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Mothwing

Forty-five

Jeremy stood on a slight rise in the middle of a large meadow facing a distant wall of forest. He stood there and then he sat there for hours on end, immersed in the primal beauty of his environment. Myla finally joined him and sat at his side.

"Where's Jeep?" he asked.

"I don't think she likes the light out here. Dikki says she favors a human environment, but I think that's just to stay close to me. She adjusts the lighting to suit herself, though. As you’ve noticed."

"So I've noticed. How does she do that?"

Myla no longer considered it a major mystery. "The lights malfunction. It has something to do with quantum probability. I think it has more to do with accessing unlikely probabilities rather than actually making anything happen. She has a rapport with us and just drags us along with the events that work in her favor."

"How do you know it's a she?"

"It's just an impression I get. It hardly matters.”

It does matter, Jeremy was thinking to himself.  You know way more than you should.

"She doesn't bother you at all,” he commented.

"She's a very special being, Jeremy. A very powerful being. I'm in awe of her."

Jeremy looked away and fell silent.

"You like it here," Myla said, electing for a change in subject.

He gave a willing nod of agreement. "This is what Earth was like. The plants even use chlorophyll for photosynthesis. That's not all that common, you know."

"No, I didn't know."

"I could never imagine what Earth looked like, or felt like. I’ll never have to try again.”

"Did you do the right thing coming with me?"

He laughed. “It’s worked out great so far. Too bad we can’t just stay here. This place is what human beings were made for, metaphorically speaking."

"Then you do understand. I didn't think you ever would."

"But it's not what you want, Myla. It’s what you wanted when it was important to you to be a Nat.” He gestured with a nod to the sky. "You're at home out there with the likes of Dikki and Jeep and the aliens. You outgrew the both of us.”

Myla scooted closer to the boy. "Jeremy, when this all started, I put away that the part of myself that had no reason to think she was ever going to be more than a girl of twelve standard years. I'll keep her exactly the way she was forever. It's the only part of me that's important, or for real. I can bring her out for special occasions, wear her almost like clothing, and forget everything else. When I'm doing that, I promise you, I'm the same as I always was."

"You'll always be twelve years old, Myla. If we were marooned on this world, I'd die of old age, barring accident or disease. You'll be a twelve-year-old girl a thousand years from now."

Myla thought far ahead and sorted through bizarre possibilities that would have frightened Jeremy. "Let's go walk in the forest and see what kind of things live here. I don't think we're going to be here for very long, and we may never come back this way again. This is most certainly not Jeep's home."

Jeremy was appalled by the thought. "Do you really think Jeep knows her way home? Do you have any idea of the distance she's traveled, Myla? We detected her entering the far side of the galaxy, eighty thousand light-years distant. We may be ten billion light-years beyond that by now. And you're telling me that she knows where to go from here?"

"Wanna bet on it?"

He shook his head, unnerved by the thought. Rising to his feet, he reached for her hand. "Let's go see what lives here."

They stroll in silence across he meadow of aromatic grasses rippling in a breeze. Jeremy balked approaching the gloom of the forest. "We might run across a few things that bite."

"If anything dares, we'll start a tooth collection."

Like most Earth-type worlds, they encountered creatures that ran, slithered, and flew, most of the wildlife small and shy, darting into the underbrush or the tree canopies when disturbed. They saw brightly colored herbivores grazing in open plains and gliders of even greater size passing overhead through breaks in what passed for trees. They returned to the vicinity of the skiff toward nightfall and spend another hour on the crown of the hill studying the curiously dark sky scattered with a few bright, close stars and the distant smudge of a galaxy.

"What's that?"

Jeremy pointed. Myla studied a patch of fuzzy starlight like an opening through a dark cloud into a dense region of stars. She had seen no such object during their approach. The patch of starlight had to be a distant cluster they had missed, although it didn't look like one, and she was certain they had missed nothing earlier.

Myla led the way back to the skiff and put the view on a screen. Jeep rose slowly to her feet from a corner of the cabin and joined her and Jeremy.

It looked like a tear in space affording a view of another part of the universe. "I've never seen anything like it," Jeremy said.

Myla glanced back Jeep and relaxed with an overpowering sense of finality that gave her goose bumps. "It’s the way home," she said.

Jeremy chuckled a nervous, total lack of confidence in her assessment. “Yeah, right.”

"Myla," Dikki announced as a voice among her own thoughts. "Gorn is entering the atmosphere. It should be within visual range shortly."

"Why, what's happening?"

"Unknown."

Myla relayed the message to Jeremy. "Gorn said he was going to take up residence here. According to Dikki, his ship is entering atmosphere now."

Jeremy ran outside to see for himself. He turned slowly and finally pointed to a glow on the horizon. "There it is."

A white fireball rolled in deathly silence through the upper atmosphere. The vessel decelerated, then seemed to break up and become a trail of glimmering material arcing across the vault of the heavens.

"Unknown biological contamination detected," Dikki advised.

Myla grabbed Jeremy's hand. "Let's get inside. Gorn’s biochemistry was pretty weird. It may not be safe.”

Once safely sealed aboard the small craft, Dikki monitored the environment and kept Myla updated. Myla relayed the information to Jeremy. "I don't know what kind of life form it might be, but Dikki says it resembles a bacterial mist. I’m thinking spores."

Jeep kept her eyes on the screens as well, taking an unusual interest in the arrival of the entity who had chased her halfway across the universe. When dawn rose on the landscape outside, Myla scanned the surrounding terrain on the monitors. She paused the camera. "There. That's the same thing I saw aboard the alien craft."

The growth stood the size of a man, a jumble of twisted shapes in bands of pale color. Others were visible in the distance like mushrooms that had sprang from the earth in the dew of a cool dawn.

"Join me," Gorn's voice reverberated among her thoughts.

"We've been invited outside," Myla relayed to Jeremy with a nervous grin. "He wants us to join him."

Jeremy balked at the thought. "No thanks."

"Dikki, tell Gorn that Jeep is ready to move on, but thanks for the invitation."

A bird alighted on the alien creature and then flew off unharmed. "I don't think it's going to have a detrimental impact here," Myla commented, knowing Jeremy would be concerned.

"Let's don't stick around to find out,” Jeremy said. His hands were shaking. “Maybe Jeep's people have the navigational coordinates to get us back home."

Without further comment, Myla took the skiff streaking back to the courier. Once aboard the larger vessel, it took hours to reach the astronomical anomaly. From a closer perspective it looked even more like a rent in the darkness through which glowed a dense expanse of stars.

"If we go through,” Myla announced as their view of a distant universe began to fill their screens, “we’ll never find our way back. Last chance to settle for good ‘ol Gorn.”

Jeremy took her hand and managed a brave smile. "I’ll pass. Go for it."

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