"Open Wide and Say Ocule" a sci fi short story

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Several things had been going on for centuries. First, the navigation and monitoring systems of the S.S. Strabi had been malfunctioning, second was the ongoing war with the same enemy. Third was the Voice.

It was all so exhausting. It seemed as if the captain and crew of the Strabi had been appealing to the Voice for help with the same two problems for so long with nothing changing that the captain didn’t even record anything much in his log anymore. Until Lash Date OD-2-1.100 when something different finally did happen.

On the bridge came a far-off booming like an approaching storm over the western ocean of Ocule. As usual the great broken monitor showed nothing but a few fuzzy shapes of celestial bodies in the outer galaxy where they’d been lost and wandering for centuries, a million quanta away from their beloved home planet Ocule, and the booming was probably just their ancient enemy, the S.S. Ismus, coming in range and firing their lasers at the Mountain Planet in the quadrant to the west of them again, so the captain and crew dutifully stirred to life in their bridge seats at their unreliable stations, exchanging the same old words and actions as they’d been used to doing for centuries when this version of the scenario began. They weren’t yet aware of the change about to occur that would get their blood pumping, their minds alert. After all these centuries of predictable unreliability they were now simply interested in doing their jobs to see how the scenario would end up this time so they could log it with the other predictable variations for the ongoing analysis that Doctor Opia and Science Officer Tropia, the twins, were conducting to come up with a way to break out of the galatial mess and get back home. They no longer cared so much anymore about repairing the monitor or navigation or electrical systems in the vehicle and now, if they ever made it home they italicneveritalic wanted to go back out again. They just wanted to either a), log broken navigation patterns and battle outcomes and reach Ocule, or b) destroy their enemy completely and reach Ocule.

They’d never been able to destroy the Ismus.

It was because of Planet Mountain they’d never been able to destroy it. The beings aboard the Ismus had learned to use it to their advantage to evade destruction.

The Ismusians had always remained just out of sight behind it, a huge, one-hundred-times-larger-than-their-ships, dark, oblong-shaped planet bigger at the bottom than the top with no moons circling it, hence the name “Mountain Planet.” Except for once before, during an encounter on a lash date so old no one could remember now, it’d seemed as if the Strabi would get a good bead on it for a precise laser hit when almost two-thirds of it had momentarily hovered above Mountain, wavering, at the exact same time that the Strabi happened to be correctly aligned, but Weapons Officer Maser, nervous at the surprise opportunity, was so caught off guard that he fumbled and botched the shot. The Ismus had disappeared back behind Mountain an nth of a second just before the beam hit empty space, almost as if Officer Maser’s hurried trembling movements lining up had alerted it somehow. That was just it. Somehow. But how?

For the two enemies had never seen one another face to face, much less spoken to each other.

“Look alive, people!” said the captain as the faraway booms came. No one knew precisely what time of day it was because of the ship’s broken clock readouts, but the monitor glowed like dappled brown cat fur instead of completely black as it sometimes did, so it must’ve been ‘daytime.’ The Lash Date galatial timekeeper still worked though, and the captain read it off his chair’s arm panel. Because the automatic Captain’s Log didn’t work. “Yeoman Pixel, initiate journalizing Lash Date OD-2-1.100 and Tropia--”

“Already on it, Captain,” said Tropia from his science panel as Yeoman Pixel, a young enlisted man, relocated himself near the captain with his recording device now on.

“The Ismus just began firing on Planet Mountain today, we believe. Sonic evidence detected--” the captain said as even louder booms came from somewhere behind the southwest bulkhead, making the bodies of the crew automatically rock with slight alarm even as they kept on manning their posts, and the captain yell, “--and getting louder--Science Officer--”

But Tropia was already ahead of him, shouting capably but anxiously, “Measuring compression and rarefaction of the sounds as planned, Captain! Thirty point five five nine tril-hertz-degrees south-south-west and quickly diverting at a three tenths rate to the west-southwest and west-west-southwest--”

“Lieutenant Derigo, status of nav drive!”

“Periodically engaging, Captain!” came the surprised shout.

“Then use it!” Captain Joule commanded over the increasing sound of the booms, “use it like you’ve never used it before! They’re going axal!” Three crew members shouted and clapped and the captain was interrupted by excited Doctor Opia behind him.

“You know they’ll hide as usual!”

“Indeed!” shouted Tropia from the captain’s right, “going axal!” He began to count out his echo readings as the Strabi simply hovered in place, waiting, sometimes dipping a little to the left, then back again, everyone staring at the screen. “Point three five seven…now eight… now nine…”

Everyone held their breath. Up the left side of the monitor, the dark sloped shape of what they all knew to be Mountain Planet lay fuzzy but solid like the rock it was made of, angling slightly here or there on the screen only as their ship kept microscopically dipping and leveling out. Someone gasped as their ship’s nose suddenly tilted upward a slight bit, showing more of the narrow angled top of the mountain and more blurry space than they’d ever seen before, and Tropia kept on counting, “…now ten…eleven… Captain, the outer media of the emissions seems to prove--”

But no one was listening because suddenly the Ismus came fully into view and Captain Joule shouted, “Lt. Maser, don’t you move!”

Even Doctor Opia was stunned into silence at first. Then he cried, “Captain, what are you doing! They can easily shoot you as you them!”

“Lieutenant Vox, hailing frequency! Either testing our old communication equipment or testing their lasers, Doctor, we’re finally where Planet Mountain can’t jam us,” he said.

“Aye, aye, Captain! Hailing frequency, all languages!” shouted Vox, rusty switches clicked and groaned, and one long squeal cut in across the bridge, hurting ears and cutting out again.

“Maybe both,” muttered the doctor, covering his ears.

“S.S. Ismus, this is S.S. Strabi, hailing. Do you read?” Silence. “S.S. Ismus, this is S.S. Strabi. Do you read? Over.”

A crackling sound bubbled up over the bridge’s old surround sound and two things happened at once. They heard the response from Ismus at the same time as they heard the echoing booming Voice of their God, a Voice they hadn’t heard in a long time. The echo of the Voice died out.

The Captain scowled. “Say again, Ismus?” Then irritatedly to his crew, “How long’s it been since we heard Voice? Now? Voice talks to us now?”

In the excitement several of them answered him over the crackling coming from the ship’s speakers.

“Four or five decades.”

“Fifty years!”

“Fifty-nine point zero two eight years, Captain,” said Tropia.

“What did It say?” Derigo wanted to know. “Just now? Did anyone get it? The echoes were so big this time--”

The Voice drowned him out with incomprehensible echoes so loud and long this time that the words ran into each other. Yeoman Pixel’s recorder banged to the floor as he reached to squeeze his ears, his body corkscrewing in pain, and a female technician crawled under her station holding her ears. But the message from Ismus came again and it was small, but fell precisely as the last Voice echo died into silence and so this time was easy to understand.

In fact, to their surprise the person speaking from Ismus sounded like one of their own men, from their own planet, talking to them in their own language of Ocule so that Lt. Vox didn’t even have to operate the ship’s Translator.

The Ismus simply said, “I’m tired. You’re not going to shoot us are you?”

Captain Joule and the others looked taken aback. Then the captain said, “Well, uh. No. I was thinking more about a truce, because we just measured your guns as more powerful than ours.”

Everyone glanced at each other. Clearly this wasn’t true. They’d all heard Tropia’s counting which indicated not only location but the sizes of the massive booms as the Ismus’s lasers tallied against Mountain Planet. Even as massive as they were everyone knew the measurements of the Strabi’s guns, some of which still worked, were a lot bigger.

Captain Joule shrugged, letting out a chuckle. “Huh. So, see? You could blow us out of the water right now if you wanted to.” But everyone saw him nod at Lt. Maser who then silently eased his hands up to the weapons controls.

In that moment, the S.S. Strabi suddenly and unexpectedly drifted upward and a little to the right, Joule shooting navigation officer Derigo a look, who shrugged. His whole body was turned away from the steering mechanism, so it clearly couldn’t have been him doing it.

The captain said, “Uh, did you just see that, Ismus?”

“What,” came the reply.

“Our ship just rose up and to the right.”

“Yes.”

“So you can see us clearly?”

“Yes. Why?”

“What about your navigation systems? How are they?”

“Why?”

Captain Joule answered with the entire crew hanging on every word because this was unprecedented. For the first time since anyone could remember, no one knew what was going to happen next.

“Well,” Captain Joule said, sounding conversational, but his eyes locked with Lt. Maser’s whose hands rested confidently on the weapons panel ready for the order. “Because we can’t remember how long our nav systems have been wonky and unresponsive to repair.”

There was a pause.

“Really…”

“Yes,” said the captain.

“How long would you estimate?”

The captain sighed. “Three hundred years. Give or take.”

Some of the crew looked nervous.

“Really? Well, ours has been about the same for that amount of time too.”

The Strabi crew looked at each other.

The Ismus went on. “And our lasers just conked out.”

A stir went through the crew and Captain Joule’s hand went out to stop it as the Ismus said, “Your measurements are correct, they’re huge, but that’s because we’ve gradually been storing all energy from our other systems into them for one last hurrah in case we ever started to drift into your line of sight again. We just blew them all out blasting at the large mountain-shaped planet to scare you away. We’ve got nothing.”

The locked eyes of Captain Joule and Lt. Maser were in understanding as Maser’s hands quietly moved on the weapons panel setting aim, strength and range.

Suddenly the Voice boomed over them again, upsetting all that.

“Do you hear that?” Joule yelled over it to the Ismus.

“What is it?”

He waited for the echoes to die out.

“That’s who we worship since Time immemorial. The God of our Planet Ocule. At the beginning of time he used to listen to us and help out when we needed it, but since our screen went fuzzy two hundred years ago it’s like he’s gone deaf. We barely hear from him anymore but when we do, he’s-- so-- loud. He’s just gotten louder. We can’t even understand him anymore.”

“Well, I can hear him, pretty clearly from behind you.”

“What’s he saying?” Captain Joule saw the eyes of his crew get big, alert, like his own. Their God might speak to them, help them, through their enemy!? Maybe they were finally going home?!

But the captain of the Ismus said something else first. “I lied before when I said I saw your ship drift up and to your right. I saw your ship move up and to our right.”

“What? But we’re facing each other--” The Voice boomed drowning the captain out and he jumped up from his chair yelling, “What is the Voice saying?” running to the great monitor with both hands over his ears. Right before he reached it he tripped because the ship suddenly jolted upwards, knocking other crew members off their feet too, but then it stopped and steadily began floating again. It floated steadily… straight, straight, up, up and up.

Crew members, back on their feet, madly worked their panels, trying to correct. This was a thing that’d never happened before.

As if trying to hold the ship down, Captain Joule yelled and desperately hugged the monitor, his body splayed out half over the left image of the mountain planet and half in the center of the galaxy with its distant fuzzy planets. “Why is our ship floating straight up now!? What side of your ship is the large mountain planet on!?”

“It’s on our left. On your right,” said the Ismus.

“Impossible! Impossible!” the captain cried, “it’s on our left!” as the Voice began to boom out yet again, over which Captain Joule shouted, “Ismus, just tell us what he’s saying!”

Inside the close-walled little room, seated in the comfy big blue chair with the rectangular metal box hanging down in front of his head, his tennis-shoed feet just a few inches above the chair’s foot rest, framed pictures of fuzzy sheep and cuddly bunny rabbits behind him, the little boy said quietly, “Um, that one. Um, the first one. No. Go back. The one before that.” On his lap was a tin hot air balloon toy, his fingers tightly clasping some of the stiff wire strings, a tin uniformed man inside the tiny balloon’s basket. There were three other people in the room with the boy. A man and a woman in separate chairs a few feet in front of him, anxiously listening and watching, and a man in a short white coat next to him on a stool. The white-coated man patiently flipped levers on the rectangular metal box.

The man and the woman stared as the white-coated man swiveled the rectangular box away from the boy’s face and the boy’s eyes came back into their view again, his left eye drifting in toward his nose and gradually up, while the right eye angled slightly down from its normal center and held there, quivering slightly.

The man in the white coat scribbled something on a little desk with his back to the man and woman, mumbling the boy’s name on the paper at first. “Samuel Shipton.” Then he faced them and said, “It’s definitely strabismus. It’s a treatable condition. Good thing you adopted him when you did. The orphanage must not’ve given a damn.”

The little boy piped up as he’d suddenly been doing a lot lately in the presence of his new parents. “But it’s not, Mama.”

“Not what?” said the woman.

“Not-- strabih-- strabiss--”

The white-coated man helped him. “Strabismus.”

“Strabismus,” the boy said, smiling because he got the strange word right. “It’s not strabismus,” he told them. “It’s like I told you. I’ve had ‘em for years. I got aliens behind my eyes.”

-end-