We followed the moths, or they followed us, deeper into the bowels of the Brazilian jungle. While I appreciated the lieutenant’s company, my attention was on the moths, not her. My entomological studies are dedicated to those beautiful creatures, you see, cut from the same lepidopteran genetic cloth as butterflies but reviled for their colour. People see their fluttering as darting, their poise as predatory. They become loiterers, vandals, a blight to be cleansed. In truth, moths pollinate sugar-rich plants, and in death, they act as sustenance for spiders, birds, and lizards, the tiny cogs of our ecosystem, and still, people treat them as aliens. They brought us out here, didn’t they?

     People also think our big ape brains invented geometry and equations and maths out of the aether, but moths figured all that out two hundred million years ago. Just look at their bilaterally symmetrical wing patterns, or honeybees, who use path integration to establish distance and time, or how they make their homes out of hexagons, calculated precisely for structural integrity. They look for food in ferns designed with the Fibonacci sequence in mind. We are just infants playing catchup with the rest of the world.

     If Earth is the cradle of humanity, then a moth’s wings make it an infinitely deep one. I notice new details, new layers, new mires, every time I get one under a microscope.

     It appeared like the moths were heading in the direction of the Signal, like we were, as if it were a lantern in the dim. Hundreds of them flittered around us with a kind of order I could only feel, not measure. At least not with the equipment they had given us. Perhaps they were not dancing back and forth but north and south. The kind of order humans have the arrogance to assume is theirs, and theirs alone.

     "Like they have a compass?" Alicja offered when I broached the idea.

     "Birds know north from south."

     "Moths don’t know anything. Ugly things." She slapped one that landed on her wrist.

     I flinched.

     "Is it still on all channels?" she asked.

     The omnipad unfurled from my forearm. The Signal was still calling out in every way possible, yearning to be heard: radio, infrared, ultrasonic, subsonic, optoloid. I nodded, and we pressed on, clambering up a small waterfall and soldiering through greenery desperate to suffocate us. Our path flowed down into a canyon and followed the trail of what once would have been a river in some ancient pre-Anthropocene era. Diverted, but where to? Moths were around when the river was. They remembered.

     The moths kept me company, or were they different moths then?

     The Signal grew louder the closer we came, but what it was saying became no clearer. Three years ago, an amateur Finnish astronomer identified its patterns, and since then, nobody, not even ISLE, could figure out what it was saying. I didn’t believe them when they told me the signal was coming from Earth. Calling out in every way it could without saying anything like a wailing child in the wild. It just wanted to be heard. The one clue they had deciphered was a vague reference, purely by the colour and pattern, to the attacus atlas, more commonly known simply as the Atlas moth, and the subject of many of my studies. They wouldn’t otherwise put up with a bumpkin, would they?

     "I’ve never seen trees like this in Poland," I said, trailing a finger up the branch. It was a mangle of wood spotted with droplets of sweet nectar that dangled from threads. "They taste like honey. Try it."

     "Don’t eat things from the forest," Alicja warned. "You don’t know what it could be."

     "It’s safe," I said immediately. "Scale insects produce it from the leftover sugars in the phloem."

     "So, they’re aphids?"

     I dabbed a droplet onto my fingertip.

     "They lack the firm morphology," I said. "As in, they’re soft, like they’re stuck as larvae."

     A moth landed on my finger and feasted on the speck of glitter. "Do you hear that?" I said.

     Alicja halted, the barrel of her gun tilting. "Hear what?"

     A sound like fluttering wings, far away and deep in the jungle. A great beast or a thousand small ones moving in unison. Up and down, up and down, a beat. One, two, three, four, I counted. Then a hum like rushing water, rising to a crescendo, but only loud enough to notice if you were listening for it. I was. It was a music of its own. ‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Alicja, but she kept the barrel of her gun up.

     The music died away, and twittering quiet rushed in like water after a rock hit the surface. I murmured a qur’anic blessing to mark the moment.

     Dusk was reaching across the sky and pulling a dark blanket over us. Twilight creatures emerged for the hunt. Countless moths and other insects appeared once we set up the remote hearth. Our suits produced their own warmth, so the hearth was just for light. The faint imitation of home.

     Perhaps it was the oppressive darkness—we couldn’t get our bearings from the stars that night—but the jungle had a way of forcing you to contemplate your isolation. From civilisation, yes, but other people too, even though I was sitting right across from one. It made me intimately aware of the distance between us, like she and I were islands in an ocean of loneliness. Things left unsaid, unasked rose to the surface. Whatever the reason, it was the first time Alicja asked me about my life outside ISLE, grasping at what little human contact she had. A lifeline. Building a bridge across the water to me. Maybe she felt it too.

     It was against the rules, but the only people to tell us that were ten thousand kilometers away.

     "Jasniya, when did you come to Poland?"

     "Why?"

     "Just curious."

     "Before I can remember. My mother left Poland for Iran to be with my father. She gave birth there, but they decided to raise me in Poland after the Second Revolution."

     "Your Polish is excellent."

     "I grew up there."

     "Yes, but, well." Alicja cleaned her glasses as if avoiding my gaze.

     "What about you?"

     She slid her glasses back on. "Kuyavia, my parents too and their parents before—"

     "And their parents?"

     The question seemed to catch Alicja off guard. "Sorry?"

     "What about your great-grandparents? Where were they from?"

     Alicja downed a mouthful of water before answering. "I don’t know. Would have been the Second World War, the Soviet era. Lots of people moved around then. Moved. What a word for it. Lots of people shot too."

     The hearth licked and flickered to imitate a real fire. It made Alicja paler than she truly was, though her cheeks remained rosy and warm. A glance at my reflection in the omnipad told me it deepened the dark shade of my skin and eyes. It brought out the foreign things in me.

     "What do you think the Signal is?" I asked her.

     She chewed her lip the way she used to chew nicotine gum. "Realistically? Nothing. If it wasn’t nothing, someone would have claimed it."

     "And unrealistically?"

     "What do you mean?"

     I leaned in. "What do you want it to be?"

     For a while, she did not answer. "Something new. Something alive."

     "Me too."

     And we shared a smile: one part polite, two parts hope. That night, I had no stars to watch, but the moths were a good replacement. They danced around the hearth and around each other. At first, they moved randomly. But as the night aged, the moths took on a new rhythm. A new equation. Their chaos began to unravel. Not a rhythm that I could write down or replicate in musical language, and not the music from before, but a rhythm I could only grasp at. There was a mathematical pattern to how they moved, constellations of their own, a different language, even if I didn’t speak it.

     "Do you see how they’re moving?"

     Alicja barely looked up from her omnipad. "What?"

     "The moths, how they’re…"

     Alicja spared a glance, brows raised, and then went back to her omnipad. "That’s how moths move. Shock."

     The following day we reached the Signal’s coordinates. If it were something new, something alive, then it would be remembered as a Polish expedition with everything that entailed. I let my imagination run wild—the accolades, the praise, the prestige. Mazurek Dąbrowskiego would play, shouting to the world that Poland is Not Yet Lost, reminding them all of our resurgent history. What the foreign force has taken from us, We shall with sabre retrieve, I sung myself. My mother made me learn it before I attended school. The French, the Nazis, the Soviets, the Austrians. People reached into the rubble of empire and drew out a new Poland every time.

     But apprehension had me too.

     Poland was pastel buildings that hurt your eyes, relics of the communist bloc, never-ending football matches, and politics splitting up family dinners, and I was all those things, but I wanted to feel it was the other parts of me too. My blessings and the shadows of my skin. If it was something new, something alive, then I wanted people to see those when they saw Poland too.

     Our path curved around a cliff wall formed in the Triassic period. Alicja could tell by the sediment layers and index fossils. Flowering greenery clung to the wall like young children cling to their mothers, and I found tiny beetles feasting on the leaves—leaves my moths hid under during the day. Perhaps they had even pollinated them, or some mothy ancestor of theirs had. I found it amusing that they would not even know. I do not expect you to find it amusing.

     We had to abseil down into a clearing. It was framed by that cliff face on one side. The forest parted like the Red Sea to the blue sky above.

     "This is it," I said, checking the omnipad.

     "Can’t be."

     I checked again. "It is."

     Damn thing must be broken."

     "It’s not."

     "But there’s nothing here," said Alicja, forehead creased. "No machine, no creature. Nothing? We came all this bloody way for nothing?"

     "A clearing is weird enough in a dense jungle."

     Alicja scoffed. "I can’t believe it."

     "It could be abandoned? Maybe there was something, once."

     I paced around the edge of the clearing, and my hand could not help fitting itself to the trigger of my rifle. Nothing had been cleared, no plants had been gutted and removed. It was as if the forest had never been allowed to encroach on this tiny patch of earth. Even the trees overhead kept the distance, bending away.

     "And it’s quiet," I added.

     "What do you mean it’s qu—"

     "Shh. Listen."

     A jungle was never meant to be silent—if creatures were not rustling, the trees were whispering, and if the trees were not whispering, the birds were hollering—but in that clearing, they all had agreed, or had been made to be dead silent. Even the moths had settled down.

     "And not nothing," I said. "Look."

     Alicja and I stood back from the cliff face we had been following. We had to move several metres before we could truly take in its grand scale. Etched into the stone was a fossil of four wings, split by a thorax and crowned with three antennae-like ferns. It was some five metres wide, splayed as I would have them in my display, with that perfect bilateral symmetry in shape, but oddly, not in the patterns of its wings.

     "Two hundred million years," I explained. "That’s how long they’ve been on Earth, Alicja. They were old before we were young."

     "Don’t get esoteric on me," murmured Alicja, slumping down onto a tree stump.

     "I’m not being esoteric."

     "You always are."

     The fossil formed a thorn in my mind.

     "Why aren’t the wings symmetrical?" I asked.

     "I don’t know. I’m not the entomologist."

     "I’ve never seen anything like this before."

     Moths then began to coalesce around the fossil as if they knew their long-dead Triassic ancestor. All of their wings were expectedly symmetrical. They fit the patterns I knew and loved. The geometrical rules nature had laid out for them. It was taking more computing power than my brain could muster, but I could feel the moths pulling me towards some underlying mathematical order—pointing me towards something I was feeling but not yet seeing, just as they had been the night before.

     Alicja was already setting up camp. "So, we have a pretty fossil. Lovely. Look, I know it’s frustrating, but some expeditions just end up that way. Guess we just have to camp for a couple of days, take the readings, and head home. Don’t get worked up."

     "It’s not that," I insisted. "It’s not that."

     I got out my omnipad and a notebook.

     Hundreds more moths flocked to the clearing overnight. More arrived the day after. Their presence visibly irritated Alicja to the point that she sealed her suit and slid down her visor. She would not have felt any that landed on her, but she still slapped them into a grey-green paste whenever one did.

     I studied the asymmetrical markings of the fossilised moth, which we nicknamed Mothra. Nine layers of glittering concentric circles across her four wings, like a single canvas, and each ring had a blotch attached like a gemstone in a wedding band. Though etched into the same geological layer, the rings and the circles were different shades. When pressed, Alicja admitted it was improbable, but not impossible, even if she didn’t know how it formed.

     At the heart of its fore wing, the innermost circle, was the darkest blotch —about the only normal patterning on Mothra—except for the fact it was not mirrored on the other wing. The small circles along the rings — all nine of them — were slightly different colours too. All variations of the cream, red, and smouldering grey. It took all that time, but the moths brought me to what they wanted me to see.

     "It’s our solar system."

     Alicja didn’t even look up from her instruments. "Alicja, it’s our solar system."

     "What?"

     And it was. The rings were the orbits of the planets—including poor Pluto, which made me smile—and the circles along them were the planets themselves, frozen in their rotation. At closer inspection, Alicja identified the moons as tiny flecks in ovals of their own: Europa, Ganymede, Eros, Titan, Charon, Iapetus, and all the rest. The exact number in the right places. The blotch on the left wing was the Sun. It was all out of proportion, like an old map, but still, undeniably our galactic home, and three rings along, was our tiny cream cradle, brighter than all the rest.

     "It can’t be," said Alicja. "A map of the solar system two hundred million years old."

     "It can’t be, Jasniya. It’s impossible," bit Alicja, twisting away from the cliff-face, from me, from what Mothra and her kin were leading us to.

     "But it is! This is something new, Alicja, something alive! This is what you wanted!"

     "It’s not alive. It’s very clearly dead. Fossilised and dead."

     "Look around you, Alicja!"

     She cast her gaze down. I stepped over to her and took her hand.

     "Look," I breathed.

     Thousands of moths hovered in perfect stillness around us. They were poised, as if hung from invisible strands in the ceiling of the stars, except for one. It was pale and larger than most of its counterparts in the clearing. It started at the fossilised mark of Earth on Mothra’s wing and launched into flight; it fluttered upwards, ascending amongst the ranks of its kin. The light of our hearth fire caught the folds of its silver wings, and for an instant, it blazed.

     But after a time, transfixed, I saw the moths were not perfectly still. That they were moving, if only slightly, as they hovered, orbiting, governed by an equation, and in a way that I knew all those invisible strands were tied together. They were an invisible instrument of infinite proportions playing the music of the spheres. Each moth was a system, or a star, or a galaxy, she did not know, but they were revolving around one another, tugging at those celestial strings. The omnipad recognised the layout of the universe, scaled down but perfectly replicated.

     That single moth, out of sync with the rest of the orchestra, halted before Alicja and began circling one of the hovering creatures. The pale moth took on its own synchronous orbit and became another string in that grand machine. The Signal had never been louder. The music returned.

     Awe pierced me, and it must have pierced Alicja too, because she pushed up her visor and began tugging at the tips of her left glove. She moved slowly, as if afraid that sudden movements would throw it all out of balance. She withdrew her left hand and raised it, only her index finger pointed out. An offering.

     The pale moth drifted, like it was contemplating, before accepting it and landing on her fingertip. Alicja’s smile broke, towards the moth and towards me, before understanding did.

    That is how it always is with life: we feel before we understand. But then came understanding, like a flood. Our tiny lepidopteran friend had just laid out a path from Earth to somewhere in the sky.

     "They’ve been calling," she whispered. "All this, it’s a map. To where they came from."

     "Two hundred million years ago," I said.

     Alicja looked to me with sorrow and memory.

     I write this knowing how it will be perceived, but I swear it is the truth. I ask you to not call them alien.

 

 

Lt. Colonel Ahmadi