Alien

Jared left the party that was busily transferring from the lounge to the kitchen for drink top-ups and nibbles. He walked through the open patio doors out into the warm velvet evening with the cooling zephyrs whispering as they gathered up and shook the dust from the curtains. He lifted his eyes to the blackness of the night sky and focused on the disc of Venus rising over the horizon to the West. He was strangely drawn to Venus but couldn’t really understand why. He was vaguely interested in astrology and cosmology but not more so than most of his peers so he could find no reason or anything special about Venus to explain it. It had been the subject of much ribald banter from his best mate, Joe, when he had mentioned it so now he kept it quiet and just looked at her when he had a few quiet moments to himself, as now.

                Joe came up and tapped him on the shoulder, he was always the life and soul of any gathering he was at. ‘Come in and join the fun instead of moping out here by yourself,’ he said.

                ‘OK,’ said Jared, ‘I wasn’t moping, I was just relaxing away from the crowd for a minute.’

                ‘Whatever, get this down you, ‘said Joe, thrusting a glass full of suspicious liquid into Jared’s reluctant grasp.               

Jared slowly followed Joe towards the noise of the throng inside He wasn’t very good at parties and hadn’t wanted to come until Joe had persuaded him. He always felt like an outsider, an observer, never really part of the crowd, just like Colin Wilson, not part of the mainstream, a little bit different. He didn’t manage to lose himself in the enjoyment of the moment, he thought of himself as a Bristolian, ‘sleeping with one eye open.’

*

They had grown up together and got on well because they liked the same things, football mainly. They supported the same team, Bristol Rovers, and lived close to each other in South Street, Bristol. They were nearly inseparable, so much so that everyone called them ‘the JJ twins’ as no one really knew which was which.

Once they had both saved up enough to buy a bike each, they could set off on expeditions of adventure, across the River Avon by the old railway bridge now carrying the cycle path, through Victoria Park and the tunnels of the Cumberland Basin road system and out into the glorious country of the Ashton Court Estate – now owned by Bristol Council and so open to all. They both enjoyed these trips as they could play in the woods, look at the herd in the deer park, run up and down the grassy slopes and race each other as they swooped down the steep grass slopes on their bikes and then get an ice cream, if they were flush with cash, from the van, parked by the side of the car park. They then often lay in the grass while licking their 99’s telling each other what they were going to do with their lives. Joe was going to join the Royal Navy and travel to all those exotic places he had heard about while Jed didn’t have any idea of what he wanted to do, he just wanted to find out more about the world – and Venus, but he kept that part to himself, he was a little weary of his peers saying he was obsessed with Venus. He was secretly certain that a different destiny awaited him, different to anything that Earth could provide.

*

One day they cycled to the end of Beggar Bush lane, intent on getting as far as the old quarry that they had heard about. Their intention was to explore the quarry and then return home via Brunel’s suspension bridge. They knew that if they got off their bikes and walked across, it would be free. They hid their bikes in the hedge and then, after crawling carefully through the wire fence, they clambered down the quarry benches, past the signs that stated, This is a dangerous quarry, not a playground. KEEP OUT. They were young so, of course, nothing would happen to them. They had the carefree feeling that they would live forever. It was easy climbing down the benches as vegetation had taken hold on the rock faces, giving hand holds on the way down. They were soon on the quarry floor and could see into the tunnel that went under the road to where the old crushing and coating plant has once produced the material for surfacing the nearby M5. They wandered around for a while, exulting in the freedom to be in a space that was once under many metres of solid rock and where a very rare sample of Rhodocrosite had been found by the Russell Society.

They tired of exploring after a while and sat in the sun to unpack their rucksacks to plunder the plastic boxes of marmite sandwiches and swig from the plastic bottles of fizzy drinks. They had a rest for a while and then climbed up the benches to emerge at the road where their bikes had been stashed. They cycled back along the road, past the traffic lights and were soon at the Western abutment of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. They dismounted to save the cost of the toll and to look at the magnificent view down along the Avon Gorge. It was a Wednesday so there were very few people around and almost no traffic. The Samaritan’s free phone was unused – no one was keen to kill themselves on a sunny spring afternoon when the birds were singing.

*

‘I want to explain something to you,’ said Joe.

                ‘Wassat?’ asked Jed, not really interested in talking, his eyes were on a group of jackdaws circling in the rising air currents near the cliffs, probably looking for likely nest sites.

                ‘Please listen to me, it is very important,’ said Joe. ‘I am not what I seem, I am an alien.’

                ‘OK,’ said Jed, going along with the joke. ‘Prove it to me then.’

Joe climbed up on to the parapet wall and started to climb over the anti-suicide wires.

                ‘Stop,’ said Jed, I believe you’

                ‘No, you don’t, you are just saying that to get me down. You have to really believe me.’ He climbed down the other side, the outside, of the suicide wires and stepped out into space. He stood there on a column of seventy five metres of fresh air, the tide was in.

Jed looked at him with his mouth open, ‘Wha, wha, what are you standing on?’

                ‘Nothing but air,’ said Joe. Now do you believe me while I tell you a story?’

                ‘Well, yes,’ said Jed, but will you please come this side of the wall and sit down with me before you start, you know I have no head for heights.’

Joe climbed over the parapet wall again and then sat down with Jed on the kerb.

*

‘It’s a long story but it goes like this. I am a member of the Space Guard. There are about three hundred and fifty of us around the world and I just happen to be here in Bristol. The reason I have to tell you about it is that I know that you have been having visions and a strange attraction to Venus. This is because our communication net with our area headquarters on Venus has been leaking a little and infecting you. We had to hide our office in the methane clouds on Venus because you humans are getting to know Mars and so we would likely be noticed.

                Our job is to see if you survive the predictable crises that life goes through on any planet and to see if we can learn any lessons by watching you cope with them. We have monitored the near extinctions through history that would have sterilised most planets but there was always just enough life left to repopulate – sometimes in greatly different forms as evolution filled the available niches. The recent wars and famines have decimated the human race but you struggled through. You got through the nuclear age without starting an atomic war and now you are facing climate change as you burn the Earth’s stores of hydrocarbons. The leakage of the communication between Earth and Venus was responsible for the Internet being developed by the way.’

                ‘OK, so say I accept that all this is true, where do you come from?’ asked Jed ‘what is the answer to climate change?’

                ‘I cannot tell you where I come from and also cannot tell you the answers, we are watching you to see if you think of different ones. There would be no point as you could not comprehend the data but let us just say that I come from a long way away in space and time.  Fermi got his paradox wrong. There are many trillions of us from billions of galaxies and the second part is not true only because you haven’t been able to see us – except for the occasional error in communications such as happened to you. We have been checking your race through your development and think that, should you survive the coming challenges, you should be ready to join the human family in about three hundred years of your time.

                Now I have to blank all your memories of this, and your obsession with Venus, so that we can both continue with our lives where we left off.’

                ‘Will you at least give me an hour to think about all this before you do that and will you answer all my questions?’

                ‘OK,’ said Joe. There’s no harm in that.’

They spent the next hour with Jed asking and getting the answers to all sorts of questions, including nuclear fusion, climate change and if the laws of physics as understood, we correct. He even asked if ‘42’ was the real answer to everything. He also got the answer to the puzzle of the unified field theory.

*

Jared stepped outside the party for a moment to get a breath of fresh air. He idly glanced up at the clear night sky and wondered if there were other people out there and if he would ever see one of them. He didn’t think so.

                His friend Joe, called him in to the kitchen to join him in a beer.