“The Grand Falls do not exist, Earthson,” Drez said. 

“Of course they do. I’ll take you there and see.”

“We cannot leave Reygloa’s system, Earthbrother,” Yorvo said. “And what sort of Earthbrother name is Stacy? Our data shows no Earthbrothers named Stacy.”

“Sexist,” Stacy said. 

“Yes,” Yorvo said, “Indeed I am a person who has sex as I am also machinist who machines parts, but I know not what this has to do with your having taken Earthsister’s name.”

Drez vocalized a rebuke tone at Yorvo and asked, “What does Stacy mean, Earthbrother?”

“Anastasis. Stacy for short.”

“An Earthsister’s name,” Yorvo said.

Drez said, “Cease. What proof have you for the Grand Falls?”

“Why does no one like falls anymore?” Stacy asked.

It had not started out so weird. Stacy had spent his morning normally: tending to the wild chickens in the audubon center, taking a nap in the hammock he’d erected across the branches of the great Redwoods that now grew where oaks and sycamores once permeated the shale in the rainforest climate. He’d been trailblazing near the falls when they’d picked him up. The initial shock of alien abuduction went about how you’d expect and ended with Stacy having blue blood soaked kale sticking out of his right ear and a temporary tattoo of an eighties cartoon on his thigh complete with a life fox they’d fuzed into his back. He didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t want to  do much of anything other than meditate on how he’d been trailblazing when they’d picked him up. How badly he missed it now. 

“Do you mean you start new trends in the scatterplot of human fashion?” Drez, the bigger and older one had asked him.

“No,” Stacy had said. “I mean I blaze new trails.” He’d given up on worrying about how the sorts of beings to whom he spoke, spoke themselves.

“You burn them?” Yorvo asked.

“Sometimes,” Stacy said. “Sometimes we cut them. Sometimes I use my feet and leave some food for the animals to follow.” 

“Why were you blazing trails?” Drez asked.

“To protect the area around The Falls.”

“How?” 

“With designated picnic areas and a nice route that featured The Falls from a good vantage point that’s evolved over the decades. Easiest way to get more folks to see it, to preserve it.”

“What are these Falls?”

“The Grand Falls. Here in Joplin.”

That’s when the aliens started laughing. Mocking him outright and scoffing.

“You mean The Grand Falls from all of the paintings, songs, stories, and movies that came out of Joplin?” Drez asked.

“Yes,” Stacy said. “We have an exhibit on it at the Audubon. It’s tucked into the truck of one of the redwoods near the entrance.”

The aliens laughed again.

“I get the punchline but I don’t get the set up,” Stacy said. “What’s so funny?”

“They don’t—“ Yorvo giggled. When his fit stopped he said, “They don’t exist, Earthbrother.”

“The Falls?” Stacy asked. 

Both aliens nodded, cackling. 

“But you even said that you’ve never been to Earth, only abducted folks.”

They nodded. As much as their head things could move up and down like chin things. Drez said, “And we won’t. It is not our vocation, our place in time. We would die if we broke our place in time.”

“So how do you know that The Grand Falls don’t exist?”

Yorvo hummed contentedly. When he’d finished, he said, “Critical theory.”

“Critical theory?” Stacy asked. 

“Imaginative works of art are not real. Therefore what is in imaginative works of art is false. There are depictions of The Grand Falls in many imaginative paintings, songs, stories, and movies from Joplin in that time. Therefore The Grand Falls are not and were never real.” Yorvo hummed even louder.

Drez said, “It follows. It is theorem.”

“But what is imagination?” Stacy asked. “And what is art? And what is work?”

The aliens went silent. 

Stacy threw one more punch. “And what is real?”

They bared their teeth like deep sea things and opened wide their maws. 

Alien food wasn’t so bad if you added siracha, which they had on hand from one of their labs in an attempt to recreate a case of bottles they had commandeered from an antique shop. The shop had crates of the stuff and apparently it never really aged. It was, in a way, preserving the falls: had Joplin back in ancient Missouri during the Dark Ages used any other condiment more than siracha? He’d found empty bottles of the stuff in the tumbledown rocks. He wanted to take the surveyors down to the falls to show them, but they would not be persuaded. He offered to trailblaze on their homeworld, to show them how to curate a way through their own rather pink and purple wilderness without either disturbing the flora or dying from encountering fauna or discouraging others to come and see and experience their wild. He helped preserve it. 

“You’re a conservative,” Yorvo said.

“I don’t think that I—“

“You conserve things as did your Earthfather Teddy Roosevelt,” Yorvo said. 

“I… conservationist?” Stacy asked.

“Yes. A conservative.”

“Those aren’t—“

“A conservative. A good conservative.” Yorvo was humming. “Conservatives saved your world from climate change, though much was destroyed Earthbrother.”

“There’s so much wrong with that statement,” Stacy said.

“A good conservative.”

“Whatever,” Stacy said. “As long as you don’t destroy your natural habitats, that’s all that really matters.”

“We don’t destroy any natural habitats,” Yorvo said. “We live here. It’s our scouting parties that destroy flora and fauna. And only the flora and fauna of other planets such as yours, Earthbrother.”

“Wait. So you don’t want to go to the falls?”

“Of course not. We sent a scouting party and part of our engineering corps to inspect it,” Yorvo said.

“To Earth?” He had flashbacks to dam day. Corps of engineers?

“Of course. To the Falls, Earthbrother.”

“I need a ship.”

“Denied.”

“I want a ship.”

“Denied.”

“I’m taking a ship,” Stacy said.

“We…” Yorvo looked to Drez. “Is there a word for taking a ship against command?”

Drez said, “Earthbrothers call that stealing, but I know not what that means.”

Stacy had not waited. Stacy had run towards a ship. He thought of dam day.

Of the city states left in the region, the Kansas Citystate had taken Joplin back from the Texarkan city state as the Holy African Empire had moved in again to drain the land of its resources. It had created a water crisis. This was early in Stacy’s career, when he worked in far more bureaucratic ways. Difficulty of bureaucratic solutions is you need bureaucrats for it to work and most of those had been killed in later days in the coup. But back when they existed, Stacy had to take the fight to them on their turf: Form B499-S. 

See they had decided in the midst of the Holy African Empire takeover that dovetailed with the water crisis that the best way to keep the locals well hydrated would be to dam the river system that led to the falls and flood the valley. Few people cared: the ones that did seemed excited that they would get a lake. Stacy cared. Stacy knew what that would do to the biosphere of the region. He knew what terrible things would come if they flooded the valley — even who would lose their homes and whatnot. He’d often plotted the consequences for climate change’s sake, conservative that he was. And knowing what he knew, he did everything he could to save not only the river but the waterfall. They still didn’t care and went forward with everything. He got them to stop by pointing out the impending doom of one of the bureaucrat’s houses. Same form, same submission process. That ended it. 

The way he saw it, no one liked waterfalls anymore.

That assumption drove him for many, many years as a trailblazer and conservationist. 

Climate change had flooded the valley enough as it was, based on the historical maps he still had: the water level had risen higher with the steady beat of rain bombs upstream. It had given them the more rainforest climate, had made it easy for redwoods to thrive in their packs, their moots. The Grand Falls had grown in size and stature through erosion and the rising of the water levels and several historic rock slides that got washed downstream so that it looked much more like Victoria or Niagra with the heights involved — much of the landscape had changed from the original drawings in the early 21st century, but the idea of the falls remained the same.

But this was not what Stacy saw as he flew the ship to the site. 

Stacy saw no scouting team, but rather a swarm of the alien race building and dickering and doing everything they could to dam the falls and drain it dry. It reminded him of the sheer lack of conservation they showed on their own planet: if he could not teach them to preserve their own, how could he ever teach them to preserve his? He went person to person to try to convince them to quit, but they would have none of it. He tried filling a form (in what language?), tried a buyout (with what currency?), tried bartering (did they even barter?), tried reason (was this even rational?), tried drawing in the mud with sticks until he was rendered into little more than what they called a “savage.” As in irrational, uncivilized, swineman. 

So he decided to stand in the river. 

As the water began rising downstream, and as they started finishing the last of the downstream dam, Stacy found himself standing in the falls saying, “You’re going to kill me if you finish! Look! You’re going to kill an innocent person just to finish your dam.”

The foreman said, “Get out, human, don’t be foolish: there is no Grand Falls and never was.”

His team started singing that: There is no Grand Falls and never was. There is no Grand Falls and never was.

The foreman said, “Get out. Why die for a lie?”

And as the waters rose and his stubbornness turned to despair at their attempt to destroy the truth of the beauty of the thing he’d spent his life to preserve, he realized that they didn’t hate the falls. They just hated the reality of the falls. They liked the idea of waterfalls, the idea of art based on waterfalls, the idea of tourism or having something to talk about locally, but they didn’t like the reality of it. God himself was right here in these falls and the locals didn’t know it and now some intergallactic colonizers didn’t see it either. The falls came down and the floods came up, the falls came down and the floods came up. Yes, there were an infinity of ways to destroy a waterfall, but only one way to keep it. An infinity of ways to be insane, only one way to be sane. An infinity of ways to fall, but only one way to stand tall.

There is no Grand Falls and never was.

So Stacy stood.

And drowned. 

And they wrote songs about him. Their best was Elegy for The Falls. 

Love what you just read? This story, written especially with the Joplin Toad in mind, is part of a collection of stories by mr. Schaubert entitled “the Vale”. You can find that collection and read more of these stories here; or you can download this story for your kindle (and support the writer) over here.