Alien Contact (39 page)

Paranoia hit. “Ever hear of Ray Bradbury?”

She smiled with real affection. “Oh, yes. We only met him once or twice, but he was genuinely sweet. I miss him.”

“So you met him, too.”

“We’ve met a lot of people, apricot. Why? Is he a relation?”

“Just an old-time writer I like,” I said.

“Ahhhhhh.”

“In fact,” I said, “one story of his I particularly like was called ‘Mars Is Heaven.’”

She sipped her tea. “Don’t know that one.”

“It’s about a manned expedition to Mars—written while that was still in the future, you understand. And when the astronauts get there they discover a charming, rustic, old-fashioned American small town, filled with sweet old folks they remember from their childhoods. It’s the last thing they expect, but after a while they grow comfortable with it. They even jump to the conclusion that Mars is the site of the afterlife. Except it’s not. The sweet old folks are aliens in disguise, and they’re lulling all these gullible earthlings into a false sense of security so they can be killed at leisure.”

My words had been hesitantly spoken, less out of concern for Minnie’s feelings than those of my colleagues. Their faces were blank, unreadable, masking emotions that could have been anything from anger to amusement. I will admit that for a split second there, my paranoia reaching heights it had never known before (or thank God, since), I half-expected George and Oscar and Nikki to morph into the hideously tentacled bug-eyed monsters who had taken their places immediately after eating their brains. Then the moment passed, and the silence continued to hang heavily in the room, and any genuine apprehension I might have felt gave way to an embarrassment of more mundane proportions. After all—whatever the explanation for all this might have been—I’d just been unforgivably rude to a person who had only been gracious and charming toward me.

She showed no anger, no sign that she took it personally. “I remember that one now, honey. I’m afraid I didn’t like it as much as some of Ray’s other efforts. Among other things, it seemed pretty unreasonable to me that critters advanced enough to pull off that kind of masquerade would have nothing better to do with their lives than to eat nice folks who came calling.—But then, he also wrote a story about a baby that starts killing as soon as it leaves the womb, and I prefer to believe that infants, given sufficient understanding and affection, soon learn that the universe outside the womb isn’t that dark and cold a place after all. Given half a chance, they might even grow up…and it’s a wonderful process to watch.”

I had nothing to say to that.

She sipped her tea again, one pinky finger extended in the most unself-conscious manner imaginable, just as if she couldn’t fathom drinking her tea any other way, then, spoke brightly, with perfect timing: “But if you stay the night, I’ll be sure to put you in the room with all the pods.”

There was a moment of silence, with every face in the room—including those of Earl and Peter and Carrie, who had just come up from downstairs—as distinguishedly impassive as a granite bust of some forefather you had never heard of.

Then I averted my eyes, trying to hide the smile as it began to spread on my face.

Then somebody made a helpless noise, and we all exploded with laughter.

Seventy years later:

If every land ever settled by human beings has its garden spots, then every land ever settled by human beings has its hovels. This is true even of frontiers that have become theme parks. I had spent much of this return to the world I had once known wandering through a brightly lit, comfortably upholstered tourist paradise—the kind of ersatz environment common to all overdeveloped places, that is less an expression of local character than a determined struggle to ensure the total eradication of anything resembling local character. But now I was headed toward a place that would never be printed on a postcard, that would never be on the tours, that existed on tourist maps only as the first, best sign that those looking for easy traveling have just made a disastrous wrong turn.

It was on Farside, of course. Most tourist destinations, and higher-end habitats, are on Nearside, which comes equipped with a nice blue planet to look at. Granted that even on Nearside the view is considered a thing for tourists, and that most folks who live here live underground and like to brag to each other about how long they’ve gone without Earthgazing—our ancestral ties are still part of us, and the mere presence of Earth, seen or unseen, is so inherently comforting that most normal people with a choice pick Nearside. Farside, by comparison, caters almost exclusively to hazardous industries and folks who don’t want that nice blue planet messing up the stark emptiness of their sky—a select group of people that includes a small number of astronomers at the Frank Drake Observatory, and a large number of assorted perverts and geeks and misanthropes. The wild frontier of the fantasies comes closest to being a reality here—the hemisphere has some heavy-industry settlements that advertise their crime rates as a matter of civic pride.

And then there are the haunts of those who find even those places too civilized for their tastes. The mountains and craters of Farside are dotted with the little boxy single-person habitats of folks who have turned their back not only on the home planet but also the rest of humanity as well. Some of those huddle inside their self-imposed solitary confinement for weeks or months on end, emerging only to retrieve their supply drops or enforce the warning their radios transmit on infinite loop: that they don’t want visitors and that all trespassers should expect to be shot. They’re all eccentric, but some are crazy and a significant percentage of them are clinically insane. They’re not the kind of folks the sane visit just for local color.

I landed my rented skimmer on a ridge overlooking an oblong metal box with a roof marked by a glowing ten-digit registration number. It was night here, and nobody who lived in such a glorified house trailer would have been considerate enough to provide any outside lighting for visitors, so those lit digits provided the only ground-level rebuttal to starfield up above; it was an inadequate rebuttal at best, which left the ground on all sides an ocean of undifferentiated inky blackness. I could carry my own lamp, of course, but I didn’t want to negotiate the walk from my skimmer to the habitat’s front door if the reception I met there required a hasty retreat; I wasn’t very capable of hasty retreats, these days.

So I just sat in my skimmer and transmitted the repeating loop: Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. Walter Stearns. I desperately need to speak to Walter Stearns. It was the emergency frequency that all of these live-alones are required to keep open 24-7, but there was no guarantee Stearns was listening—and since I was not in distress, I was not really legally entitled to use it. But I didn’t care; Stearns was the best lead I had yet.

It was only two hours before a voice like a mouth full of steel wool finally responded: “Go away.”

“I won’t be long, Mr. Stearns. We need to talk.”

“You need to talk. I need you to go away.”

“It’s about Minnie and Earl, Mr. Stearns.”

There was a pause. “Who?”

The pause had seemed a hair too long to mean mere puzzlement. “Minnie and Earl. From the development days. You remember them, don’t you?”

“I never knew any Minnie and Earl,” he said. “Go away.”

“I listened to the tapes you made for the Museum, Mr. Stearns.”

The anger in his hoarse, dusty old voice was still building. “I made those tapes when I was still talking to people. And there’s nothing in them about any Minnie or Earl.”

“No,” I said, “there’s not. Nobody mentioned Minnie and Earl by name, not you, and not anybody else who participated. But you still remember them. It took me several days to track you down, Mr. Stearns. We weren’t here at the same time, but we still had Minnie and Earl in common.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” he said, with a new shrillness in his voice. “I’m an old man. I don’t want to be bothered. Go away.”

My cheeks ached from the size of my triumphant grin. “I brought yams.”

There was nothing on the other end but the sibilant hiss of background radiation. It lasted just long enough to persuade me that my trump card had been nothing of the kind; he had shut down or smashed his receiver, or simply turned his back to it, so he could sit there in his little cage waiting for the big bad outsider to get tired and leave.

Then he said: “Yams.”

Twenty-four percent of the people who contributed to the Museum’s oral history had mentioned yams at least once. They had talked about the processing of basic food shipments from home, and slipped yams into their lists of the kind of items received; they had conversely cited yams as the kind of food that the folks back home had never once thought of sending; they had related anecdotes about funny things this co-worker or that co-worker had said at dinner, over a nice steaming plate of yams. They had mentioned yams and they had moved on, behaving as if it was just another background detail mentioned only to provide their colorful reminiscences the right degree of persuasive verisimilitude. Anybody not from those days who noticed the strange recurring theme might have imagined it a statistical oddity or an in-joke of some kind. For anybody who had been to Minnie and Earl’s—and tasted the delicately seasoned yams she served so frequently—it was something more: a strange form of confirmation.

When Stearns spoke again, his voice still rasped of disuse, but it also possessed a light quality that hadn’t been there before. “They’ve been gone a long time. I’m not sure I know what to tell you.”

“I checked your records,” I said. “You’ve been on the moon continuously since those days; you went straight from the development teams to the early settlements to the colonies that followed. You’ve probably been here nonstop longer than anybody else living or dead. If anybody can give me an idea what happened to them, it’s you.”

More silence.

“Please,” I said.

And then he muttered a cuss word that had passed out of the vernacular forty years earlier. “All right, damn you. But you won’t find them. I don’t think anybody will ever find them.”

Seventy years earlier:

We were there for about two more hours before George took me aside, said he needed to speak to me in private, and directed me to wait for him in the backyard.

The backyard was nice.

I’ve always hated that word. Nice. It means nothing. Describing people, it can mean the most distant politeness, or the most compassionate warmth; it can mean civility and it can mean charity and it can mean grace and it can mean friendship. Those things may be similar, but they’re not synonyms; when the same word is used to describe all of them, then that word means nothing. It means even less when describing places. So what if the backyard was nice? Was it just comfortable, and well-tended, or was it a place that reinvigorated you with every breath? How can you leave it at “nice” and possibly imagine that you’ve done the job?

Nice. Feh.

But that’s exactly what this backyard was.

It was a couple of acres of trimmed green lawn, bordered by the white picket fence that signaled the beginning of vacuum. A quarter-circle of bright red roses marked each of the two rear corners; between them, bees hovered lazily over a semicircular garden heavy on towering orchids and sunflowers. The painted white rocks which bordered that garden were arranged in a perfect line, none of them even a millimeter out of place, none of them irregular enough to shame the conformity that characterized the relationship between all the others. There was a single apple tree, which hugged the rear of the house so tightly that the occupants of the second floor might have been able to reach out their windows and grab their breakfast before they trudged off to the shower; there were enough fallen green apples to look picturesque, but not enough to look sloppy. There was a bench of multicolored polished stone at the base of the porch steps, duplicating the porch swing up above but somehow absolutely right in its position; and as I sat on that bench facing the nice backyard I breathed deep and I smelled things that I had almost forgotten I could smell—not just the distant charcoal reek of neighbors burning hamburgers in their own backyards, but lilacs, freshly cut grass, horse scent, and a cleansing whiff of rain. I sat there and I spotted squirrels, hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, and a belled calico cat that ran by, stopped, saw me, looked terribly confused in the way cats have, and then went on. I sat there and I breathed and after months of inhaling foot odor and antiseptics I found myself getting a buzz. It was intoxicating. It was invigorating. It was a shot of pure energy. It was joy. God help me, it was Nice.