The floating Man-O-War looking things served as space satellites. As we neared the planet, a pair floated outside our window, bathing the ship in red light.
Rilquza placed his hand on a panel, causing our ship to respond with five notes: Re, Mi, Do, Do, So...
The floating thing responded with the same notes, but with the sounds of a bassoon.
A group of jellyfish things swarmed our vehicle, escorting us down through the planet's atmosphere.
Thick, unusually shaped clouds tantalized the imagination with possibilities.
When the clouds cleared, we found jungle canopy obscuring the view.
It stretched all the way to the horizon, no sign of buildings, parking lots or roads, just the tops of trees and long winding ribbons of massive green rivers.
As the canopies gained definition, subtle indications of civilization emerged from the foliage. Poking out, here and there, we spotted huge marble-like spheroids, twisting multicolored spires and domed buildings set high among the branches.
Our craft got joined by dozens of others in different shapes, sizes and colors.
Gertie pointed. "Look! Look! It's ET's ship!"
"Maybe...but I think he's home warming an egg right now."
"I hope we get to see him soon. I'm so tired of waiting!"
We approached a vast glittering structure shaped like a lotus on a lily pad, its shells and big windows curving as elegantly as the Sydney Opera House.
The interior served as a garage of sorts. Our vehicle parked on a shelf in a big vending machine thing between other spaceships.
A blue gelatin-like substance enveloped the hull. Our pilots informed us it had something to do with decontamination.
Tolmina shut off the engine, leading us to the exit hatch. I asked if we should bring our things along, but Colzest said they'd have someone bring the items to us once decontamination was complete.
The hatch opened on the wall jiggling blue stuff. The substance obscured the view beyond the walls of our compartment. Vague shapes moved around. Qulpari gawked and pointed to us, machinery shifted, other vending machine things rotated.
"Can we eat that blueberry Jell-O?" Gertie asked. The aliens said no, definitely not.
Afraid of suffocating, I grabbed the oxygen equipment, but Rilquza stopped me, showing me a creature, attached to the ship by a long snake-like body. You put it on your face to breathe in these kinds of situations. Goggles kept the stuff out of your eyes. Charlie got placed in a special `pet carrier'.
Rilquza and Tolmina stepped through the ooze first, speaking to someone on the other side.
The masks snaked back to us, enclosed in protective bubbles. Colzest urged me and Jamie to put them on.
Rilquza's goggles were an odd fit, but they suckered around our eyes well enough to protect us from...whatever it was.
Jamie let Gertie go ahead of her, acting like she were looking out for my sister, being the young one and all, but I think she was just scared.
I and Gertie clutched each other's hands as we waded through ooze that felt like gel hand sanitizer. The air tubes in my nose and mouth pumped me with air smelling of burnt popcorn and old bagels. My eyes stung in places where the gel seeped in, but, unlike sanitizer, it only had the effect of opening your eyes in a chlorinated swimming pool.
From outside, Rilquza and Tolmina guided us out to a couple panels at the border of the cube.
The moment I stepped on one, a blast of hot air and something powdery shot out from a grating below my feet, and I became encapsulated in a large rubbery bubble, resistant to puncture. My glasses somehow got separated from me.
While this transpired, the Qulpari used their powers to separate my hand from my sister's. She ended up floating in an unconnected bubble next to mine, unhappily attempting to pop the bubble with her fingernails.
The masks and goggles traveled back into the ship.
I hovered in a place resembling a shopping mall, with all its balconies, landings, and decorative plant boxes, the walls covered in colorful hexagonal tiles, large non-English banners hanging from the rafters.
Colzest somehow coaxed Jamie out, aliens telepathically moving Gertie aside like a balloon, to make room for her. Jamie too got blasted with powder and...ballooned. Other aliens pointed and stared at our bubbles, muttering to each other. "Oooohhh!"
"What are they doing to us!" Jamie cried.
Since I was the one with the Jandaga in my ear, I posed the question to Colzest.
It's standard procedure. The Eklemese need to know if you have any contaminants not eliminated by the Gorbild Cube.
"We're not sick."
It doesn't matter. Any time we bring an animal here, it has to be placed in quarantine until it's cleared with Eklemese.
"But I'm not an animal.I'm a person."
Tolmina relayed the argument to an official looking Qulpari in a silver and turquoise `bone' breastplate. He only got a short dismissive growl in reply.
He says that every animal feels like they're special, but we can't afford to get anyone sick.
"They are going to bring us our stuff, aren't they?"
Jamie stared at me in horror. "Are they going to lock us away in a zoo?"
I asked, but nobody could answer the question. The guy with the breastplate just gave an order to place us in something called a Todronab and take us to the Woxewan, whatever that was.
A group of Qulpari donned masks and entered the ship, emerging with sealed containers, presumably our stuff.
We got floated down a ramp, amidst hundreds of staring aliens, mostly Qulpari, but a good number of Abreyas too. An iris gate opened, and we found ourselves outside.
A brilliant green sky spread over our heads, matching the color of their rivers It had been late fall when we had left earth, it had been late fall, ET's planet happened to be in the middle of summer. Not the best season for our particular outfits. The heat baked us through our bubbles.
Trees surrounded us on all sides, big and little in a wide assortment of colors. Some didn't appear to have leaves, just trunks, boughs and branches supporting huge clusters of pink and purple cotton balls, fuzzy orbs ranging from the size of a basketball to the diameter of a boulder. Other trees bore tube shaped leaves resembling sea anemone, and when you passed them, their brilliant flowers shot back inside the tubes.
A lot of abstract sculptures stood between them, and sculptures of Qulpari with plaques I couldn't read. No billboards, advertisements, or books or newspapers defaced the landscape. Here and there, I caught a Qulpari at rest, running their hands over a long beaded textile, or something resembling a gold tailor's tape measure, kind of like how Native Americans used to read wampum.
The huge lily pad thing supporting the `garage' and surrounding platform had been crafted from a type of super light concrete, covered with hexagonal paving stones. Footfalls and objects hitting its surface made hollow sounds.
We arrived at a dock, floating before a metal construct that looked like part of a roller coaster track.
A glance over the edge told me how far off the ground we were. Trees the size of skyscrapers, bedecked with futuristic mushroom shaped buildings, extended down for more than fifty feet on every side. I sucked in my breath.
A heavy wind shook our bubbles violently, causing them to drift so much I feared we'd blow off the edge. Somehow, though, in between us captives willing the bubbles not to move, and the aliens' power, we didn't.
The source of the disturbance came zooming up the tracks, a giant train-like living caterpillar creature with a hairy segmented body and a big head that combined features of a fly with a house cat. It came to a stop with a loud pneumatic hiss, door panels swinging outward and up on its furry sides like a Delorean.
Our alien friends floated us inside this thing, through a fuzzy subway-like compartment. Portholes gaped outwards. The seats, ramps and standing poles grew from the thing's body. I imagined if you drove a nail into any part of it, the creature would shriek and derail itself.
Transporting contaminated livestock appeared to be a common practice in that place, for our bubbles got deposited in a set of egg-carton-like depressions in between benches.
Although we had the comforting presence of Rilquza, Tolmina and Colzest nearby, it didn't change the fact that everyone in the entire vehicle stared at us, or our imprisonment.
"I feel like a monkey at a zoo," Gertie complained.
Jamie slumped in her bubble. "Not a lot we can do about it now...At least they let us keep our clothes. Every time you read a story about someone being abducted, they generally get stripped naked and probed."
My sister rolled around in the bubble like a hamster in a ball. "You think they'll give me clothes like Rilquza has?"
"I...don't know."
The swing doors closed, and we were moving. The view out the windows skewed as our otherworldly living vehicle dropped at a steep, dangerous angle.
"Is this thing safe?" Jamie asked the aliens.
I repeated the inquiry.
You have nothing to worry about. Qulpari use this Todronab every day.
Jamie frowned at me. "So where do you think they're taking us?"
I shook my head. "I don't know, Tatooine?"
Gertie idly rocked her bubble. "They said we were going to the Woxewan."
"Yeah? And what is that, exactly? A prison? A dairy farm? The place where they train Stormtroopers?"
"Dunno." I tried to ask, but our three alien friends got busy talking to other aliens about a lot of complicated stuff I couldn't understand, and they acted like they couldn't hear when I spoke to them.
Jamie groaned. "I was picturing something different when I volunteered to come along on this crazy adventure."
My face flushed hot. "So now you volunteered? I thought ET was `playing matchmaker and arranging a marriage for us!'"
She sighed in frustration. "Why do I even talk to you?"
"Don't get upset at him," Gertie blurted. "You're the first girlfriend he's ever had. He doesn't know how to talk to them. I know because I'm his sister."
Jamie laughed, her angry expression softening a little as she gazed into my eyes. "That true?"
I swallowed. "Maybe?"
"You should say yes, Elliott," Gertie urged.
Jamie grinned expectantly.
I rolled my eyes. "Okay, okay! It's true. Every word of it."
She giggled. "It's nothing to be ashamed of. At least now I understand you."
The swing doors came back open again, and everyone came filing out.
Our alien friends floated us out on another vast platform. Before us stood a huge swirling purple-orange orb flanked by colorful onion domes and spires that made you think of ice cream. A pair of impossibly large trees supported the main structure and its associated maze of little domed buildings.
While the others took a ramp down into the dome area, us humans got levitated out on an enclosed moving sidewalk above. We rolled ahead, watching the crowds beneath doing business transactions with `wampum' and bracelets of different kinds of glowing beads.
Moments later, we arrived at a silver gate, guarded by a pair of breastplate wearing Qulpari.
On either side of this gate lay a set of dark, forbidding looking giant tubes, reminding me of construction site trash chutes.
Without a word, a breastplated guard gave me a push, and I fell screaming into the dark.
I tumbled for what felt like a mile, then the dark pipe bent like a water slide, shooting me down another tube.
Abruptly I went sailing through the air, into a big rubbery wall.
My balloon bounced off, splashing down into a pool of water. There I floated for over a minute.
Part of the wall lowered into the water, currents dragging me forward with a mechanical humming sound. I could only watch helplessly as the bubble rolled down a channel, through a darkened alien gondola tunnel.
My bubble disappeared, dropping me into a pool of ice cold water.
Shivering, I paddled through an underground reservoir. Big gray undecorated cube, only one visible door.
Although crystal clear and refreshing, my teeth chattered, so I quickly swam to a ramp, climbing up on a raised concrete island that made hollow sounds when I walked on it.
A moving sidewalk came on when I approached. Since I had nowhere else to go, I let it take me through a tunnel.
The conveyor ended in a semicircular room lined with doors. All kinds of weird animal noises ushered from within, but I couldn't tell which was safe. I froze in one spot, refusing to budge.
A light appeared above a door with a musical tone.
It slid open, revealing a gray prison-like room.
"ET!" I yelled. "Vorxora!"
No answer.
"Rilquza! Tolmina! Anyone! Help?"
A cluster of glowing arrows appeared around the open door.
I whimpered.
For the first time since we left the moon, I had real doubts about the kindness of ET's people.
It felt like I'd only traded one governmental prison cell for another.
Completely alone, I let my tears fall, despondently shuffling into the cell.