In
Space Oddity
Episode 03
There was a modestly sized, modestly secret alien spaceport in the outskirts of Davenport, Illinois. Much like with the Milwaukee bazaar, its secrecy was maintained through a combination of arrogance, laziness and lots of blind luck. Only two barriers separated the humans of Davenport from their alien neighbors, and one of those barriers was just a young unarmed Vetrefzklan who would politely ask you if you were there for the spaceport. And he was only playing gatekeeper out of the kindness of his reptilian heart.
Within the port, a diverse array of alien ships, each one more colorful than the last, awaited their turn to take off. The Milwaukee merchants were halfway through their collective abandonment of the planet, although many had had no choice but to leave their wares behind. Most ships were not big enough to carry big loads on top of several different sentient species, each with its own unique life support needs.
"I can't believe this has all been happening right under our noses", said Jake, clearly thinking aloud. Gabriel had to smile at the amazement in his voice, and affectionately held the other man's hand a little tighter. "I mean... an entire alien community in the Midwest. With how much stuff gets leaked about everything, you'd think someone would have noticed it."
"Another cosmomancer told me once that it's actually very common", said Gabriel. "She said that most worlds aren't really normal enough that their inhabitants would immediately notice something like this. You know… kinda like how you sometimes don’t see some of the crazy and over the top stuff that happens in a drag show because everyone in there is being at least a bit sickening."
“Dude, you’ve literally been to one drag show in your entire life.”
“One Earth drag show.”
Jake gave him a puzzled look, and for a second seemed to seriously consider asking him more, but ultimately gave up and just went along with it.
Kurrenj Toh, the Graurra merchant, was saying her goodbyes to her fellow merchants and giving her visibly nervous animals some reassuring headpats before they were loaded onto the bloated-looking violet and green freighter that would take her to her home system. The little Thorian Thrasher was not among them.
In fact, the little Thorian Thrasher was being held in Jake's free arm, and appeared quite happy about it. Which really put a damper on Gabriel’s stubborn commitment to refuse to think of the alien creature as ‘cute’ and ‘cuddly’.
The last of the animals gone, Kurrenj Toh turned back to the two humans, her antennae twitching. “We must truly live in a strange cosmic moment. It has been long since I last saw so many of us move in unison in peacetime.”
She paused, pensive.
“Or perhaps it is just your planet. Some toxin in its atmosphere. You should look into that.”
“Well, climate change…” Gabriel started and immediately trailed off.
"You must know something about my buyer, Andromedan", said Kurrenj Toh. "The buyer was human.”
“‘Human’ human or ‘Vobruuf disguised as human’ human?”
“Most Vobruufs are rather unsociable…”
“True.”
“So definitely the former”, said the Graurra. “He came to me, was very friendly, and described what I knew to be a Thorian Thrasher. He then asked if I knew what it was and where he could acquire one."
"If he didn't know what a Thorian Thrasher was, how did he know what it looked like?" Asked Gabriel. "Did he tell you?"
"He showed me some footage", answered the Graurra. "Apparently, during one of your planet's many meta-human incidents, someone saw and recorded one. I easily recognized that beautiful..."
The creature in Jake's arm gurgled rather loud and disgustingly, and the Graurra aborted her effort to compliment the species. She just stared at it for a moment, her eyes looking a bit haunted, then returned her attention to the young cosmomancer.
"Anyway, he promised to pay with genetic samples of some near-extinct Earth species", said Kurrenj Toh. “Which was an extremely generous offer. You would not believe how enthusiastic some buyers in Athaloc and Myllej are about cloning snow leopards and pandas. And good genetic samples of Earth species are a lot more rare in the Milky Way than Thorian Thrashers.”
Gabriel looked at the Thorian Thrasher, and it looked back at him with eyes that were remarkably expressive, although he had a hard time understanding what exactly they were trying to express. Hopefully a puppy-like tenderness, although they were more likely pondering how edible cosmomancers were.
"Do you have that footage?"
“No, I do not.”
“And your buyer’s name?”
"I would argue that his name is irrelevant, since he is dead", said Kurrenj Toh. “I do know the name of his employer, however."
Dead silence, except for the hesitant lift off of a smaller, rounder freighter nearby. One big problem with setting up a semi-clandestine bazaar in a world without a sizeable space flight industry was that you had to settle for subpar, second-hand freighters with no decent maintenance or spare parts within a light year.
“I’m sorry, but are you trying to build suspense?”
The Graurra struggled with the buttons on her speaking device, antennae twitching with annoyance. A crackling that was way too loud preceded the return of her voice.
“Apologies. A malfunction.”
“Oh.”
“I was trying to say ‘Poseidon Energy’.”
"I don't know what that is."
Jake spoke up, to Gabriel's surprise. "I know what that is. I've heard of them."
"It sounds like a corporation", said Gabriel.
"It is", said Jake. “They offered me an unpaid internship once. I turned them down because… you know… working without pay is… bad.”
Kurrenj Toh made something like a chuckling sound. “I like this fellow human of yours, cosmomancer.”
Beside them, another freighter tried to lift off, hovered uncertainly a few feet over the ground for a couple seconds, then crashed as its engines failed rather noisily, colorful sparks filling the air around it. They paid no mind to it. It was the fifth crash so far.
"So, Poseidon Energy."
"They were fairly active buyers in many of our bazaars on Earth", said Kurrenj Toh. "Mostly interested in scanners and laboratory equipment. We all found it a bit odd that they did not jump straight to weaponry or artificial intelligence, but maybe we were just being prejudiced."
"Well, yes, that was very prejudiced of you", said Gabriel without really frowning.
He offered a hug, which the Graurra accepted, because most Graurra loved hugs, and the two parted ways.
Then the Andromedan stood, with Jake by his side, watching as the last few ships of the Milwaukee merchants left Earth’s atmosphere in a slow, mostly discrete, slightly accidented procession. The spaceport was left almost completely barren, a vast cave barely concealed under the grassy field, illuminated only by the stars and the moon.
“So… is this a normal day for you?” Asked Jake.
Gabriel smiled. “I honestly don’t know.”
In the following weeks, Gabriel found that he still did not know what, if anything in his life, was ‘normal’. The aftermath of the Hounds’ attacks had exacerbated that uncertain sensation, the world around him still reeling in ways both great and small, even as the meta-humans and heroes resumed their struggles. The Andromedan found himself strangely isolated in the relative peace, having no contact with his fellow vigilantes or with his fellow cosmomancers. Neither Takol nor the Delphinian showed up, and it seemed as if the rest had taken the recommendation to lay low quite seriously. All he had left to do was deal with whatever strange and potentially dangerous cosmic phenomena turned up within the Earth’s atmosphere, of which there were very few.
His Google searches on Poseidon Energy yielded little information, and most of it disappointing. The only noteworthy thing about them was their tendency to hoard prodigious scientists from top American universities, like a nerdy kind of dragon, producing a lot of research available to the public, but not enough to justify that much investment. They spent very little on lobbying politicians and whatever competition they had was suspiciously uninterested in even acknowledging their existence. In short, they screamed inconspicuous and were, therefor, a bit conspicuous.
By the second week, he realized that he had procrastinated on sending the little Thorian Thrasher back to its homeworld. It remained with him and Jake, constantly demanding cuddles from Jake and occasionally allowing Gabriel to pat it on its gooey head. It was the world’s most grotesque yet well-behaved pet, even if neither of them ever addressed it.
It was a month of long swims, quiet romantic nights in the dorm rooms, visits to his family in Vermont, newly discovered Prince albums, and a couple skirmishes with sapient being traffickers from Cagolon Bia. And every day of that month, the Andromedan was keenly aware of the fact that his world had suddenly gotten smaller, more intimate, and he did not feel entirely at home in it.
Maybe Claudia was right.
“Well, that was certainly an unexpected resolution”, said a distractingly half-nude Takol, leaning his wet, crimson-skinned, broad-shouldered body on the porcelain-like railing of the balcony over the artificial ponds. “Not the part where you were able to end the whole mess without any casualties on either side, of course. Cosmomancers are usually very good at that. But the fact that a pandimensional being was willing to speak to you in particular...”
“You also thought that was strange, then?” Asked Gabriel, floating on his back in the pond directly below, just letting the alien minerals in the purple-tinted water soothe his strained muscles.
“I mean… everyone knows that the motivations and thinking processes of such beings are incomprehensible, but still.”
“Maybe I was the first human they ever met?” Gabriel speculated out loud, swaying his arms a bit to avoid drifting away.
“Sounds plausible.”
“Yeah.”
“Still… you did good. Very good, in fact. You were compassionate, level-headed, but firm. And it worked out.”
“Thanks, dude.”
“‘Dude’, he calls me”, chuckled the alien man, showing off his very sharp teeth.
It had taken the Andromedan and his fellow cosmomancers a few days to find their way back from dark space, back to the Dream Unchained. The fleet that greeted them was not too different from the one they had left behind many weeks before. It was a vast, colorful collection of mismatched space ships, more colorful than any other in the known universe, sailing through the cosmic oceans in no particular direction.
It had the looks of a haphazardly formed armada made from leftover or repurposed ships from every corner of the Milky Way and Andromeda, without a singular, unifying design to its whole. And it was, as far as the Andromedan was concerned, one of the most beautiful, comforting sights he had ever seen outside of Earth.
Around him, Gabriel heard other cosmomancers swimming and chatting, enjoying the calm between storms. Outside, a myriad adventures and perils awaited them. There were wars to fight, disasters to avert, stranded ships to save and many, many more things. Gabriel had quickly discovered that these moments, where they could all just mingle and relax and almost pretend that there were just space wizards having a bit of harmless fun in the comfort of their fleet, would always be short.
He heard a splashing sound, felt ripples in the water, and then Takol was walking beside him, knee-deep in the water, a crown of Micafian flowers on his tentacled head. He really liked wearing those. They smiled at each other, although there was an understanding in Takol’s eyes that said a bit more.
“What is it?” Asked the alien man.
“What do you mean?”
“Humans are very expressive. You are thinking about something. It's bothering you.”
“Well, maybe not bothering me, but…”
"Do you want to go home?"
Gabriel said nothing, even as the other lied down beside him.
“Maybe stay on Earth for a while, spend time with other humans, get accustomed to the normal human lifestyle again?”
“That’s the thing”, said Gabriel, closing his eyes for a moment, taking a few breaths. “I kind of don’t want to, and that worries me.”
“Well, it’s not that uncommon…”
“But Claudia doesn’t feel the same way”, Gabriel interrupted his friend. “She’s still one of us, yes, but she's also fighting for Earth, first and foremost. She’s always there when they need her. And I wonder if maybe the difference is that I’m not completely… human anymore. Mentally, I mean.”
He sighed.
“Now and then I look at myself and feel this question in the back of my head, like a headache”, he said, getting a handful of water to drip on his face and untied hair and rub it in, fingers running through his soaked locks. “What part of me is going to define what sort of Andromedan I am? Because a part of me feels at home here, and another part of me doesn’t want that. That other part of me wants his daily life to be swimming in an olympic pool on Earth and going to church on Sundays and eating human food and just… I don’t know… catching common, human criminals...”
“You dork.”
Gabriel scoffed and sat up, mouth gaping slightly with bafflement.
“Seriously?”
“You’re overthinking it. Hence, ‘dork’.”
“What about you, then? How did you figure out your place in all this?”
“Oh, it was easy for me”, responded the former Andromedan. “I mean, my home planet was destroyed shortly after I hatched, so there’s really no dilemma for me there. The entire cosmos is my home now.”
“What if it hadn’t been destroyed?”
“I’d have probably chosen this life anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because I believe my life has an essential meaning, and that meaning is what I have right here”, said Takol. “I like helping people. Always have. And I have the power to do it in ways few others can. I don’t think any external factor could have changed that.”
Gabriel said nothing, but looked down, expressionless, until a chuckle escaped his lips. And then he grinned at the other, eyebrow arched playfully.
“Aren’t you the same guy who tried to teach me how to pick up a Toblunc girl, knowing that I had a girlfriend back on Earth?”
Takol threw his hands up in the air.
“Not my fault that you squandered the most valuable life advice I’ve ever delivered by being stubbornly monogamous.”
The video was barely an hour old, but it had already gone viral. Even after everything that had transpired the month before, and in the years before that, people did not, could not, treat these things as normal, as just another part of their human lives.
At first the sound was subtle, as was the sight that accompanied it. An inhuman humming, followed by a constellation of weak lights in the darkness. It was not large or bombastic. But in a way, the smallness of it made it all the more disturbing, because it was everywhere. Wherever the phone’s camera turned, there it was: a thick, writhing combination of darkness and light that distorted the space around it, and its distortions resonated in every direction. Its form stretched high into the night sky, from where it had come. And it was alive.
Lake Champlain was unrecognizable under the being’s form, its gravitational power distorting everything around it. Water had crystallized and formed a ring around the being’s most solid and cohesive part, joined by rings of dust, rocks and trees. The very city of Burlington was straining under the force of the cosmic being’s pull, its structures refusing to yield and abandon the laws of nature, the physics that had always been a part of it. The people of Burlington were outside their homes, most of them trying to get as far away as possible from the lake, while others dared to get closer. The being had hurt no one yet.
The military’s drones arrived at the scene fast and, when they struck, they were destroyed even quicker. Manned reinforcements would take longer to get there. If any meta-humans were planning to help, they were still far away.
The Andromedan appeared soundlessly, his purple and black armor exuding a cosmic iridescence as he came through a spherical rift in space, his body floating in the low gravity surrounding the being. And the reaction from the being was immediate.
"Hey!" He shouted at it. "Whoever you are, don't move any further. You're endangering innocent people."
The black and golden mass of tentacles, rock and swirling dust acted defensively, its matter collapsing on itself in a display of cosmic power that could only be described as a tantrum. A tantrum that further distorted the space several miles around, and which involved no small amount of bursts of dark energy, dark matter and some mysterious stuff that omnipotent beings from dark space seemed to always carry with them wherever they went. The sound was a deafening humming and droning, and it felt almost melodious, but not in a way that reminded the human of any song from his homeworld.
“Wait, do you know me?” Asked the Andromedan, a puzzled look on his face. His voice was drowned out, yet it was not unheard. “Why are you here?”
The response was a trail of light that was not luminous in a way that any human could comprehend, coursing through space like tendrils of ink or dust in the clear waters of a cosmic ocean. That trail disintegrated all it touched. It was an act of hostility, one that was both fearful and intimidating, which confirmed the human cosmomancer’s suspicions.
The Andromedan said nothing more for a while. Instead, he gave himself over to impulse, and his body moved through the darkness, coming closer to the being. And when he was finally close enough, he touched it. It felt like touching sand or a thick liquid or a metal, changing states and compositions so constantly and so rapidly that it was almost impossible to distinguish them. Little specks of light, like fireflies, embraced his hand, coursed through his fingers, and they were strangely cold.
The gesture seemed to calm it. Its strange motions slowed. He thought of the people of Burlington, of his family there, and hoped that he could deescalate whatever this situation was.
He made a little cooing noise, almost involuntarily, and that seemed to help even more.
“Hey, it’s alright”, he whispered tenderly, the sound rather muffled by the peculiar composition of the air, if one could still call it that, around him. “Where did you come from? How did you get here?”
The creature spoke, but without using any words. Gabriel was not entirely certain that it even had the capacity to verbalize. And yet it spoke. Ideas seeped into his mind, simple and clearer than any combination of sounds. The creature had a name, although not one that Gabriel could pronounce (and he had gotten very good at pronouncing non-human names), and preferred ‘they’ pronouns, or at least their species’ equivalent of them.
They also found the Andromedan’s hair color rather quaint.
“Thanks”, said Gabriel, his gentle ministrations of the being’s mysterious matter uninterrupted. Gabriel had never read the works of Lovecraft, but he knew an eldritch-like alien when he saw one. Or rather, he knew one when he noticed that their appearance was incomprehensible, outside of the reach of his human imagination or his human senses. Being a cosmomancer meant meeting the occasional one. It also meant that he got to learn unexpected things about them, like the fact that most of them were mostly benevolent, if a bit lacking in empathy, but also very temperamental and easy to provoke. This one, it seemed, was not too different.
They showed him a corner of dark space, beyond the reach of most space-faring species, where it had dwelled for millions of years. They showed him the peace of that solitary void, where they nourished themself on cosmic energies and stray matter. And they showed him a long-dead cosmomancer, the second Andromedan, and the beacon she had left behind. A beacon, made from a fragment of the Andromedan’s armor, which led to…
“Me”, said Gabriel. “My armor.”
They had come for him. He had been visiting his family, and the being had merely followed the connection between that beacon and his armor.
“Okay… but why?”
The being showed him nothing in response. He felt its emotions, however, and saw how those emotions became further distortions in the space around them. Burlington was still in danger.
“I need to know”, he said as he gazed into what he assumed was the being’s equivalent of an eye: a huge, miles-deep hole in its mass that was filled with liquid, iridescent light.
After a breathless wait, a clear answer finally came.
The Andromedan’s bordeaux eyes widened, and he ripped his hand away from the being’s hold. He opened his mouth to say something, but the words remained buried inside him. He struggled, shook his head, and took a hold of the anchor in one of his pockets, using it to help him stabilize the space around them.
“You’re... scared?”
