Chapter Thirty-Three

THOUGH THE LANGUAGE barrier still remained, that simple gesture had torn down much of it. The Keplerites no longer held back, but swarmed around us, shaking our hands and speaking—well, I had no clue. Their tones and expressions conveyed friendship though.

A round of what we took to be introductions followed, with the tall man who had shaken Caspersen’s hand gesturing toward himself and repeating a word that sounded like Gat. He said it a few more times until our repetition sounded near enough that he smiled broadly, nodding. His closest companions repeated the move, each with words of their own. And then we, one by one, did the same.

It struck me that, for all we knew, they might have been planning who among them would dine on us first. And we, like a pack of imbeciles, nodded along, grinning with nervous excitement at our own doom.

In a minute, when these introductions finished, the boy stepped forward. Tall and thin, almost gangly, he had a haggard look that I assumed was because of his run-in with the cannibals. But his eyes sparkled with eagerness as he approached us, and he spoke at a rapid pace. Whatever he said, he said it with a good deal of pleasure.

Kayleigh and Caspersen made attempts to communicate with him in our language—and met with no more success than he’d had. He seemed at least to understand the congenial sentiment, though, because he peppered his confused queries with ample nods and smiles.

This non-conversation was still underway when the leader of the Keplerites, the one who—we assumed—called himself Gat, stepped forward. A collective hiss of caught breath sounded as quite suddenly he reached a hand to tug on my sleeve. “Ihnsa,” I thought he said. His expression had gone deadly serious and lost all of its jovial qualities.

He stared expectantly at me, but I had no idea what manner of response he wanted. So I resorted to, “What?”

“Nehsa,” he repeated, tapping my sleeve. It was the same word as last time, but I processed it more clearly this time. And a feeling settled on me—an impossible feeling—that I knew this word. I knew the leading in, the faint hint of a vowel couched between it, and the final syllable. I knew it…but I couldn’t place it. I glanced at my arm, where he had caught hold.

He pointed to one patch in particular on my uniform: a NASA patch. Then, I understood why the word sounded so familiar, and yet so different. He’d almost dropped the first a, and that changed the emphasis. But I was almost certain I knew what he meant all the same.

So I asked, “NASA?”

He glanced at his companions, and back at me, and said again, “Nehsa?”

“NASA,” I repeated, somewhat stupidly. I had no idea what to do with our new bit of common ground.

Gat turned again to the Keplerites with him, doing his best impression of my pronunciation. They repeated it back and seemed to find the pronunciation amusing as they laughed. Then he turned back and clapped me on the shoulder, taking my hand and shaking it heartily, saying again and again, “NASA.”

This, apparently, was the breakthrough Kayleigh needed because she exclaimed suddenly, “Gat!”

He looked up, seeming as startled as me. She approached with her hand extended, introducing herself again. “Kayleigh. I am Kayleigh.” Then, gesturing to the earth at our feet, she knelt to trace out a sentence with her finger. “We are from Earth.”

He nodded. “NASA.”

“Yes,” she agreed, turning again to the dirt. This time, she scrawled, “Can you read this?”

He glanced up at her and smiled, tracing one word beside it. “Yes.” Then he spoke slowly, “You are from Earth.” The words were almost incomprehensible to me, so altered was his pronunciation. But at this new pace, with the knowledge we really did share a language, my brain registered them.

Kayleigh, for her part, looked so overjoyed she might weep. “Yes. Yes, we are.”

Gat seemed almost as affected as she, for he burst into an effusive stream of chatter that quite bypassed my comprehension. Seeing this fail, he turned again to the dirt and brushed away their conversation so far to spell, “We are descendants of Genesis. You are welcome among us.” Then he spoke, carefully enunciating a word. “Frenz.” He nodded, smiling. Seeing the confusion on our faces, he spelled out, “Friends.”

Kayleigh repeated the word aloud, and her pronunciation seemed to amuse the Keplerites, because they mimicked it with a keen emphasis on the letter d. Gat nodded approvingly.

*

A LENGTHY CONVERSATION of sorts followed, written out in turns in the dirt between Kayleigh and Gat. While the most abundant changes to the language had transpired in the spoken form, in which almost all hard consonants and unnecessary sounds seemed to have been shed over time, the written language had evolved somewhat as well. Many of the spellings had changed to omit silent letters or hard consonants, and many words seemed either to have been dropped altogether or added. There were more than a few times when one party or the other would use a word that confounded the other.

But we made do, and in the end came to understand that these people, who called themselves the Nation, were descendants of the original Genesis crew. So, too, were our attackers, the cannibals—called by our new friends the Lava Dwellers. This appellation would later make sense but, at the time, seemed inexplicable.

The Nation lived among the trees. There, they told us, they had a great city, high enough above the cannibals to afford safety.

More importantly, Gat assured us we would be welcome among them in their city. They’d watched us make our way through the forest. They’d seen us save the boy. They’d seen us fight the cannibals. And they would be happy to share their homes with us.

The boy, we learned, was called Quess, and Gat was their leader. We discovered, too, that our eleventh-hour rescue was not so much the miracle of timing it had seemed. The Keplerites hadn’t happened upon us at precisely the right moment. On the contrary, they’d been spectators to the entire event. For what reason they had delayed, Gat didn’t specify. But judging us finally to have run our course of luck, they made the decision to come to our aid. Though neither said so directly, I had the impression this last-minute save was as much due to the influence of Quess as Gat.

For our part, we remained reticent about the details of our mission. We didn’t specify we were off the Genesis, only that our ship had come to harm in the mountains. Caspersen deemed it wiser not to reveal that we were essentially stranded on Kepler-186f, a long-forgotten remnant of the crew from which these people claimed descent. Our initial contact seemed to be going well, but it would be folly to reveal the desperation of our circumstance at such an early stage of our acquaintance. So Kayleigh exercised all the skills of a seasoned politician in giving answers at once absolutely true but simultaneously misleading.

We were from Earth; we were part of a mission to the planet, sent by NASA; we’d landed in the mountains. It was all true but also missing a key detail: we were three thousand years out of time into the bargain.

After a space, the exchange concluded, and the Keplerites turned to the trees. Gat issued a call, and suddenly great bundled rope ladders fell down from the trees all around us, unfurling as they went. They seemed to appear as if out of nothing, materializing from among the dense foliage far overhead. Our companions set to climbing these, and Gat bid us follow them.

We did as directed. When his turn came, the professor stood at the base of the tree, gazing up into the dense green overhead, and shivered. “Oh hell. I hate heights.”

I can’t say I didn’t sympathize. The climb was easily sixty feet straight up. The ladders had been constructed of great, sturdy bunches of some sort of plant material. I suspected they would more than adequately support us. But there was something about feeling my lifeline twist and move with every shift of my weight that seemed to carve an express lane for my heart, straight from the chest to my mouth. It didn’t help that the Keplerites had long since shed any such hesitation and nimbly scrambled up the rope ladder—sending shivers and jolts of movement down to me with every step.

It was a gut-wrenching climb. the professor picked a ladder two trees over from me, and I heard him whimpering the entire way up. I nearly whimpered myself when I made the mistake of looking down as we started nearing the bristly clumps of needles.

Still, in the end, we all made it—even the professor. The Keplerites hoisted Russell up in a makeshift sling. The rest of us climbed some twenty feet above the first real branches and ended at a plank platform. One of the Keplerites extended an arm to me as I reached this, and I stepped up with an inward sigh of relief. Only when I was a good few feet away from the edge did I take a moment to really examine my surroundings.

I’d stepped onto one leg of a wide network of bridges and roads, all reaching from platform to platform. Some of the structures were crafted of dead wood fastened in place with the same thick ropes that formed our ladders. In other spots, live branches had been twisted and molded into place.

From the forest border, a broad road stretched into the distance. And still, rising even higher above us, the trees formed a canopy of branches over the woody highway. Gat gestured for us to move in that direction, toward the forest interior, and we made way for the last of the army. We waited to go farther until the entire party made the landing. Now the Keplerites drew up the ladders, rolled them into bundles, and fastened those bundles to the planks, one by one.

Finally, with a grin, Gat signaled we should move out, and, all of us attempting communication as we went, we headed into the forest.

Light streamed through the branches overhead, and patches of light and shadow covered the road. Unlike the forest floor, where the sunlight almost never made an appearance, here we moved for long stretches entirely in light.

The road continued for some time, and we kept up a good pace. After the day and night we’d had, it wasn’t the easiest march. Nobody complained, but I could see it taxing the civilians’ strength. And poor Russell started to look like a ghost.

Kayleigh had managed to keep the bleeding to a minimum, but it didn’t change the fact that he had a gaping wound in his shoulder. Still, he soldiered on with as much forbearance as he could muster.

The Keplerites chattered the entire time. Every once in a while, I caught a familiar word or phrase. But their inflection in tone and their enunciation was so very different than Earth English that I struggled at times to remember they really were the same language. On their tongues, speech seemed to become song. All the guttural tones and hard sounds of my day had given way to light, rippling notes. It was, in its odd way, at once both beautiful and disconcerting.

Through the long journey, I found ample time for more substantive reflection, not only on our current position but also the remarkable state of the Nation’s infrastructure. As to the former, the farther we went, the less convinced I grew of our prospects. It seemed to me that here, high among the trees, we put ourselves at an even greater disadvantage than on the ground. This was their territory, the byways from where they were adept at descending. We were terrestrial creatures, and this feeling of being suspended somewhere between heaven and earth was new and foreign. Which meant if our hosts had any ill intentions, we would be grossly outnumbered and in a strange world. Screwed, in short.

As I could do nothing about that but hope Gat hadn’t misrepresented his intentions, I set aside those dark thoughts and buried myself in wonder at this midway realm. It might prove to be our final resting place, but I couldn’t help but marvel at it anyway. The road we traveled seemed to be one of several main thoroughfares, intersecting now and again with a minor path and, less frequently, a road of equal breadth. All of them had been constructed of wood and anchored in place with ties of rope.

I saw the same manner of landings and bundled ladders as those upon which we’d ascended, placed in intervals all throughout the forest. Sometimes, a watchman stood guard nearby. Sometimes, the platform went unwatched. But everywhere, the Keplerites had built escape hatches—or, perhaps, portals from which to attack.

Time will tell.