Observation Impedes Change

The shuttle rumbles as it enters the atmosphere and I feel under dressed. A couple of older women speak in low, tired voices, and a man around my age tries to keep his two-year-old daughter calm. His wife is asleep against his shoulder. Laughter filters from the back of the cabin.

Clouds burst against the shuttle windows, and all at once, we’re through. A lush forest spreads out across a strange continent, the first glimpse of the dense life that hides the ruins I spent my entire life savings to come see. Callion is an ancient world, and allegedly those plants share a root system older than human civilization. I have a hard time picturing that, but it’s got to be true, because my sister told me. And Lena was the one who discovered it.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re beginning our landing procedures. Please, for your safety and comfort, ensure your seat belts are fastened, and thank you for joining us on Outworld Historical Tours.”

***

The dome is a massive expanse of glass approximately six kilometers across and placed directly on the edge of the beach. Strange, foreign ocean sounds drift through the air, though I think they’re piped in. We’re not actually allowed in the water, which is disappointing. Long avenues cut across luxurious buildings, outdoor dining areas, tennis courts, and swimming pools. Employees swarm the place, welcoming our group as we make our way to the accommodations.

Everything feels empty: we’re the first tour group allowed on-planet, even though they’d built space for a few hundred more.

My room is big enough for a small family back home with shower pressure stronger than I’d ever experienced. No droughts here, no shortages. I sit on the balcony and stare at the forest, trying to imagine the life, the place teeming with history buried under ground litter and soil. She must’ve loved it here.

The first half-day is free time. I explore the dome, visit a buffet set for fifty with only one other person around, walk along the edge of the shore and dig my toes into sand no other human has likely touched before. I spot my fellow travelers in loose-fitting linen pants and wide-brimmed hats, and they do their best to avoid me. The glass dome ends a hundred yards before the water. That’s no problem. I linger near the soccer field and stare at the freshly-painted goals.

We gather in the evening near the Historical Preservation Kiosk. Photos of the ruins are projected across a white wall. Did she ever come here when she was alive? A very tan man with big white teeth smiles at the crowd.

“Hello, everyone, I’m Dr. Torres, welcome to Callion. We’re going to go over some safety rules, talk about the ruins, and plan to meet up for our first morning tour. Is everyone ready?” Enthusiastic murmurs. “Wonderful. First rule is: do not leave the dome without a guide. The ecology here is fragile and we are only visitors.”

Temporary visitors. Very temporary. I stare at the photos of the ruins as they turn slow 360-degree arcs.

***

Dr. Torres leads the hike into the forest. There are specially-groomed paths and we’re told not to step off them. “For the forest’s protection as much as for your own.” I hang in the back and talk to an old woman named Amina as she struggles to keep up with the group. She tells me about losing her daughter three years earlier, about getting her cross-void travel certification, about coming here with her childhood friends to find an expression of non-human consciousness somewhere far from home as a way to connect with the one-ness of the universe. I don’t tell her about my sister.

We reach the ruins after an hour. The first appears at the edge of a small clearing, also groomed. The stone looms in a pit crossed with string and fenced off by caution tape. It’s smaller than I expected, but there’s clearly more of it buried in the earth. Dr. Torres talks about excavation, about deciphering the pictograms, about non-human processes and cryptographic techniques. “In short, we have no clue what any of this is, but it’s amazing.”

I stare at the first structure. Square with a sloping roof. One wall taller than all the others. Lines cut across the rock, a shimmery, strange local limestone. The lines swirl, converge, break apart again in what seems like a dance, or a language, or a piece of sheet music. I picture my sister standing right here and digging this proof that humanity wasn’t always alone from the damp soil. It’s ugly and not particularly impressive. There’s no door, no window. No obvious interior at all. A solid monolith.

I ask Dr. Torres if there’s anything interesting about them at night. One of Lena’s messages mentioned she loved coming here when the moon appeared from behind the clouds. He gives me a strange look. “Not that I’m aware of. It’s dangerous out here past curfew.”

We’re shown the other ruins. Stone pillars with more of that abstract, swirling script. Low walls ringing hexagon shapes. Smaller, scattered bits of rock, some of them standing in piles, others tossed around loosely. Another massive building, again without a door.

“They’re markers,” Amina says, nodding to herself as she stares at a tall structure, wider at the base than at the top, covered in converging circles and triangles. “No, they’re beacons.”

Calling to what? But she doesn’t know.

***

We have more free time in the dome. Luxurious massages, delicious meals, more relaxation than I can handle. I have lunch with Amina and her two friends, Eshe and Nia. They like to laugh a lot and that’s a good distraction. But the longer I stay in the dome, the further away I feel from Lena.

Worse, during the tours of the ruins, especially during the lectures the well-meaning guides provide, I feel even less. There’s no spark of her at the edge of the manicured line looking at the structures she killed herself to find. There’s no sense of her wonder, of her joy and mystery, of her world-changing realization that these, right here, would shift the course of human history forever. Our narrative would never be the same. It couldn’t be the same.

I can’t feel her at all.

My sister, the little girl that dragged me from the mud after I tripped and fell during a hike. My big sister and her wide, charming smile. The smartest person I’ve ever met.

One night, a couple days into the trip, I tell Amina why I spent every dollar I had to come all this way. What feels like an extravagant vacation for them is a pilgrimage for me. We sit at the edge of the pool in the twilight drinking coffees while a family splashes in the shallow end. She listens and nods as I talk about growing up with Lena, about how she was ten years older, about how Lena was sharp and bright and our parents were worn down and absent. How Lena was my best friend. I talk about Lena going to graduate school, landing a job with Highrun Mining, about coming here to do basic surveying. How her life had changed when they found the ruins and the company approved a dig.

Her enthusiasm brought me here. This place changed my sister, and now I want to feel that change too. I’m desperate for it.

“It’s the tour,” Amina says, face shrouded by the shadows from the trees, a local species with long, sharp leaves and a scaly trunk. Tree isn’t even the right word. “They sanitize it and give us context, but that’s not how she experienced this place. She didn’t have a dome. There were no restaurants.”

***

The ruins creep from the forest floor like finger bones clawing at the sky. I crouch at the edge of a fence and stare at the tip of what’s allegedly a fifty-foot-tall obelisk, still mostly covered-over.

Whoever was here, they’re long gone.

Did she want to speak with them? Did she imagine herself walking among the dead of an ancient alien civilization and communing with sentient life she may never be able to understand? I reach out a hand but don’t touch the stone. I want to feel the same thrill and the same horror she must’ve experienced.

Instead, this place is only empty.

Ground surveys and drone surveillance plus a few advanced satellites have scanned the entire planet, but there’s no sign of life aside from the dense forests. No cities, no towns, no villages. No housing at all. If there are more ruins, those haven’t been discovered, but Dr. Torres says there are at least a dozen expeditions planned.

Amina asks if they’re still going to mine here. Dr. Torres promises the company will move their operations to a less sensitive area.

***

Three more days before they ship us back out and the next batch of tourists arrive. They say there will be two shuttles next time, then three, then four after that, until the dome is crawling with wealthy vacationers interested in seeing a scrap of real alien history.

I think about asking Dr. Torres if he knew my sister, or if anyone still on planet worked with her, but I don’t want to see the pity in their eyes. I can’t handle the respectful nods, the sad smiles. What a tragedy, everyone says. What a horrible waste. For them, my sister was defined by her use, by how smart and talented she was; but to me, my sister was there when I came home from school, she laughed at my bad jokes, she taught me how to kick a soccer ball. She was the only person that called regularly to check and see how I was doing as we got older. Her loss isn’t a tragedy. It’s a nightmare.

Amina’s the one that finally tells me to do it. I meet her by the pool for cocktails after she has dinner with her friends. We talk about the other vacationers, about how strange this empty dome feels, about the ruins and what they could mean. She looks at me over the rim of her second drink. “You should go out there,” she says, staring at me in a way that makes me think she’s kidding. “You want to feel close to your sister, right?”

“We’re not allowed without the guides.”

“But that’s exactly what you need.” She shrugs and takes a sip. “Just a thought.”

And the conversation moves on, but the idea sticks in my head.

***

“What, you think I’m not having fun?” Amina gives me a big smile in the dim light of an orange overhead. Fifty yards on, the guard booth is the last beacon before the end of the dome and the start of the forest. “Do what you have to do, okay? And tell me about it when you’re back.”

I thank her but she’s already walking away. Amina’s friendly and doesn’t sleep much, and the guard in the booth seems to recognize her when she calls out. They talk briefly, and when she staggers and falls over, hand clutched over her chest, he rushes over to help. His walkie chatters and another guard comes running.

Nobody notices when I hit the big blue button like Dr. Torres always does and push the door open. The night’s there, heavy and stagnant, the thick air and strange sweet smell of the alien trees gusting across my face.

I follow the path. It’s marked by pylons every fifty feet or so. Moonlight barely reaches through the thick canopy. I consider moving off the path but I’m afraid of getting lost. The sky’s an occasional glimpse, and I’m suddenly very aware of how alone I am on a strange planet heading toward the remains of a long-lost intelligence. Ahead, the dig site appears as a break in the trees, and I slow as the first of the stone mysteries appears like a black outline in the gloom.

There’s nothing. No movement, no sparkle, no recognition deep inside my chest. I watch the ruins and will them to do something, to do anything, and instead they remain the same inert lumps of rock they always were.

Lena sent me long messages about how it felt to stand here and watch history reveal itself from the earth. She’d talk about communing with the long-dead builders of this place, of feeling like she was a part of a massive and unfolding story continued over millennia. She wrote about these ruins as if they were magic.

They’re not magic to me.

In her last letter before the shuttle accident, she’d wondered if this was the right thing to do. Humanity had a long, long history of uncovering the past and taking it as its own. Imperialism in ancient Egypt, the theft of Greek statues and Roman artifacts, dozens and dozens of significant treasures packed up and displayed in foreign museums without the necessary cultural and historical context. What could we possibly give to these long-dead people? What could they be except a sideshow, a curiosity? Lena had wanted better for them. She’d wanted to find the builders and to give them flesh and weight and heft. She’d wanted to make them people.

But there’s only rock. There’s only stone. I came here hoping to find the magic she felt, to get closer to her in the same way she felt like she was getting closer to whoever made this place, but instead, my sister remains impossibly far away.

“Hey, you can’t be out here.” Dr. Torres’s voice echoes down the path behind me. Flashlight beams move across the ground and my shadow grows across the ruins. “Julien? Is that you? You’re not supposed to be outside of the dome after dark.”

I start to turn away from the ruins, already prepared to tell him everything, about Lena and about why I came here, when the clouds drift from in front of the moon and the light sparks across the strange ancient glyphs.

It starts like a wave following the cloud’s path. One moment, the ruins are inert and dull, and the next they glow with an impossible inner blue light. They sparkle and dance, and the shapes rearrange themselves, morphing like they’re floating in a viscous fluid. I watch, completely transfixed, Dr. Torres and the security team totally forgotten, as the ruins seem to take deep breaths, huffing in and out with that impossible internal light.

Lena was right. They really do glow. Nobody mentioned this during the tour, and now I’m witnessing something very few people have ever seen for a millennia. The blue is like the deep ice at the center of a glacier, a frozen ancient blue, and the shapes are trying to say something to me. What language, what feeling they want to convey, I can’t know. And it doesn’t matter.

I still don’t feel her here, but at least now I understand why all this was worth the effort.

The clouds drift back into position. The blue light fades and dissipates, and the symbols return to their original positions as if they’d never moved to begin with. I look over at Dr. Torres, and he’s standing next to me, staring with open astonishment.

“I’d heard they did something at night, but we haven’t been allowed out here after dark in ages,” he says very softly, flashlight hanging limp in his hand. “Did you know that would happen?”

“My sister told me.” I turn away from the ruins and start back to the dome. The two security men let me pass without saying anything, and Dr. Torres stays behind, watching the dim monuments in the darkness.

Hi folks, I’m back! Took an extra week there for the holidays, and might take another again this month, but we’ll get back on track soon. As usual, if you liked this story, hit the like/heart button so I know I’m not alone in an uncaring universe surrounded by endless void! Have a good week!