Alien
Danny doodled absently in the margins of his homework. He’d gotten into the Astronomy elective this year, and although he’d finished that homework, he wasn’t ready to start on his Language Arts homework. Instead, he daydreamed, his thoughts drifting slowly from the sun, to satellites, to stars, to planets.
“Clockwork, are there ghost portals on other planets? I mean,” he said, revising his question, “could a person travel to another planet, like, um, Mars, using natural portals?”
For a long moment, Clockwork didn’t answer, and Danny sighed, aware that he did sometimes push his luck when it came to Clockwork and questions. As Clockwork said, he couldn’t give Danny all the answers.
“That’s an interesting question,” said Clockwork.
“It is?” asked Danny, sitting up on the couch (which bore a remarkable similarity to the couch Danny’s parents had blown up when he was six).
“Yes,” said Clockwork. “It is.” He moved to the side of the time screen he’d been looking at, letting Danny see it.
The screen showed a starscape, detailed, bright, and familiar. Earth’s night sky.
“A portal may form anywhere that sufficiently captures the soul,” said Clockwork.
“Like… imagination-wise?”
“That is the most common element in these situations, yes.”
Danny squinted at Clockwork. “The way you phrased that is weird.”
“But no less true.”
“People imagine Mars all the time,” said Danny.
“So they do,” said Clockwork. He flicked his hand and the image on the screen dispersed into static, only to resolve into what Danny quickly recognized as the beginning of Sam, Tucker, and his disastrous trip with the Infi-Map. "But natural portals do not only pierce through space."
Danny floated up off the couch, abandoning his homework. "Is this your way of telling me that we're going to start finding weirdly old bodies on Mars and stuff?"
"There are other planets than Mars," said Clockwork. "And more than humans pass through portals."
"Yeah, I know, but Mars was–" he stopped. "You don't mean planets in this solar system, do you? You mean– you're talking about things from Earth going to other solar systems."
"It is a possibility."
"But," continued Danny, approaching the screen, "people didn't know about exoplanets until pretty recently. So, were the portals just aimed at the stars, or…?"
Rather pointedly, the Danny on the screen tumbled from the sixteen-hundreds to Rome.
"Right. I guess time, um." He winced. "Portals can form regardless of time."
"Nice save," said Clockwork with a raised eyebrow.
"I'm trying to follow your clues," complained Danny. He continued to watch the screen. "Is that just one sided, from the future that knows about things, to the past that doesn't?"
"Were you trapped in the past?"
"No," said Danny, "but we also knew about the future."
"Hm," said Clockwork.
"I guess I'm trying to ask… If you had something in, like, I don't know, the time when bacteria started producing oxygen–"
"The Siderian Period."
"Yeah, then. Could a portal open then, in the, uh, the Siderian Period on Earth, and go through the Ghost Zone, and have the other side be on planet that it could, um. Live on? That wasn't Earth?"
"The chances are small," said Clockwork.
"But they exist?" pressed Danny.
Clockwork waved his hand again, and the screen flickered, going from Danny and Vlad fighting in a coliseum to a cloudy blue-green ocean. A neon green whirl came to life among the blue, and the point of view zoomed through it, coming to a stop above a gray ocean under a whitish sun. Bluish water trickled through the tiny portal, splashing into the gray sea. The color diffused, slowly.
Danny bounced in the air, excited. "And it could live?"
"I believe you are the one who told me humans had calculated the odds of a mouse surviving on the surface of the sun for a week."
"Then that means, that means that there could be real alien life that ultimately came from Earth."
"What makes you think this is not Earth?" asked Clockwork, tilting his staff at the screen. "The sky you know takes much of its color from the composition of its atmosphere. What makes you think either of them were Earth?”
Danny’s mouth slowly formed an O of surprise.
"But then," said Danny, “you could basically have a chain. Life going from one planet to the next and the next after that… Would things get traded back and forth like that? Is that where missing links go?”
“Most holes in the fossil record are simply due to chance, or certain organisms being difficult to preserve.”
“But not all of them?”
Clockwork hummed noncommittally.
“That’s so cool,” said Danny. “Like, aliens had to exist, either way. Life happening in one place and not anywhere else– Well, that’s way too unlikely. But this is really cool.”
“As you have said.”
“But if the crossover is consistent… if it’s consistent, wouldn’t someone have noticed? I know people disappear all the time, but people showing up out of nowhere is different. Isn’t it?”
“Remember,” said Clockwork, “the current awareness of your world is a relatively recent development. For most of human history, if a new group of people arrived in an area, and local people were not able to recognize where they came from, they simply assumed they were from somewhere far away, but still knowable."
"Well… okay. I can see that. Just. Wow." He leaned back in the air, still caught in a sense of wonder. "There could be whole civilizations out there… Imagine if we could make portals that go to those places and visit. I know there's the Infi-Map, but still."
"There are reasons that ghosts no longer seek such things out, except for the foolish and the power-hungry."
"Oh," said Danny, but he only deflated a little bit.
"Daniel."
Danny righted himself to look at Clockwork. "Yeah?"
"It may come, someday, that you will ask a question that seems to have no answer, or encounter a situation to which there seems to be no solution. Think back to this when you do."
"Okay," said Danny.
"Now, get back to your homework. I know you haven't done it all."
Danny stuck out his tongue and flitted back to the couch. Clockwork was right, but he didn’t have to say it.
