Humankind has found the stars - and forgotten the coordinates of their home planet. Then Hana does the impossible and gets pregnant. Her mother's predictions ringing in her ears, she sets out to find humanity's lost cradle. She only has a myth to gu...
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The planet Obelara was beautiful. And dead.
Over eons, its twin suns had bleached the craggy ground which jutted up in slanted, rough-hewn stalagmites. Carved right into the rock and soil, a great temple snaked around those illogical mountains, covering the planet in massive structures of cylinders and spheres connected via tunnels which tamed the rushing wind into a gentle melody. The weave of ghostly pitches shaken from the very rock around them was mesmerizing, even with Phili shouting over it.
"It's a planet called Earth?" His fingers moved spherically, caressing an imaginary world as he struggled with the right words to communicate with the bald man. "Um...it's...blue. We think. Uh...lots of...carbon."
Clad in robes of reflective cloth that shone a rainbowed, oil-slick hue, the man gave no reply. He was a living statue perfectly at home among the stone walls.
"I have a theory." ALI chimed in from the device in Hana's pocket. "Trader Standard doesn't seem to be the lingua franca on this planet. Perhaps another dialect?"
"Um...okay. Uh..." Phili's eyes squirmed in their gray sockets as his thoughts meandered through alien verbiage. "Doolei p'mchatka—uh—Earth wuk'd?"
"It's pronounced 'wauk'd,'" ALI corrected.
"Not in Foor-ish."
"These creatures can't speak Foor-ish. Their mouths are poorly shaped to produce the phonemes."
"I speak Foor-ish," Phili insisted, "their mouths are just like mine."
"And you can't pronounce 'wauk'd.'"
"I did say 'wuk'd."
"Wauk'd."
"Wuk'd!" Phili said sternly toward Hana's hip pocket.
"You require three uvulas to produce the correct vowel. In the Mollusk sickbay, I can carve the necessary appendages from your soft palette, if you would lik—"
