This is another offering from the reject pile. An apocalyptic tale written in first person. Did send it out to a couple of Sci-Fi publications, but all I got for my time and trouble were rejection emails. If anyone is interested, spelling is OED as usual, not Merriam-Webster, and the voice is written to come across as classically educated. The Aliens in the tale seem blessedly unaware of ‘gender’.
Sitting behind cracked armoured glass looking out at the deserted airfield, across the potholed road from vast Lavender fields arcing toward the indigo horizon, in the unheated building cold air strips my face dry and outside a thin snow is falling. Out on the weed punctuated concrete there is a fading alien body odour on the wind. Sweet, a strange combination of Grapefruit, Papaya and salt. The pallid breeze also brings the distant foetid stench of human death.
They were here. Our visitors. At least the few that didn’t get to leave. They are all dead of course, as will I be soon, but then that’s life isn’t it? We are all finite. Even beings from the other side of the Orion spur of our own galaxy, thousands of light years away. Despite everything, our best intentions, our pledges of friendship, even their vastly superior technology.
I talked to them directly before the end, without a translator. They regretted their decision to come to our little world, but we can all be wise in hindsight, can’t we?
What did they come to say to us? What did we want to say to them? What did they really call themselves? I lack the knowledge of both their writing and speech, Nor does it matter. There is no-one and no time to tell our story any more. I have scoured all the terrestrial and interstellar frequencies, flown in marvellous machines across a scarred Earth. And I’m absolutely sure of that. As sure as I can be. There are no people out there but the dead. Much of the wildlife likewise.
There are no hidden enclaves of survivalists bunkered down with a conveniently large arsenal and ample stores of food. Oh, the large arsenals and food stores are there with a lot, and I mean a lot, of decomposing bodies, but there is little to shoot at, even if living trigger fingers could be found.
The dead aliens are slower to rot as their own internal microbiomes consume them, but they too are part of the great dying. leaving only mummified husks.
Across the concrete, the bulk of one of the Aliens orbit to ground shuttles looms out at the edge of this scrapyard of burned ground and scattered debris. There is nothing there that I need. It is dead, as are the crafts crew of three. One lies, a tangle of bony limbs at the bottom of the gaping maw of the bulky ovoids loading ramp, gradually desiccating in snow flecked air.
In life they were curious creatures, no more than one and a half metres tall, part mammal, part insect, their upper bodies armoured by overlapping plates of smooth, pale, iridescent chitin, lower four ambulatory limbs for walking. To watch one sit cross legged as they were wont to do, was to marvel at a ballet of lower limbs.
A stocky, surprisingly human like torso and head bore two comparatively heavy fingered upper arms used for gripping and another two three fingered much smaller arms capable of incredibly fine manipulation. And they were a race of such inner beauty, such sophistication. Yet so startlingly different from us, from two not quite human but incredibly beautiful and intricate crystal irised eyes set below broad smooth silvery pink skull caps, to their bamboozling double pelvic and shoulder joints.
At our first face to face meeting, once certain we had no natural pathogens capable of harming one another, one of my colleagues was wearing an antique Breitling chronometer on his wrist, an item they displayed great curiosity toward. I believe it originally belonged to his grandfather. As a gesture, he took it off and solemnly handed it over, only to watch the precious antique disassembled before horrified eyes. A minute or so later his watch was reassembled and ticking smoothly. Aghast and spellbound, he took it back.
Their music is incredible. I play recordings constantly via my headset, but compared to a live performance, it is but a vapid shadow. Human technology is simply not capable of capturing the delicate nuances of tone and cadence to reproduce them properly. As for mathematics, they made even the greatest human genius look like a dunce with their understanding of faster than light travel. Yet they were so innocently delighted to find intelligent life that they wanted to share. Everything.
We fortunate few who actually met our interstellar visitors in person came to love them for their culture of generosity and stoicism. Now they are all dead. And so are we. Apart from me of course. The last human. The last sentient being in a world gradually running down like an unwound clock.
So what really happened? Did we, in a life or death struggle, wipe each other out? Was there a great war? Spaceships, laser cannons, last pyrrhic stands against overwhelming odds, and all the drama of space opera? Nothing so simple. The truth, as all truths are, was far more complex than that.
So what killed us? Why am I the only one left? Well there was a war. In a way. A faction calling themselves the Humanity First movement, built around an extreme environmentalist philosophy which blamed the Aliens and many of the first contact team, including myself, for everything. Even for that which none of us could possibly have done.
Humanity First also somehow got hold of several nuclear weapons, which they used. Burning their own people into shadows as they did so.
Our visitors were startled by the massive explosions of course, but were unharmed. Their craft, engineered to resist extremes in the depths of interstellar space at huge velocities, shrugged off the nuclear fireballs like summer rain. I was onboard a large scout craft with the UN diplomatic mission during the worst attacks and to my surprise felt nothing.
Any other race might have retaliated in kind, but not our visitors. They understood their own history all too well, how factionalism and blind hatred for those who were not precisely like them had almost destroyed their own civilisation, and how they, the last of their kind, learned to come together to visit the only other intelligent species they could find across the great void of space and time.
They tried to communicate their understanding and the cogent philosophies behind it, but Humanity First wasn’t listening. To anyone. Nor did the extreme coalition of political and religious zealots who backed them. To them the Aliens were simply unholy monsters come to invade and do the unspeakable to Earth and its natives. As such our visitors had to be destroyed, as did their allies, of whom I was named as one for my several public attempts at mediation. My mouth cannot help but twist at the irony. From low level career diplomat to public enemy number one in a single giant leap of illogic.
When their nuclear weapons failed, the human zealots crafted deadly nerve agents and plagues, supposedly tailored to kill only our visitors. They were wrong. So very, very overconfident of their own abilities.
Insects, closely followed by birds were the first omen of their error, falling from the skies like rain. A few days after that Fish and sea mammals washed up on every shore, including some species we had never seen before. Then, then, last of all our visitors, and of course, humans as our biosphere collapsed. Most people dying of the bio warfare agent residues where it had contaminated the entire food chain. Others later dying of starvation and poisoning when preserved supplies became tainted and their clean water ran out. Only the Deer seem unaffected, now they swarm in large herds, untroubled by predators, through a world denuded of human influences.
Apart from me, alive only because of washing twice daily with Lavender oil for a rare skin condition. Lavender oil, as we came to know, being the only substance giving any degree of protection at all from Humanity First’s lethal biowar agent. Our visitors, even as they too died, divined that a spare hydrogen bond of the key toxins combined with one oxygen molecule in the oil, could render it mostly inert.
To try and mitigate the effects, our visitors helped desperate groups of dying humans plant massive Lavender plantations, in the vain hope that such crops might forestall the effects of the biological agents. For all but me it was much too little and far too late.
A year on, by way of atonement for my species vicious mendacity, I harvest as much Lavender I can, spreading it wherever I go to try and neutralise the residual poisons. But even so, I too am dying. Just a little more slowly than most. Now despite twice daily appluication there is a large ulcer on my left shoulder, my throat feels sore and sometimes breathing is difficult, leaving me bent double and wheezing for the last vestiges of oxygen in the air. My joints are prone to sharp jabs of pain, a counterpoint to a slow dull ache in every muscle. There are pea sized lumps under my skin and sometimes I have headaches that would put migraines to shame. I appear to have lost a lot of weight.
Had the Aliens only come to conquer and exterminate as was claimed, they could easily have done so by dropping large space rocks into Earth’s gravity well and then simply waited in orbit for the dust to settle. Instead they came bearing gifts for the only other semi-intelligent species within reach of their space warp drives. What did Humanity First do? Reject the wonders and double down in their attempts to destroy our visitors. In the process dooming themselves along with all those they professed to be saving.
As I wander this envenomed world, a passing bipedal curiosity for the rare remaining wildlife and unculled herds of Deer, I try to work out how we as a species got first contact so horribly, completely wrong.
Why is not in doubt, a simple twist of sociological incompatibility and human paranoia that did for us all. Something even the wisest, at least those we were inclined to listen to, of either of our species failed to foresee. But hindsight is all I have and I must record these thoughts, not for my own posterity, but as a warning to any other starfaring species out there.
The technology to transmit I have, it sits in the remaining intact lander our surviving visitors left behind when they fled. Miracyonder, I have no direct translation for it’s name, just an approximation, a crude anglicised bastardisation, my opposite number at the transpecies diplomatic mission, showed me, even as it died, how to operate the controls and compose a broad spectrum signal which will reach the rest of out galaxy and a good deal farther. Once activated it will automatically repeat the message for as long as the lander power lasts. Something, Miracyonder told me, that will not run down for many Earth centuries. A warning for other species. Do not come here. It will have to suffice.
After which I do not know what I will do. There will be no help, and I will have to live out what days I have alone, isolated on this graveyard planet.
Could our visitors have saved me? Taken me with them? I would have refused to go, even if they would. Because my presence would likely have only triggered more death between us, and better dying here on Earth than in an alien starship, coasting through the void with only the soon to be dead for company.
Most of our visitors chose to die in the great chasm of space rather than on a, to them, alien world, suffering enormous guilt that they had been complicit in the end of a, for want of a better term, civilisation. They were a highly moral people, and the universe will be a poorer place for their passing. I wish I could say the same for my own kind.
Nevertheless, I am the last human. Achingly isolated, a shambling, shabby bipedal figure who in crushing grief for the loss of his civilisation shouts torrents of imprecations at uncaring clouds. The last of two intelligent species. At least the last one I that know of. And I scatter lavender in our memory.
2049 words.
