CLAM is a short science fiction I hope to publish in a couple of weeks. Here is the first chapter.
“Looks
like you are holding the last can,” said the old man, leaning back in his chair,
his hand fumbling inside a pocket. Before he put a simulated cigarette in his
mouth, he murmured something like hate it.
“Aren’t
you a biologist?” Devin said as he peeled the lid off the can and poured the
precooked clams into a bowl. With a deep breath, he momentarily forgot about
the gray-haired biology professor sitting at the same table. To Devin, eating
was an effective way to deal with anxiety, and his anxiety had been progressing
as they approached Mullos 17 b, a planet located eighty light years away from
home.
“Why
would somebody ask me this question every time I smoke?” Roland smiled. The wrinkles
around his eyes reminded Devin of the growth rings on a clamshell. Roland had a
small figure, an aquiline nose, and eyes that always expressed interests in his
surroundings, although at the moment, Devin could not think of anything fascinating
in the windowless kitchen of a spaceship.
“A
biologist is a human,” Roland continued. “And humans don’t stop doing things
just because they know the harm.”
Devin
made no reply and quietly ate his clams. He tried to concentrate on the food
and ignore the questions that kept popping up in his mind. Was he really here
twelve years ago? How could there be no memories left? And his three colleagues
who …
“Sometimes
I wonder,” Roland interrupted at the right moment, “what’s the point of living
a life as a clam, or … or a lobster? Well, at least lobsters have brains.” He gazed
down and frowned at the fake cigarette, but soon decided to resume smoking. “As
clams, do they even know they exist? I mean, after they are born … You know, in
my junior year I was once interested in clams’ reproductive systems. They can
be male, female, or hermaphroditic …”
Devin
suddenly lost his appetite. The idea that the mushy gooey stuff in his mouth may
have been self-conscious turned his stomach. He enjoyed talking to Roland most
of the time. Well, most of the time! He dumped the unfinished clams with the
shells into a garbage bag and cleaned up the table. He needed a moment alone.
* * *
He
climbed up with ease the long and narrow stairs leading to the bridge. At the
age of forty-nine, Devin was swifter and stronger than most of his peers as a
result of regular exercise. He had tanned and tight skin, bright eyes with
superb eyesight. Health, career, and personal life had been great, barring the
last mission that had made him a hero to some people, and to others “a coward
who ran home alone with his colleagues left to die”.
And
unless he retrieved his lost memory, he could argue against neither, even to
himself.
The
bridge was a circular room with windows providing a 360-degree view. Pleasant
hums surrounded various machines that had been deliberately arranged to make
use of every available spot. To his surprise, Mina was still sitting at her station,
and he couldn’t recall seeing her at all in the kitchen. The young Asian woman was
scrutinizing something on the screen in front of her. The long smooth hair lay
freely on her back, and her right hand was habitually holding the black-framed
glasses. With simple and effective eye surgeries—Devin reflected—few women still
wore glasses nowadays. Somehow she persisted.
“This
isn’t right,” she glanced at him and said. She had a freckle-free face with
long eyebrows and limpid eyes. A very “clean” look, Devin always thought.
He
kept walking and ignored her comment. Girls are always paranoid. He knew that as
a father of two teenage daughters. He stopped at the front of the room and surveyed
the blue planet ahead. Still far, it resembled Earth in many ways with notable
dissimilarities. The side of the globe they were facing at had a single ring-shaped
continent. Inside the ring there was a large lake or a small ocean. A massive
white cloud with a swirl hole at the center perched on the northwest of the continent.
There could be an island hidden underneath the storm, but Devin couldn’t tell
unless he resorted to the computers.
Then
the sour feeling stirred his heart again. How could he not remember seeing the
planet? Over the past twelve years not a single day had passed without him
trying to recall details of the previous mission. And what happened to his
colleagues?
“This
just can’t be real!” Now Mina was almost screaming.
Devin
exhaled and left for her desk. Her screen showed a shadow-like image, roughly
oval-shaped except for the large crack that ran all the way from the surface to
the center. Mina tapped her fingers on the screen to make the object rotate. At
certain angles the crack was revealed as a hollow sector of thirty degrees or
so, and it went so deep that it almost split the whole thing into halves.
Creepy!
Devin straightened up and shook his head. He knew they were looking at the
smaller moon orbiting Planet Mullos 17 b, since he had just spotted the other
moon in front of the planet. It wasn’t uncommon for celestial objects to carry
signs of intensive collisions, normally in the form of humongous craters or
cracks on the surface. But such a clean and deep cut could not have been
natural.
“What
do you think?” he heard Mina asking.
“That’s
why we are here, right?” He tried to sound relaxed. “Looking for evidence of life.
This thing gives us a heads up.”
It
was true that the goal of this mission, as well as a series of other missions
to different planetary systems, was to discover extraterritorial lives, but
Devin had just realized they weren’t ready for what was waiting ahead. To date
humans had also built various facilities on Earth’s moon, but what would be the
reason for taking away a large chunk of a celestial body? And how could anyone
have managed to carry out the task?
Soon,
Roland and Kenton joined them after receiving Mina’s brief message. The four of
them gathered in front of a large screen, watching new details being filled in
as Belief-II slowed down and entered
the small planetary system. Just as Devin thought things couldn’t have become
eerier, the scanning of the moon surface was completed. Rather than an olive
with a chunk of it taken, a better description of the moon would be a
relatively flat bottom attached to a half-open lid, or valve. In fact—Devin
swallowed hard—the whole thing looked like one of the clams he had just consumed.
