Alien Son by G. S. Kenney Synopsis While working on her Ph.D. thesis in the thirty-third century A.D. on Earth, history student Aiana Kim has found an intact ancient hologram. It shows a seminal event in Earth’s religious history: the twenty-fifth century messiah named Taerlin conducting the Blessed Ascension, guiding his redeemed followers bodily into Paradise. And, despite the physical laws of time travel that prevent historians from traveling to historically significant eras—indeed, no historian has ever traveled within a century of Taerlin’s time—the holo shows something that seems impossible: Aiana herself. And the pure joy with which Taerlin looks at her! She knows she must meet this man, and convinces her thesis committee to let her to seek Taerlin. In the twenty-fifth century, on the planet Aran, young xenologist Mikel Pelerin has an unexpected opportunity to make initial contact with Aran’s only sentient alien race, the whynywir. Aran is also home to the Arantu, who are genetically human but have no known common ancestry with the humans of Earth. Mikel’s Arantu father had stowed away on a starship to Earth twenty years ago, and had influenced the people of Earth to abandon its claim to Aran, a claim that had threatened the Arantu way of life. His father died on Earth, poisoned by trace elements in Earth’s atmosphere, before Mikel was born. Mikel is determined to do some important work worthy of his father’s martyrdom. He decides to stay on Aran, risking that the starship that brought him there might not be sent back for him. Mikel is guided by an Arantu native named Cort, who claims that he uses a blue crystal implanted near his hairline to communicate telepathically with the whynywir. They travel for months through a vast forest of khena trees that are taller than redwoods and stronger than steel, beautiful, and believed by the Arantu to be the repositories of their ancestors’ spirits. The whynywir do not respond to Cort’s request to be allowed to bring Mikel to them. Mikel, however, is not to be dissuaded. Aiana’s efforts to return to twenty-fifth-century Earth fail. Time travel is accomplished through focused lucid dreaming amplified by an oneiroport, a device that consumes an enormous amount of power and thus is hugely expensive to operate. Faced with a deadline imposed by her committee, Aiana’s time is running out. Desperate, she follows a clue from Taerlin’s garb in the holo—an Arantu vest. She decides to search for Taerlin on Aran. At last Mikel and Cort arrive at the valley home of a group of whynywir. When they enter, Cort is attacked by a group of the large, winged raptors, which have very sharp teeth, and eyes seemingly devoid of emotion. Cort’s bleeding body is carried off, while Mikel remains untouched. More determined than ever to succeed in communicating with the unpleasant creatures, Mikel sets up camp in the valley. Cort reappears—not dead, it turns out, but recovering from serious wounds. The whynywir force him to remain with them rather than with Mikel. They ignore all Mikel’s efforts at communication, nor can he detect any form of intelligence or civilization among them. Desperate for any response from the whynywir, he uses the laser he had hidden in his pack to shoot at, and unwittingly kill, one of them. Aiana, returning to a time of ancient history on Aran, determines when the first human village appeared, but despite many attempts, she is unable to travel to that village until its third generation. Strangely, the people in the village, which they call “the village that waits,” recognize Aiana from their grandparents’ stories, and they tell her how she and Taerlin quarreled and parted. With feelings of overwhelming sorrow at this news, Aiana is more determined than ever to find Taerlin. She, too, will wait. She starts to show up once each generation to keep that memory alive, and to be there when Taerlin arrives sometime in the future. By the order of the whynywir, and ultimately with Mikel’s permission, Cort implants a blue crystal on Mikel. Mikel’s mind is then flooded by the telepathic communication of thousands of whynywir voices, all focused on the wellbeing of the planet Aran. Overwhelmed, he can do nothing but passively listen. Mikel, now recognizing the consequences of his violence, feels terrible guilt, but Cort persuades him that despite debilitating headaches, he must try to function normally again. The whynywir’s only advice is for them to find a certain ancient human artifact that might help. Mikel and Cort begin the long journey to find the artifact. Aiana finally reaches the twenty-fifth century. During a visit to the village, she sees two strangers approach the meadow where the ’port rests. One of them is Mikel, whom she recognizes as the historical Taerlin. Her heart leaps at the sight of him. Aiana leads him inside the ’port, where she explains that she is in this place and time as an oneiromorph, her dream self. With her thirty-third-century technology, she adjusts Mikel’s crystal so that he can both listen to the whynywir’s conversations and function normally. Unsure whether the red-haired beauty is quite human, Mikel is nevertheless smitten. Aiana tells her thesis committee that she has met Taerlin, but some members have doubts. Mikel doesn’t recognize that name, and worse, he refuses to leave Aran. If he is Taerlin, Aiana must persuade him to return to Earth to fulfill his role in history. History shows that in Mikel’s time some humans physically disappeared from Earth, and that some people appeared thousands of years earlier on Aran. Taerlin was part of both events. With this evidence, Aiana convinces Mikel to return to his own time on Earth as a recruiter; without a human settlement on Aran by Mikel’s time, Earth will colonize Aran and destroy it. Recruiting is easy for Mikel. With his deep passion for his cause, he finds many people looking for a fresh start. Together, he and Aiana take more than two hundred people to Aran. And the police take notice. They are convinced that Mikel has been murdering people rather than transporting them. When Mikel tries to flee, he is imprisoned. He needs Aiana to rescue him, but she can no longer reach him despite numerous attempts. Under court questioning, Mikel passes out, but not before he clears his name. His televised trial makes him famous. When he is released, and sees the crowd waiting for him, he tells reporters that he’ll make one last one-way trip, welcoming any who want to join him. Aiana realizes there is one last thing she must do before she can reach Mikel. She travels to the end of the long time loop she’s following, telling settlers who have just built their first village on Aran, to wait for Taerlin and her. Near Mikel’s house on Earth, a crowd has gathered to wish Mikel well, and some want to go with him. Mikel sees Aiana, and he and Aiana bring the final group of people to Aran. Now in early Aran, Aiana tells Mikel about “Taerlin.” He demands to return to Earth to set the facts straight, but Taera reveals that she can’t take him back to Earth, since in history he didn’t return after the Blessed Ascension. Mikel is angry about Aiana’s manipulation. He won’t have anything to do with her, but slowly his anger fades. Despite Aiana’s deceit, what happened was necessary for Aran, and not a bad thing for Earth. Mikel finds Aiana just as she is about to leave, and tells her he loves her. She stays the night with him, but warns him that if she attempted to stay longer while time traveling as an oneiromorph, her waking self might stay unconscious, or die. So Aiana returns to her own time. After three months in a coma, Aiana recovers, and defends her thesis. She doesn’t reveal the destination of the travelers, instead defending the notion of the Blessed Ascension. Three years later Aiana, now a tenured professor, is finishing a lecture class when she sees a visitor. It’s Mikel himself, brought there by Aiana’s oneiromorph just before she woke up. Mikel asks her to return with him in person, getting one of her colleagues to operate the 'port. Aiana refuses. She loves him, but her career is on Earth. They sleep together, and in the morning, her colleague’s oneiromorph comes for Mikel. Mikel asks her again to come with him. Again she turns him down and starts walking away, but realizing she was wrong, she turns back to say, “No! Wait!” But he’s gone. On Aran, Mikel is inconsolable for weeks. But eventually, he carries on, and he leads seafarers from twenty-fifth-century Earth to look for a place to settle near the ocean. He makes the recording that would refute the Taerlin story, should anyone from Earth find it. A few hundred years in Mikel’s future (and the same in Aiana’s past), the recording is discovered and sent back to Earth. The head of the Taerlin religion listens to the heretical artifact and then destroys it. However, he commissions research that will ultimately result in the development of oneiromorphic time travel as well as the blue communication crystals. Mikel, after living in that seaside village for seven years, needs a change. As he sails down the coast, a flash of red and white on a familiar hillside he recalls from a lucid dream he once had, catches his eye. He beaches his boat and climbs the hill. There, Aiana is waiting for him. And unrecorded in history, they begin the rest of their lives together.