Cold Eyes (First Contact) by Peter Cawdron

Author:Peter Cawdron [Cawdron, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-26T14:00:00+00:00

Land

Sleeping with the sun always up isn’t easy. Even if Dali positions himself so Luyten’s Star is at his back, over time, his raft turns and the alien sun once again brightens his eyelids. His sunshade is designed to get rid of glare, not light. It is intended to allow astronauts to work in space so it dims the light but doesn’t darken his helmet. Eventually, Dali slips off to sleep again.

Hours later, his raft gets stuck. After bobbing in the ocean for what felt like days, it’s a strange sensation to be stationary, resting on a submerged ledge. Dali opens his eyes, raises his glare visor and looks around.

Land!

Okay, cliffs is a more accurate description, but the land-dweller has reached land. This is cause for celebration. He pumps his fist.

The alien sun sits low on the horizon, lighting up a perpetually blood-red sky.

Dali’s drifted into a shallow bay. He’s roughly two football fields from shore, having come up against one of hundreds of rocky columns rising from the ocean floor. They’re natural rather than artificial, that much is clear from their rough, unfinished shapes. The top of each column is covered in thousands of uneven, overlapping concentric circles. It’s as though a fine-dining chef has created these columns out of swirls of spaghetti. Most of the columns are beneath the waterline, but a few break the surface, protruding just a couple of inches above the water.

“What is this place?”

The water is clear and shallow, being only four feet deep. Sand lines the bay. Hundreds of chalky columns reach up to the surface in either direction, stretching away from him. None of them are any wider than a car tire. To his mind, they look like ultra-fine threads of wool heaped on top of each other.

Dali drops down into the chest-deep water. His boots kick up sediment. With one arm draped over the raft, he begins wading between the columns, making his way toward the shore. Kari’s astrobiology program kicks in.

Biological structure detected.

“Are these corals?” he asks, running his hand over the water, wanting to get a good look at the nearest one. He leans in, letting the cameras on his helmet focus on the columns.

Formation appears to be built by microscopic, clonal colonies. Although morphology differs, the ecological niche is reminiscent of accumulated microbial mats. These are similar in structure to stromatolites. Assuming similar growth ranges and weather-abrasion rates, estimated age 46,000 years.

Damn. If that estimate’s correct, these things started growing long before human civilization arose on Earth.

Dali rubs his glove across the surface of the column. It feels like rock to him. The swirls could be overlapping coffee cup stains, or the oily stain of onion rings dumped on a paper towel.

He wades on, stepping between the submerged columns. They’re separated by roughly the same volume of water they occupy, forming a kind of maze.

“This is like a cosmic game of pinball,” he says to himself, noting the red recording light is still on. Kari’s algorithm is still seeing value in the footage.

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