Noor's Wake - The Map Maker, Book Two
an excerpt

Chapter One
Aurora Borealis

Tak, while never the most practical of spaceships, still realized that the house he was building had no practical uses. He was far too big to actually live in it and houseguests were out of the question. No one was to know he was here, his Map Maker had been quite clear of that. There were, of course, rules against this sort of thing. But there were also rules about Map Makers transforming themselves into infants, being adopted by alien families and growing up as humans. Not to mention trying to have themselves elected President of alien countries.

Yet that was exactly what Noor, the Map Maker assigned to Tak, had done. Right now, Atticus Clifton was Governor of the State of Illinois. And he had formed an exploratory committee for his first run for the Presidency. It had been decades since the two had spoken, though Tak followed him in the press constantly. His one job was to stay here on this tiny hump of land in the Aleutian Islands and make sure no one knew he was there, especially The Pra’agh.

Tak tried to monitor the other alien races’ communications, but they were encrypted in such a way that even his listening in could be detected. All he knew is that they were still on Earth, biding their time, planning something. Noor knew it too. It was the reason she was pretending to be Atticus Clifton, the reason Tak was cut off from the rest of the universe and the reason their mission could not fail. Because both Noor and Tak had come to love the human race and both of them had taken a vow to protect them. There would come a time when Tak would make himself known and fight them openly. And that would probably be the last thing he did. It was perhaps this knowledge that had make Tak a little squirrelly. He needed to do something besides just watching human television, even though he wad been very nearly content to do just that for decades.

The thought had come to him gradually as he watched old episodes of Happy Days. The Cunnigham’s house represented many things to him but more than anything it meant home. He had the ability to fabricate nearly any material. His many metal hands could mill wood, sew upholstery or paint pictures. So he set about creating a home for himself, meticulously recreating every detail he had seen on the television. And as he sat underground this night, the frame completed above him, he was happy. He missed his home planet, his friends there, like the ship Jipsy. And most of all he missed Noor. Ships were not intended to be alone.

It was a cool, cloudless spring night. The Northern Lights were on display in abundance, he could sense them in his burrow. But sometimes Tak’s sensors, as complete as they could detect what was happening around, still couldn’t truly see something. It was necessary for him to tune out the infrared or the radio band or the countless other ways in which Tak could experience the world. The Aurora was something he wanted and needed to see as a human, though. He turned off his sensors but the ones for visual light -- human visual light -- and shimmied out of his burrow.

Vast ribbons of green and red wended their way across the sky, shimmering and ethereal, reflected in the dark ocean that surrounded him. He knew, of course, the reason behind this display. It was simply charge ions from the Magnetosphere joining and dancing with the upper atmosphere. Like everything, it had a scientific explanation. But the beauty of the lights transcended science, transcended his circuitry and his programming and left him with an almost religious kind of awe.

But the lights also left him with a deep ache. There was sadness in his wonder, because Earth was not the only planet with lights like these. In fact there was another planet many galaxies away that had almost the exact same phenomenon. And no matter how long he stayed on his Alaskan island or how many house based on old television shows he built, that other planet was his home. And he longed for that place more than he could ever admit to himself.

As he waited for Noor’s plan to succeed, waited for the Pra’agh attack that would surely come, he did not allow himself to dwell on thoughts of home. He knew, as sure as he knew that what he and Noor were doing was right, that he would never make it back there. He was fully prepared to give his life to protect the people of this tiny blue planet. But even his absolute conviction in the rightness of his choice was cold comfort on nights like these.

The lights continued to blaze, but Tak could take no more. He slipped back into his burrow and turned his mind back to the only friends he had in his life: the people on television. Arthur Fonzarelli would make everything okay. He always did.