We weren’t the first humans to set foot on another planet. There was no ‘on’ when it came to Ehalla. Just miles and miles and miles of roiling, noxious, angry atmosphere.
Ehalla was a gas giant, like Jupiter. But unlike Jupiter, Ehalla orbited a pair of stars that danced around each other: one filled everywhere with deep blue light that pierced everything, the other was a soft but angry red.
And like I said, we didn’t step foot on Ehalla, but we did plunge deep into its atmosphere in the elevator. Dropped like a lure from a fishing pole, paid out on the end of a one hundred mile-long tether.
The elevator felt massive, and empty, creepy without it being filled. And even though we sat in what I had thought was a control room on the way up, it turned out it was just a giant observation area: you could stand in the middle of the tip and look up, and all around, and down the sides of the elevator as it squirmed its biomechanical way down to Ehalla.
Those dryads I’d seen hadn’t been controlling the elevator, they’d just been huddling in the best viewing spot.
Ehalla filled the horizon everywhere we looked. Giant storm clouds, frozen like a shake in a slow motion blender. Clouds. Massive wind-tossed patterns of chaos, worse than one of those random-created screen-savers, rising to meet us and swallow our puny little craft.
***
Our destination, the “visitor’s center,” rose out of the murk of Ehalla. The soupy mix of perpetual fog broke somewhat, and a giant complex of domes floated in the sky. Long, trailing clumps of scaffolding and girders hung from underneath them. The whole thing looked like a series of giant, metal jellyfish just hanging in the air, all connected by floating bridges that flexed and twisted about.
The elevator came to a wriggling halt. Then tendrils reached out from the visitor’s center and pulled it inwards until the ramp and largest dome connected with a jolt.
Gas hissed as doors opened and our ears popped due to the changes in air pressure.
We slowly walked down the long, slightly squishy ramp and out under the massive dome we’d docked at. Overhead, the strange hues of Ehalla lit the inside of the dome. I could hear the howl of wind everywhere, constantly battering the entire structure.
“There’s no one here,” Rada shouted.
The massive dome we were inside could fit skyscrapers in it. But it was completely empty.
“What now?” Sita asked.
They both looked at me, as if I knew anything about what to do next. “Look around,” I suggested.
I walked out to the edge of what looked like glass and looked across at the other domes. One of them had smaller bubbles inside, filled with smoky atmosphere.
“I’ll bet it’s just like the All Tree, different airs for different aliens,” Sita said, seeing where I was looking.
I could feel frustration seeping in. The weird sounding howling wind kept making the hair on the back of my neck creep up, and the inside was large and empty and full of echoes. Just girders, glass, the metal floor, and us.
“How do we find the workshop, or Kyros?” I muttered. “Mimir should have been more…”
A loud ‘thwoop’ sound made me jump. I looked back at the center of the dome, where the sound came from, to see that a large transparent bubble had pushed its way up through the floor.
The inside of the bubble roiled with gas and air from the outside, and inside all that murk floated what looked like a squid with translucent skin.
It stabbed the air with tentacles, like an angry teacher making a point, and more ‘thwoop’ sounds filled the dome.
“Hello,” said the translator in my ear.
Again, I jumped slightly.
I was happy to see both Rada and Sita do the same.
“Hello,” I said, and walked up to the bubble. The squid-alien, an Ehallan, I hoped, regarded me with giant eyes. It dwarfed us, as it was forty feet long with its tentacles and puffy body.
“I am the keeper of the visitor’s center,” said the alien in a breathless, but somewhat-bored voice in my ear. “I am one of the few who has been asked to stick a translator in my ear so we can understand you outsiders. We are pleased that the All Tree has returned. We give it our greetings: Hello All Tree, nice to see you again! We are even more pleased that only a few of you chose to come down to visit Ehalla.”
“Pleased? Why?” I asked.
Tentacles flailed about. “We don’t like visitors. They are intrusive, and upset our dreaming and schedules: Oh, look, the visitors are here. We must now stop telling stories, and fishing, to climb high up into the clouds and give our greetings. It is tedious, and so few of you tell good stories or daydreams. Do you have any jokes? First you must tell me a joke.”
“Jokes?”
“Funny sayings,” the Ehallan said. “Yes please. Uncomfortable situations. Hahahaha: jokes.”
“A joke… it’s really important that we see Kyros.” I said.
“Joke,” the alien squid said firmly.
I looked at Rada and Sita, and they shrugged. So aliens could joke? I thought furiously for a second. “Well, three men are sitting in prison to be executed: the warden ask what they want to eat. Filet mignon says the first. And he gets it, and then he gets executed. Then comes the next man. And he says, he wants lobster. And he gets it, and then he gets executed. Then they come to the last man, he’s an old and canny Caribbean bad-boy, I mean, lifelong prisoner, and he says he wants guinips. Guinips are a sort of fruit where I grew up, they’re hard shelled, with a big seed, and a slimy, tasty stuff on the seed.
“But anyway, the warden says, guinips are out of season, and the bad-boy says: that’s okay, I can wait.”
The single large squid eye stared at me. Then blinked.
“Execution? Execution isn’t funny. Why are people eating before they are killed? Why were they killed? I don’t understand. I don’t like this joke. It disturbs me…”
I held up my hands. “I’m sorry, it’s… it’s the first thing I could think of. It’s funny because the man chooses a food they can’t get for his last meal, so he’s being canny. You know?”
“I don’t know. Why were these men being killed?”
“Well, probably because they did something horrible.”
“Then why imply that it is good that this one escaped execution?”
“I… don’t know…”
In the bubble the Ehallan puffed its body out. “You are unfunny,” it pronounced. “So I will tell you: go find Kyros and quit bothering me. He’s through that lock, over the bridge. Just keep going that way.” It pointed with a tentacle.
I let out a deep breath.
“Oh, and use the breathers,” the ‘keeper’ said. “You can’t breathe our air, aliens. You keep forgetting that unless I spell it out. And that’s… unfunny. Goodbye.”
A puff of smoke filled the bubble and it was gone.
Sita burst out laughing. “That was the best joke you could come up with?”
I stared pure evil back at her. “What could you come up with quick like that?”
She stopped laughing.
I marched around the bubble toward the airlock we’d been pointed toward.
This was not how I imagined a first visit to a different world would be: with some weird floating alien asking me to tell it a joke.
If I’d known, I could have at least prepared…
***
The breathers looked like something right out of an old underwater adventure movie: way too large and insect-looking bulbs. They were stacked in front of the open, round door of the airlock leading outside.
“Wow, that is not what I was expecting,” Sita said.
“Right?”
I pulled the breather on over my head, like a giant helmet for deep-sea diving, then checked to make sure Sita and Rada had as well. I could see out of the helmet, as most of it was transparent.
“I can see okay.” That was Sita again. She waved at me.
“I can hear you!” I said.
“Good. I was hoping we could still communicate with each other,” Rada said.
I looked at the airlock. The giant, round door with small cog bits on the rim had rolled halfway aside, like it was a moon partially eclipsing a sun or something. “I should go first. In case the breathers don’t work.”
“Nonsense.” Rada stepped in. “Mimir wouldn’t have sent us if it was dangerous like that.”
As she and Sita joined me, the inside door of the airlock rolled itself shut, sensing our presence. Metal clanged, the outer section rolled out of our way, and we stepped out in the atmosphere of Ehalla.
It stung my skin a bit, and the roaring wind grabbed at the helmet, but after I leaned into it, it was okay.
What was not okay: the lack of railings on the far edge of the flat rim walkway all around the floating dome.
“They fly…” I muttered.
“What?” Sita asked.
I looked over at her. “They don’t have railings because they all fly around, they’re not worried about safety or nothing.”
We edge our way around, keeping close to the dome and far away from the edge, until we came to the bridge the keeper pointed at. It was a small, thin, rickety looking series of air honeycombed metal planks, with a railing on just one side, all supported in the air by what looked like large weather balloons tied off to either sides of the planks.
I couldn’t see the other side, the bridge disappeared off into a bank of red foggy cloud that had washed over us.
And I noticed it swayed.
“Kadie, that’s too dangerous…” Rada started to say.
“We don’t have any other choice,” I replied, walking toward the edge of the rim around the dome. “It’s that or get stranded here for the rest of our lives.”
At the edge, I grabbed the bridge’s left-side railing like a drowning man snatching at a rope.
I took a deep breath and looked down past the tips of my sneakers, down past the trailing girders and to the tops of clouds miles below me.
This was pretty whack.
“Stay back,” I said. And Rada and Sita stood well back. “I’ll cross. It will be okay. Mimir wouldn’t have sent me if it wasn’t safe.”
Other than crossing a rickety old bridge hanging above the clouds, high in the sky of a gas giant, with no railing on one side.
I stepped onto the bridge. The whole structure sank and wobbled, shifted about, but held my weight.
Barely.
Up close now, to be honest, the planks were wide enough to walk easily over. It was just that every ten feet or so, the planks were jointed. They creaked up and down and side to side, all connected by hitches to each other. Hitches like what you see on the back of a pickup.
And as I reached the hitches, the bridge bent down a bit, making a slight V.
At first, I walked, but sideways, with two hands on the railing at all times.
But that was taking forever, and as I got used to the snake-like motion of the gridded see-through planks, I got brave and used one hand to hold on so I could walk straight forward.
Eventually I picked up speed as I disappeared into the stinging and dimly lit fog. I all but trotted the last few feet of the bridge.
In the dimness, I could see I stood in front of a tiny dome, held aloft by clusters of massive balloons far overhead. I could hear the wires leading to balloons singing in the wind.
Decorated balloons bobbled in the air, a variety of colors and shapes. They were all tied off to small rings welded into the structure at random points.
I tugged on the end of a piece of string, curious about the knot. The body of the rope had been looped, then snaked through the ring, and then another loop pulled through the center of that loop. The tugging balloon kept the knot locked.
It looked familiar, this knot, I thought. My dad showed it to me. He used it for fenders on the side of the fishing boat he sometimes had to work on for extra money. It let you yank one loose end and the whole knot came apart quick, so you can pull the fenders up quick.
Could a knot my dad used on boats in the islands be used by aliens on another planet? I yanked on the free end of the rope leading to the loop within a loop, curious to see if I was correct.
The whole knot fell apart and the balloon shot up into the sky. I tried to hang onto it, so I could tie it back down, but I was jerked clean off my feet and into the air. I had to let go right away. I dropped three feet back to the surface of the floating dome, my heart thudding. I’d almost yanked myself up into the air to my death!
My dad called those highwayman’s knots: as long as there was tension the knot held. But it was easy to quickly pull apart by grabbing that one loose end.
I had to quit fiddling with everyone I saw out here, I thought. That curiosity was going to get me killed. I focused on what I needed to get done here. I took a deep, steadying breath, and calmed myself down. The airlock to this dome was a hinged door, and just in front of me. I banged on it several times.
I thought I could hear an echo inside, but nothing happened.
I banged on the door again, harder, and stepped back. But not too far. Like the other dome, the rim here had no railing.
Nothing still. I had my fist raised to walk forward and bang on the door again, when something tapped me from behind on the shoulder.
I screamed and spun around.
“Hello, little alien,” the Ehallan said. It had one of its tentacles in a small handhold, or tentaclehold, notched along the rim, and was holding itself in place there. “You keep banging. What is it you want?”
I had shoved myself hard up against the door as I’d jumped back. “I’m here to see Kyros,” I said quickly.
“Well done. I’m Kyros. You have succeeded.”
The Ehallans, I thought, were a bit odd. “Yes, I need to talk to you, then, Kyros. Mimir sent me.”
“Good for Mimir. Sadly, I’ve never met a Mimir before in my life. What does one Mimir look like? Is it an alien like yourself?”
“No,” I held up a hand. “I’m sorry, Mimir’s an avatar, of the All Tree.”
“The All Tree, yes: I know the All Tree. It sent you?”
I made a face. “Sort of. There was an emergency, the avatar sent me.”
Kyros tapped the airlock door with a tentacle. It creaked open, and I had to move aside. “That sounds grave. I think we need to talk further, little alien. Join me in my workshop.”
The Ehallan puffed yellow smoke and slowly drifted down under the rim, away from sight.
I walked into the workshop’s airlock and clanged the door shut behind me.