This, what I’m calling a partial of Nalbo’s mangled hand, began its life in a totally different kingdom of life. Have a look for something fungal. Its image, once I’d cut certain pieces away, sort of reminded me of a mangled hand I once did see … a shocking injury … I thought would illustrate Nalbo’s injury nicely.
Below is an example of a autostereogram. ‘Crossing your eyes’ (crossing the lines of sight from your eyes) you should be able to see a 3D version of this pic. This concept, invented by the Hungarian neuropsychologist Bela Julesz features in this chapter.
Forgot to get the reference, it’s from the Wikipedia article about autostereograms.
This image is a cut from an original photo by whom I don’t know from somewhere in the gloaming beside the virtual ocean where we go surfing when we open our laptops, switch on our desktops or scroll up our mobile phones. Cell phones to you, too.
It might even be a cut from an image from iStock where I purchased maybe thirty useful shots a few years back. I don’t remember. The fire is the important thing, though. As in, Claire builds a fire.
This story was written well before the no-no thing started about dogs dying in a story.
[I realize dogs are our best friends. I’ve owned a dog myself and it was a wrench to let her go when that became necessary. She was only nine years old when she developed a brain tumor and could not be saved.]
In this story one of the dogs briefly dies. So, I guess, you can take this as a spoiler alert.
At the time when I started writing Claire’s and Nalbo’s stories, I titled the manuscript Earth Fall for a working title. History soon caught up with me and there have been a novel, a film and a four-person shooter video game published by that name, and I thought for a while that I would change the name, the way that I renamed the story that became Lodestar.
But Earth Fall still makes the most sense for this story of the alien engineer, in an Earth-centric orbit for fifty years in his spaceship, comes down to Earth for an as yet unknown reason, leaving the majority of his alien and human support system to keep his spaceship in orbit.
His arrival in Earth’s neighborhood caused all sorts of distress to electronic communications and transport, as apparently his spacecraft grazed over the fields of electrical pulses. Communication satellites stopped working on day one, and humanity teetered at the brink of collapse for a decade before things stabilized, minus electronics.
Sounds like a fairly weak set-up in this day and age, though many a film plot has got up and run with much less originality. But it’s Claire’s and Nalbo’s meeting with the Lotor-alien’s life-support system that’s of interest here.
Claire and Nalbo are a pair of fairly ordinary Australian retirees whose lives intersect with a bunch of completely unordinary alien beings. The things happening as a result are necessary knowledge (for you) if later on I decide to also serialize MELD (Part 2 of the Doomed trilogy). They are a prequel, if you like.
Rita de Heer 