Outward Borne (37 page)

The People were told of the many
changes that the ObLaDas had adopted. They described their full
commitment to foster life forms within the galaxy and the many new
activities that might be pursued. What that may mean was discussed
at great length and anticipation. The People became enthusiastic
supporters of the ObLaDa plans and were resolved to help in
whatever way they could. They reminded the Das that, almost from
the beginning, they had helped deal with other alien species. The
ancient story of Gwynyth and the Nivinwa was told once again.
Surely they could help other aliens, teach them skills, key
principles, and probably do a better job of it than the ObLaDas
given their checkered record. The People were enthusiastic about
their new roles, eager to help, and help they did. The key fact,
however, the pending return of the Outward Voyager to Earth, was
not mentioned and would not be revealed for many years.

The Outward Voyager was fifty-five
years along its trajectory when it detected the first weak radio
signals emanating from Earth. This was a new and exciting
development. Radio had always been considered the critical
threshold - the transition to a technology-based society. This was
both momentous and worrisome. Alarming scientific and mechanical
developments had occurred on that planet during the fourteen
hundred years since the People had been captured. Technologic
advances must have been made at a very fast pace, too fast, the Das
thought. It was a high risk factor, in their opinion, and their
opinion was well founded. The ObLaDas quickly assembled a
communication intercept that sped toward Earth to capture and relay
decipherable broadcasts to the Outward. The Ship was still
twenty-three light years from Earth, so the radio signals they
received lagged well behind current events. Nevertheless, the
accumulated information began to provide insight into the
civilization that had developed on the planet.

It quickly became apparent that
the ancient Saxon language the captives had spoken was no longer
used, though it had a rough similarity to the present English, less
so with German. The ObLaDas, or more accurately their computers,
had extensive expertise in interpreting alien languages and, with
the Saxon vocabulary in memory, they were soon able to make some
sense of English language broadcasts. It seemed to be a prevalent
language, and some speakers even referred to themselves as
Anglo-Saxons. So English it was to be.

The ObLaDas had a more difficult
time comprehending music. A large part of the material they
intercepted was music. They did not understand it. It had such a
wild variety and had no communication value at all. The ObLaDas had
no tradition of music or anything like it. Nevertheless, they
collected these works. Perhaps it would mean something to the
humans when the time came to tell them about it. The People did
something similar after all, with their instruments and singing,
but not so complicated.

A mere thirty years later, the
quality of Earth’s electromagnetic transmissions jumped to a new
level of sophistication, when the first television signals began.
Now, with the combination of voice and images, the ObLaDas were
able to correct and improve their understanding of the Earth’s
languages, but they were often confused by their culture. The
people and situations being depicted varied tremendously; they were
inconsistent, even contradictory. It took some years for the
ObLaDas to distinguish fact from fiction, old movies from live
broadcasts, comedy from commentary, and everything in
between.

As information about life on Earth
accumulated, the ObLaDas became increasingly concerned about the
state of the planet’s society. The graphic depiction of warfare and
the apparent relish some took in those events, the unmistakable
indications of nuclear weapons, their use and irresponsible
proliferation, the stubborn refusal of nations to relinquish power
to a world-wide governing body no matter how obviously essential
this was. The ObLaDas foresaw the consequences - the rapid advance
of technology and power production within an old established
culture that was too slow to adapt to change – an emerging society
that was unable to control its own destiny – political factions too
wedded to past practices and current power to manage the future.
They had seen it all too often.

ReLak LoBa had been one of the
great minds of ObLaDa history. He committed most of his long life
to the study of alien progress. Beings, through most of their
evolution, no matter where it occurred, relied solely on their own
muscle power for survival, but as civilization developed, they
learned how to use other sources of power for transportation or
work. Once a society developed the ability to mold materials and
construct machines, they were able to expand the power at their
disposal many fold. The utilization of power provides such an
advantage that it feeds on itself, quickly leading to even larger
machines and further increasing the amount that could be harnessed.
It proliferates throughout the population until the total power
available on the planet is either exhausted or becomes
destructive.

ReLak LoBa was able to show
persuasive macro level correlations between power usage and the
longevity of advanced civilizations. With few exceptions, massive
power consumed the society that unleashed it. The survival of
power-obsessed civilizations was measured in millennia, a very few
millennia. It did not necessarily mean that the inhabitants of
those planets would be obliterated, although that did happen. Often
they were driven back to subsistence level survival, like
Genimunda. Earth, it seems, was well along the path of power-driven
self-destruction that so many had followed before. The ObLaDas
hoped that the arrival of an enlightened group of people from the
Outward Voyager might deter that fate.

It was a shock. They were on
course for Earth. The landing would occur in fifty-one years to the
day. They, not one of the other aliens, would be the first to
return to their home planet. No one wanted to go. The People had no
connection with Earth and no knowledge of that planet. After some
fourteen hundred years living within the Outward Voyager community,
even the ancient stories of Saxon warlords and idyllic villages
were forgotten, or dismissed as unrelated to themselves.

If the ObLaDas were surprised by
this reaction, they did not show it or change their plans. In the
coming years, children would be selected, raised, and trained for
the return. The People would begin to study Earth and learn what
they could of that place so that they would be able to prepare the
chosen ones for their future life. The children who were selected
for return would be brought up together and trained, as far as
possible, to cope with their new life on Earth, in North America
more specifically, for the landing would occur there. All were
taught English, and most had a second language from the larger
countries of Europe or Asia. Of course, they learned of the
different nations and their histories, about the planet’s
geography, what Earth’s scientists knew and didn’t know. Facts were
straightforward. Cultural adaptation would be more difficult to
manage. Whatever the ObLaDas and the People knew about Earth’s
society came to them from watching television shows and movies.
They were the only sources of information, but ones that would
provide out-of-date slang, confused values, somewhere between
chivalry and high school snide, and a worldview composed of
gangsters, drug addicts, and gunfighters. The community elders were
afraid for the chosen. They found it hard to comprehend life on
Earth with oceans, who could imagine so much water as you are
drowning, snow, so beautiful as you froze to death, and a sun, so
bright it blinded you to look at. They shook their heads and felt
sorry for the young people who would have to endure such trials.
And the Earth had such a large population. All of them will be
strangers. All of them will want to know more than they should
about the people who came from outer space. It would be so
extremely different from anything that they had experienced during
their life on the Outward Voyager. It was a justifiable
concern.

DePat was five years old when he
was chosen to be among the forty or so people who would be
returned. The exact number that would go was dependent on the
outcome of the great debate. The humans insisted on, and the
ObLaDas refused, the inclusion of dogs on the return journey. Were
the dogs a secondary species that had no place on an important
mission such as this, or were they indispensable companions that
had a right to return to their home planet? As far as the People
were concerned, dogs go or we don’t.

DePat was a construct, something
the ObLaDas made occasionally. He was a combination of genetic
elements from four individuals, each of whom had a tall stature,
blond hair, and above-norm intelligence. His birth mother, LeaLea,
was a dreamy sort of girl who was immersed in her music and never
became involved in his nurturing, so DePat was raised along with
the other potential Earthlings as a group, even though their age
range covered almost twenty years. They were brought up and
educated in a sub-community, not isolated in any formal way, but
always different because of their treatment and
expectations.

The ObLaDas saw DePat as a
promising youngster, blond, skinny, quiet, but alert and a good
observer. He did, in fact, prove to be a particularly bright young
man who grew out of his shyness and became intrigued, more than
most, by the prospect of living on Earth. At age fifteen, DePat was
selected to participate in a seemingly minor project that the
ObLaDas thought may be of some future interest. He was asked to
collect and organize a record of the People’s time aboard the
Outward Voyager. It was a minor task in the scheme of things, but
it was not a small one. The Outward Voyager files held exhaustive
records, too inclusive in fact, as they included massive amounts of
trivia in which a few threads of interest were buried. DePat would
need help to find his way through this maze and so he was paired
with an ObLaDa, KeDom Sa, who was about the same level of maturity
and was especially inquisitive for a Da. They would work together,
the first direct contact between the species since UnaDar and
Clovic during the Great Grack Attack.

KeDom was a smallish Da, with
bright eyes and a slow determined way about himself. His good
nature and natural acceptance of the limitations of the human
species made him a good partner for DePat. The two were given
access to the historical record and some dedicated equipment to
edit and store what they had found, ironically it stood on the very
spot where UnaDar had once found the broken construction bot that
played such an important role in defeating the Gracks. They could
collect however much information they wanted, the two were told. A
high capacity memory file would be made available. They would never
be able to fill it.

DePat was naturally interested in
the abduction of the humans from their villages. That information
was rather well organized; it had been examined by many generations
of humans before him. There were records of the capture,
recollections of life on Earth, stories, songs, and tribal legends.
The lives of the first people after they were brought to the
Outward were much less coherent. Gwynyth of Feldland wrote a
detailed history that described some of it. He was rather amused to
uncover the scandalous behavior of the Alric and the Red Girls, who
apparently shared mutual favors for many years after coming on
board. For a long time after that, there was little or nothing of
note. During the first seven hundred years on the Outward, the
People had been confined within the habitat; one year must have
been like the last. Little of interest occurred during the
centuries before the Gracks created some havoc.

DePat came upon a reference to the
Cathian abduction. It was only a fragment, but it was something
new. The reference described their introduction into their habitat
and included some preliminary records of their physiology,
biochemical makeup, and diet, but then it ended. They were no
longer on the Outward and, curiously, they were not mentioned as
one of the alien species that the Das had studied. What happened to
them? He pressed KeDom to look for this file. KeDom was reluctant
to do so, because it was apparent that the Cathian data had been
intentionally erased. There must have been some reason for doing
so, but eventually he decided that whatever reason there had been
for sequestering the information would hardly be relevant fifteen
hundred years later. Together they tweezed out leads until that
tragic story was uncovered.

The ObLaDas prepared a memory
storage device, one of their memory cubes, which DePat could bring
to Earth, but that was only the beginning of rampant confusion.
Apparently there was a good deal of ObLaDa debate about what he was
to do with it, and those varied opinions resulted in a great many
contradictory instructions. There was some general expectation that
the knowledge would provide some benefit to the poor people of
Earth, but the Das did not have a very clear idea about this might
happen, and their understanding of how things worked on that place
was rather vague. They assured DePat, however, that they had
absolute confidence in him and that he would surely be able to
figure it out. And while he must use the information wisely, they
warned him to keep the cube within his possession at all times. Why
all the secrecy? He did not know, but the cube would contain
valuable information that the Earth did not have, and that that
could lead to complications, competition, or conflict if it came
into the wrong hands. That was not his immediate problem, however,
for while they gave him a memory cube, they did give him a computer
to access the stored data.