The Explorer Trilogy
Book One: The Explorer

Part One: Landing on Planet 9Z

-The ship tumbles through the deft air,
breaking through cloudy sky.
journal and pen, my hand flim-flams
as we fly through gray, blue, and green.

My notebook's ten years old. Scribbled
dysfunction disappears,
the notes fade away the decades,
returning blank pages, forgotten fears.

I sink my head against my shoulder,
another lost and fading life,
our Earth swallowed by the darkness
of a black hole's vile scythe.

We barely escaped. All that's left are my notes.
I read through scant pages of memories,
strapped into a space explorer's seat—
endless meanderings—

As we land on planet 9Z,
a light rain brings a soothing air.
Our scanners share the topography
as we drift down to the land.

While planets by asteroids are punctured
and called to their early graves,
beneath whirling rocks now smothered
in truanced and quiet sleep.

We trudge toward a vast, ired cave
as sand and dirt make crunchy noises,
various colors make up the surface
that's similar to our world.

Horrors and lost lives here await,
but our senses and minds are strong.
A cave of life and equal fate,
We enter the foreboding doors.

Part Two: Invention and Tradition

Cradles house their ancient infants
laying paralyzed like silhouettes.
Books of miracles and unknown songs
echo skies throughout the cave's halls.

We explore this old, dingy tomb
and analyze this race,
all of its art and science, moon
and all their cultural customs.

Their moon sits atop the planet
like it was reeled down here.
It sits inside this worship set,
this giant cave Cathedral.

It's as if the moon had just phased
itself into our sights.
I scribble a drawing into words,
then there's a growing light.

Something or someone here still sings,
watching us inch our feet.
Friend or foe, subtle noises spring
and sharpen our stresses.

We walk from room to room to room
and circle our eyes around,
when a sudden shattering boom
comes piercing through our ears.

We turn on our spacesuit laser sights,
but this room gets brighter
then just my crew's commingled lights.
not fear, but surprise courses

through our bodies like needed cures,
a world of life unlocks
as reptilian bipeds scur
around, adorned in jeweled stones.

We watch them as they say something,
I think "who, what are you?"—
Forming around us in a big ring.
The confusion and lack of understanding

must be the first contact attempt,
an inevitable
byproduct of languages lost to distance,
something we all must overcome.

The brightness dims our spacesuit lights,
my crew and I alone
yet altogether in this benign,
craggy and muddy cave.

Part Three: The Tour

After hours of contemplation,
this newly discovered
species reveals their culture to us
and tours us around their cave.

The ancient infants waddle in their beds
far more spry and lively.
We observe that they're born like dead
then age into youthful skins.

They show us large halls of seat-crates,
sitting widely, dining.
They eat, laugh and commiserate
the troubles of their world,

just like us in our living rooms
where creatures live to kill,
where casual giant hornets roam
into our homes for blood.

Our group travels miles through the cave seas
when I accidentally
let out a very absurd sneeze.
Our guide, in horror, stares

as if they have witnessed disease
or malicious locusts.
They stop their tour, grab me, my team
and fling us off the boat.

The waters at head-height boil our skin,
melting through to our bones.
This cave is now a death dance den
as my crew and I sink

into these waters of gristly acid.
We sink and melt away;
a sneeze to them must be insipid
even behind the shoulder.

Death now greets us in pain to course
beneath our bubbly song,
the water is like the Trojan horse
tramping us into the soil.

Part Four: On Farmland Shores

We awaken right next to corn
and two four-legged stags
with incredibly long, strong horns
the height of goliath trees.

I struggle to get to my feet
like the rest of my crew.
We get up groggy and filthy
as we recall the burning water.

The water that we faced burned.
Our feet got stung, the heat
coursing through our layers of skin, assured
our bodies are walking ghosts.

Our spacesuits are shredded and torn
though they still cover us,
the winds dress our wounds in tangling thorns
as we attempt to find shelter.

Our electronics are gone, melted away,
so no means to ring our ship.
We sit by sea and farmland, stray,
unsure of who saved us—

Did we even have a Savior?
Are we ashore through luck?
The horned stags, did they teeth our clothes
and drag us back to land?

Saviors come at the strangest times
sometimes hanging from a cross,
Bruised, bloodied, of ill health and mind
when our lives are at our lowest;

We sit inside our heads and think
of when our time will come,
when that hand of mute loneliness
will stretch out its bold light—

After an hour of drying off
and mending suits and skins naturally,
we head out into the land, scoff
at what that species did to us.

My last recorded memories,
all I had before is gone,
all the strange lives that we've seen,
notebook dissolved in melting waters.

This planet sure houses strange beasts,
stags whose horns reach pine tree heights
six-legged, lion-like poaching priests,
their signs of evolution,

more animals than I can document,
infinite-spiders that
we do not fear, unnamed things stalk
and crawl and slither here,

Monolithic insects roam across and drone
the landscape, docile and
clacking, clumping along like phloem,
in tune within themselves.

three creatures of purple stripes walk
in front of us and stare,
reaching for our disheveled socks
beneath our space suits.

we shoo them away like they're flies
as one of them leaves us
and in disgust it hisses and sighs,
showing our internal vanity.

Their eyes close inward, they spout tears,
and give their tears to us.
To us, we reflect like mirrors
our sensual apologies.

There is a melancholic shift
now that pervades our minds.
We held ourselves too high and wished
our minds give way to godhood,

when imperfect were our murals,
those twining folds within,
our brains are wet and greasy curls
that prolong aging skin.

Confused and taken aback, it
seems to us all this planet's
life is emotional and intelligent. No grit
is shown, just empathy.

Nonetheless, despite my wonder
and great bewilderment,
I feel curious at the sundered
corn. Are these crops from humans?

Part V: The Rajal

Beings conjured from here, the void
overtakes my crew's thoughts.
We witness as each humanoid
observes our tattered 'suits.

By now we've accepted that we are dust,
that is until they came
and presumably rescued us
as we nearly sunk and drowned.

They sit us by a breathing fire
as foggy smoke eclipses the sky,
Certain they're telling some mythic ires,
I watch and document their tongues and moves.

They spin and circle like sand slugs
and twist and turn around.
They look into our eyes and smile
and make us cry from our hearts.

As we watch them dance together
through the fire and the moon,
I feel safe from the encounter
that endangered us before.

It's a miracle that we're still alive.
I know it's not for nothing.
The Rajal offer their aid, strive
to make us feel more welcomed.

By the end of the fast and fading night
we fall steadily to sleep;
after hours of tiring days of alien sights
we finally manage a better rest.

Part VI: Benign Saviors

Rusty shackles of foreign elements
bind the dryness of my wrists.
The surface of my skin peels away,
my mind starts to feel astray.

I black out into a dark and otherworldly place,
and witness where I stand
from afar like a rising skeletal hand
shaken to give its last goodbyes.

just as soon, I snap back to my reality
as the ground below me quakes.
the elements have stung my eyes, yet remedied
and stilled my stumbling feet.

They unshackle our wrists and ankles,
the Rajal that pushed us overboard,
then realized their mistakes and wrangled
us to shore and dragged us here.

Now, as the moon at the altar flies
itself miles up to the sky,
I can see it go as it rises
from its place on the ground.

I watch as the moon is flown to the sky
as our freighter flies by it.
Our freighter lands by the cave Cathedral
as the crew and I sigh in great relief.

The dancers were the Rajal this whole time
and we just couldn't see it.
Their faces distorted themselves
from their own mask-seething waters.

We were saved by the waters and spirits
the warmth from their testing touches,
a Savior maybe or vivid
eyes of storied pain and gracing comfort.

All our eyes look to the brightness
of a hopeful day real soon
when the stars won't be secluded nests
where natures die and falter.

Confusion pattered all our hearts
until we saw their truth.
The moon was drifted down by force
to worship their rare chance,

That life was made by a strange luck
as violent storms stir and sink
into the foundations of muck,
the last few spheres of scrounging life.

And they've been given this one chance
to make, to make life heal.
They smile and cry and sing and dance
like us back on our ailing Earth.

We exchange the stories of our souls
as best as we possibly can,
then leave with psychological tolls
that carries us hopefully through the darkness.

Garrett Carroll is a poet and musician whose work has been published in Star*Line and Utopia Science Fiction Magazine. He holds a B.A. in English from Adams State University.

Find more by Garrett Carroll in the Author Index.