthew rattled off.
“You have a lot of questions,” Jim replied. “I’ve got a few of my own I suppose. How about we share information? You can start by letting me know where this ship came from on Earth and when you left there, and I’ll share the same.”
Matthew Jackson chuckled. “Fair enough, Jim, fair enough. I suppose you need some trust built up before blabbering everything there is to know about you to a stranger that just barges into your home here. Tell you what. Why don’t you come on board and meet the others that came here with me, and they can help fill in all those details.”
“How about they come out here?” Jim suggested.
“They will, eventually, but they are still running analysis of the location and getting our equipment ready,” Matthew explained. “Besides, they are a bit like you, I guess. Trust is hard to come by when the stakes are so big. So if you join me inside, I’m sure that will go a long way. And I know they said they were getting something ready for lunch, so you are welcome to join us.”
Jim looked at the man and at the ship he had come from. Marvella was behind him, making low gruffing sounds.
Jim shrugged his shoulders. “What the heck. I came this far, so I might as well go all in. Just a second,” he said, turning around and going back behind the tree to gather his supplies. “Listen, Marvella, I know you don’t understand my words yet, but you seem pretty smart on picking up clues. I’m just going to check out what’s in there and I’ll be out before mid-afternoon. Stick around or take off as you wish. But I appreciate you staying with me on my walk here, and hope to see you around.”
He reached toward the animal, who pulled back slightly but didn’t retreat, and then let Jim scratch it behind the ear.
As Jim walked towards the ship with his goods, he could hear the flying fox making some high-pitched barking sounds.
“What kind of animal is that?” Matthew asked as Jim approached the ship.
“I’m not exactly sure,” Jim said, “but I’ve seen a few around, so if they are all like her, we might be able to get along pretty well.”
Matthew extended his hand when Jim came close. “I’m hoping the same can be said about us,” he said. “I mean about being able to get along pretty well. Glad to meet you Jim! Come on board and let me introduce you to the others.”
Jim shook the man’s hand and followed him thru the open door and inside the vehicle.
The first thing that became apparent is that Jim had to duck to get inside. Then he had to walk slightly bent over to not hit his head on the ceiling.
“Kind of a small entryway,” he noted.
“Oh, right. You get used to it,” Matthew replied as the door leading out closed behind them. “The others are down the hall here. Watch your head!”
After a few more meters, Jim could see the hallway opening into a larger room, but couldn’t see well into it because of his crouched walking. When he followed Matthew in, he looked around and stopped just inside the opening, swiveling his head side to side to take in the scene.
“Hello all,” Matthew announced. “This is Jim. James Kaufmann. He’s from Kansas originally. I offered him some lunch, so I hope that’s okay.”
A person approached, and extended a hand in greeting. “Hello Jim. My name is Guglielmo Bertenzatti. Welcome to Plutopia, our temporary home. Kansas, eh? I am originally from Milano, Italy. But I think it doesn’t matter much where we came from now that we are all here, eh?”
Jim reached down to shake the man’s hand.
“I never get his name straight, so I just call him Guido,” Matthew said, squatting against a wall for support. “Anyone got those meal cubes ready yet?”
“Matthew will come up with a name for everyone. I don’t know if that’s because he is more interested in eating than learning names,” Guglielmo said.
A second person approached, pushing a container over.
“You look uncomfortable standing like that,” she said in a British accent. “Have a seat and we’ll all feel a bit more at ease.”
Jim accepted the offer, sat down and looked around the room. Not a single other person besides himself and Matthew Jackson had to crouch to avoid hitting their head on the ceiling.
The woman continued. “I’m Lea Cookson. Originally from Oxford in England. And, based on the look on your face, I’m guessing you can tell you’re not in Kansas any more.”
“Oh, I know I left Kansas a long time ago,” Jim said, looking at his host. “Plutopia, I heard? Is that what you call your ship or this planet?”
“Well, now just the ship, I suppose,” Lea responded. “It would have been the working name of the entire planet, but it looks like you got here before us so perhaps you have a name already in use?”
“I’m sure there are many,” Jim replied. “Newbegin for a few people I’m around these days. Nova is what I would say. But why Plutopia for you?”
“What year were you born, Jim?” Lea asked.
“2153,” Jim answered.
“So you might remember about twenty years ago, there was a group of people who left Earth to start a new life on a different planet. That was us,” Guglielmo shared.
“I sort of remember,” Jim noted. “Fill me in on the details.”
Guglielmo looked at Lea, who nodded her approval.
“A gentleman by the name of Devon MacLlwyn determined that Earth had a number of problems,” Guglielmo began. “First, he felt that humans were forcing the planet down a path towards ecological failure. And second, he felt that humanity didn’t have a place for those like us that didn’t buy into the plan to forget about tomorrow and didn’t fit the mold of how a so-called normal person should look or act. So he decided to sponsor a colonization trip to a new planet. He reached out to find enough people interested to join him that could start this colony. The only requirement other than needing to agree with his vision of how the new world could be organized was that the people needed to be under one and a half meters in height. That is because of the design of the ship needed to minimize mass in order to be propelled fast enough. So he collected all of us from around the world, we boarded this ship twenty years ago, and now here we are.”
“You’ve been traveling through space for twenty years?” Jim asked.
“Yes, but most of the time we were in hybersleep, so to our bodies, it was more like we aged five years – if we had been awake the whole time,” Guglielmo explained.
Jim looked down, rubbed his forehead and broke out in a big grin.
“Is the story funny? Or is it us you are laughing at?” Lea asked critically.
Jim looked up but did not stop smiling. “Neither I can assure you.”
“So, please, then. Share your joke so the rest of us can laugh as well,” Lea continued, not smiling at all.
Other people had been coming in and out of the room, pushing more containers into the space which was beginning to fill up. A few of those people paused and listened in on the conversation as it continued.
“I hope it doesn’t make you laugh, to be honest,” Jim said. “You’re not the only one full of surprises here. I’m smiling because I’m thinking about someone who could have been on your ship.”
Another person came in pushing a container on wheels and opened the top, allowing a slightly peppery smell to begin wafting through the room.
“Lunch time!” Matthew exclaimed as he rose from the floor and walked to the person pulling out small cartons. “Bless you, Miss Modupe. My stomach was starting to get a tad bit ornery just now. You’ll help keep him from interrupting the proceedings here.”
“Your stomach has already interrupted us, Mister Jackson,” Lea commented.
“Apologies, Miss Lea,” Matthew said, carrying his carton back to his spot along the wall.
“Please, Mister Kauffman, what surprise were you about to share,” Guglielmo prompted.
“I was sixteen years old when I first heard about the plans you mentioned for a ship to take a group of people and colonize a new planet,” Jim started. “I was visiting my cousin’s family in Kentucky. Cousin Betty was ten years older than me, but I had always looked up to her since I was a young child. And at that point, Betty had moved out of her parents house, had a job to support herself, and was willing to spend some money helping entertain her younger cousin who was bored of listening to his parents reminisce about days past with his aunt and uncle. We came home from a concert she took me to, and I talked about how I dreamed I could be a drummer in a rock band. She encouraged me to follow my dreams and was sincere in how she said it. I asked about what thought would be the most exciting thing to do, and she brought up a recent newscast about the announcement that guy, Devon, mentioned. I kind of laughed as I watched it since I thought she was joking. But when I looked at her face, I could see she was serious. You see, she’s short-statured also, and I could tell the idea really intrigued her. I told her she should apply, but she said she wasn’t smart enough and they wouldn’t want a country bumpkin from Kentucky anyway.”
“Now Cousin Betty was one of the smartest people I knew back then. Not just book smart, but she had more common sense than anyone. Even though we lived hundreds of miles apart, she and I talked and messaged a lot, and she talked me out of a lot of stupid things over the years. I told her she should apply and let her skills and her brainpower give them a reason to select her, but I wasn’t really that supportive of the idea. The topic came up now and then for the next couple of years, but she never applied. I thought she was smart to not go, since I figured everyone on that spaceship would die well before their ship go very far. I was wrong, Betty was right. Here you all are and now Betty is back on Earth, saying she is too old to make the trip on one of the alien ships.”
No one spoke for a moment. Then, the woman that Matthew referred to as “Miss Modupe” walked over to Jim and handed him a carton from the container she had pushed into the room.
“She sounds like she would have been an excellent companion to be with us,” Modupe said. “I hope her fortunes allow her to find a way here safely and that we may get to meet her at some point.”
“Thank you,” Jim replied. “So do I. And I wish they would let her bring my dog along. The last time I visited her a month before leaving Earth, my dog refused to leave her place when it was time to go. She said ‘You know, Jim, most dogs are smarter than most people. Perhaps Marvin is trying to tell you it’s no use to keep runnin’ around unless you’ve got something you expect to find.'”
Jim opened the carton and sniffed the contents.
“It’s a protein paste, but I hope it tastes a bit like English beef stew,” Modupe said.
“If you don’t want it, Jimbo, I’m happy to take it off your hands,” Matthew said from the wall, as he was licking his fingers to clean the sauce he had scraped from his carton.
Jim broke off a utensil from the side of the carton and forked into the meal cube. “Thank you, Miss Modupe. This smells much better than what I’ve been eating since I arrived, and I’m sure it will taste better also.”
“And how long has it been since you arrived here on this planet?” Lea asked.
“Mmm, I believe it’s been close to seven days now,” Jim said between bites.
“So almost a week?” Lea said.
“I don’t know,” Jim said. “That’s one thing I learned quickly after I landed. People here specifically avoid Earth-based measurements of time. We don’t know what the annual solar cycle is and with two moons, the lunar cycle is a bit mixed up, so why talk about months, weeks, hours or minutes if they don’t apply here. I guess it makes sense, but it takes some getting used to.”
“And the group of people who were here before you, where did they all come from?” Lea continued. “Is your village large? Is it far from here?”
“Large enough, I suppose,” Jim answered. “I couldn’t say exactly how far, but I saw your ship fly overhead yesterday morning. So with all this tech you’ve got, I’m surprised that, before you landed, you weren’t able to spot some of those villages you ask about.”
Some of those that had paused their work to listen to Jim’s story now looked nervously back and forth between Lea and Guglielmo. Then they went about their duties again.
“In the spirit of open communication, we did notice human gatherings, Mr. Kaufmann,” Guglielmo shared. “In fact, we arrived in orbit around this planet four days ago. Our probes and our ship telescopes that we were using to determine a good landing spot picked up signs of basic organized communities that we were not expecting, which was quite shocking to us, as the nano-probes that had been sent here in the decade prior to our departure from Earth reported this place to be completely void of any civilization. So to find that a life form had become that well advanced in less than thirty years required that we did a lot more investigation. There are tens-of-thousands of communities spread around the globe and we tried to find a place that was good to start our own village but sufficiently far from existing communities that we would not crowd any neighbors and they wouldn’t crowd us.”
“Tens of thousands?” Jim said, shaking his head. “I figured there would be a lot of us, but didn’t have a good idea of how many.”
“So why plop yourself down in the middle of all this if it was so unexpected?” he continued. “I mean, how do you know we are not some cannibalistic species that came here from a nearby solar system and would attempt to wipe out these strange creatures that invaded our turf? Matthew seemed trusting just to walk out of the ship like that and start calling out for me like he thought I’d reply.”
Jim looked at Matthew, who smiled, shrugged and nodded his head in Lea’s direction. Jim then looked at Guglielmo, who avoided eye contact with him, staring at Lea instead. So Jim turned to Lea.
“The probes we sent from our ship over the past two days have microphones and we could hear human languages being spoken by the people the probes were monitoring,” she said. “The chances of another batch of humanoids randomly developing multiple languages spoken on Earth was too rare, so we guessed something must have resulted in you getting here. And we tracked hundreds of ships arriving each of the past three days, dropping off nearly a thousand people each time, and leaving with no one getting on board, that we figure there must be some mass exodus happening from Earth. That’s where we are hoping you can help fill in some of the knowledge gaps we have, Jim. Why are you and the others leaving Earth and coming here? Did the environment become that bad so quickly after we left? And how is it you have tech that allows for so many people to arrive each day but you all are dropped off “as is” you might say. None of the tech that got you here is helping you get established on this planet.”
“OK, so you guessed well that we came from the same place as you,” Jim noted. “But why come down here so soon? Why not monitor things from up there for a while?”
“Because we didn’t plan to orbit this planet for any more than a day or two,” Lea answered. “The systems on the ship brought people out of hybersleep as the ship neared the planet. By the time we discovered others were already here, it was too late – everyone was already awake. We don’t have anywhere else to go, and we don’t have enough food and water to stay in orbit, so we really had no choice there. Either come down here to the planet we had committed our lives to living on or stay up there and starve in space. That was probably the easiest decision for us since we arrived. So we shared our story, Mr. Kaufmann. Tell us more about how you got here – and why?”
“I think it would be easier if you come to our village,” Jim said. “Where is your leader, Llewyn? I’m sure my friends would love to hear from him all the things you’ve learned about us, and we can share our story. Why not have him come back with me to meet my fellow colonists?”
No one answered immediately. And no one but Lea returned his gaze as he looked at the people remaining in the room.
“Devon, well, he couldn’t make it this far,” Lea responded uncertainly.
“He couldn’t make it this far?” Jim repeated. “Did he stay on the ship?”
Lea crossed her arms and stated in a much more emphatic tone. “He’s not here, Jim. He’s not with us.”
Now Jim paused, letting the words soak in.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “We had about ten percent of the people on our ship who didn’t survive the trip. I didn’t even think about it happening to you as well. My apologies for being so dense, and I’m sorry for your loss. Then perhaps you can join me in going back to the village, Lea. I’m afraid I wouldn’t do the whole story justice trying to explain it all myself.”
“That won’t be possible,” she replied, uncrossing her arms. “We have too many things to do here to get our location established. You’ll have to do your best to explain what you understand about how you got here.”
“I’m missing something I think,” Jim said. “We have so much to share about how to get by on this planet, and you’ve got things that can make a huge difference in our ability to thrive and help you as well. If you don’t want to come to my village, I’ll go there and bring some people here to meet you.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible either,” Lea said.
“OK then, I’ll just be on my way. You can come find us once you get your bags unpacked,” Jim said, standing up from his seat and then hitting his head on the ceiling. “Ow!”
“As I said, I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” Lea repeated. “We’re not yet ready to be found. Since you’re the only person our sensors are picking up in the area, we’re guessing you came here alone. Hopefully it will be long enough before anyone else comes along that we’ll have our defenses in place, as we don’t expect everyone will be as welcoming to us as you are.”
Everyone who was still paused listening to the conversation took this as a cue to get back to their previous activities.
“What do you mean, that won’t be possible?” Jim said, rubbing his head as he crouched to avoid hitting the ceiling again.
“Look, Jim, I’ve got a lot to do at the moment. I’ll be back in a few hours. Make yourself comfortable where you can. We can’t let you off the ship as that would be too risky for us. We’ll talk more when I get back.” And with that, Lea turned and left the room down a different hallway than the one Matthew and Jim entered from.
“What do you mean you can’t let me off the ship,” Jim said loudly. “Are you keeping me a prisoner?”
Matthew spoke up again. “They’re good people, Jim. They don’t do things the way I do, but they got me out of a jam I couldn’t have escaped from on my own, so I trust them to do the right thing eventually. I’d suggest relaxing a bit and we can go find Modupe to see if she can whip up anything else for us from her protein packs. I’m surprised at what she comes up with at times.”
Jim looked at Matthew. “You’re serious?” he asked. “Just like that and I’ve lost my freedom to do what I want? Is this the 1800s and I’ve been made a slave?”
“No, Jimbo. According to the on-ship computer, it’s 2092. April twenty-second, 2092, in fact,” Matthew stated.
“April twenty-second? Really?” Jim said. “Well isn’t that ironic. It’s Earth Day.”
He thought about what had happened a year ago on this day, and how he watched the alien ship leave from Seneca, taking Luna on that first voyage and causing him to start his search to find her again.
“I hate Earth Day,” Jim Kaufmann said to no one in particular.