IGMS Issue 2 (28 page)

Dee fought the urge to withdraw. "Thomas?"

They took it from me. Almost sucked me right out with it, but they took it all. Everything.

"Who did? Is this Thomas?" said Dee.

Yes. Thomas. I lost part of myself, have you seen it?

A laugh.

"What happened to you?" said Dee.

Dee was flooded with sensory information. He was floating in dark space, stars all around. Then he noticed a dark patch of space, as if a dark hole had opened. The hole grew larger and larger, the stars disappearing, until he realized that he was looking at another ship. An immense, completely dark craft approached.

This image was briefly replaced by an image of Thomas, looking at his hand. The image zoomed in to his hand, upon which sat a fly. Thomas slapped the fly with his other hand, leaving a smear. Then the image zoomed back out.

Hint. We're the fly.

Thomas laughed hysterically.

Again Dee was floating in space, the immense craft pulling along side. A tendril stretched out toward him, coming closer and closer. The moment it touched the hull, Dee saw a bright flash of light, and felt data sweeping out of him.

"Dee, what's happening?" said Anne, frantic.

No response.

She opened the cubicle door. Dee's body convulsed.

"Don't touch the umbilical!" said Rob. "I'm going to shut down the core. He'll know how to get out!" He moved to the other side of the room and started tapping away on a keypad.

Dee felt data flow from the ship at unbelievable speed, a vortex of information flowing into the alien tendril. He then started to pull away, watching the scene from afar. He could now see Thomas shutting down every system. He could feel Thomas's self being pulled into the vortex. Then Dee was yanked away, as if he was on the end of a taut rubber band, leaving Thomas and the immense alien craft behind.

Silence.

Blackness.

Nothing.

Anne watched Dee regain consciousness. His eyes opened, focused on nothing, then finally Anne.

"What happened? Are you alright?"

"Did you reset the core?" mumbled Dee.

"Yes," Rob said. "We reset the core."

Dee reached up and snapped the umbilical off his head. Tears welled in his eyes. "Thomas was in there. He was in there."

"Impossible!" said Rob. "He couldn't possibly have --"

"He was in there!" yelled Dee. "It was him. He called me by name, he ... he wasn't right, but it was him."

"And resetting the core ..." said Anne.

"Killed him," said Dee. "He's gone."

He hugged Anne. Anne, confused and scared, hugged him back. Dee started and broke the hug.

"Rob, get Earth online immediately. Anne, help me get back to my ship."

Dee liked the way Anne felt against him as they moved, and for the first time in a long time, he was reluctant to jack in. But they needed to get back, and he needed to contact Earth.

"What's happening, Dee?" said Anne.

"Thomas made physical contact with an alien ship," he said. "A ship from God knows where, and it was mind-bogglingly immense. It didn't show up on Thomas's sensors. He didn't even notice it until it blocked enough stars from his sight."

They reached the cubicle, and Dee held Anne tight for a moment before climbing in. They looked at each other without speaking as Dee closed the door.

After jacking in, Dee searched sensors and cameras until he satisfied himself that the ship was not hovering nearby.

"Incoming message from Earth," Dee said. "There are military ships en route. Four days out. And they are asking for a full explanation."

Rob entered the engine room. "How about giving us one, too?" he asked.

Dee described and recorded what he experienced to Anne and Rob in detail. After sending the recording to Earth, he scanned another time.

"I can't see the thing around here anywhere," said Dee.

"First contact," said Rob. "I always thought it would come."

"They'll know quite a bit about us if they figure out how to read the data," said Dee. "But somehow, I don't think that will be a big problem for them. Wish we knew something helpful about them."

After a few moments of silence, Rob said, "I'll go secure the engines over there. We can probably start making for home, meet those ships on the way."

Anne watched Rob leave, and placed a hand on Dee's cubicle. She looked around until she found a camera, then looked right at it. "Let's talk, Dee."

"Are you sure you want to talk to a flying hunk of metal?" he asked while scanning again.

Anne could sense his smile. "Yeah. I'm sure."

"Good." He completed another scan. Nothing. "Let's talk. You and me."

How do you systematically destroy a child with love? It's not something that any parent aspires to do, yet a surprising number come perilously close to achieving it. Many a child escapes destruction only through his own disbelief in his parents' worship. If I am a god, these children say, then there are no gods, or such gods as there be are weak and feeble things.

In short, it is their own depressive personalities that save them. They are self-atheists.

You know you have begun badly when you parents name you Bonito -- "Pretty Boy."

Well, perhaps they named you after a species of tuna. But when you are pampered and coddled and adored, you soon become quite sure that the tuna was named after you, and not the other way around.

In the cathedral in Toledo, he was baptized with the name Tomas Benedito Bonito de Madrid y Valencia.

"An alliance between two cities!" his father proclaimed, though everyone knew that to have two cities in your name was a sign of low, not high, pedigree. Only if his ancestors had been lords of those cities would the names have meant anything except that somebody's ancestors were a butcher from Madrid and an orange picker from Valencia who moved somewhere else and came to be known by their city of origin.

But in truth Bonito's father, Amaro, did not care for his ancestry, or at least not his specific ancestry. It was enough for him to claim Spain as his family.

"We are a people who were once conquered by Islam, and yet we would not stay conquered," he would say -- often. "Look at other lands that were once more civilized than we. Egypt! Asia Minor! Syria! Phoenicia! The Arabs came with their big black rock god that they pretended was not idolatry, and what happened? The Egyptians became so Muslim that they called themselves Arab and forgot their own language. So did the Syrians! So did the Lebanese! So did ancient Carthage and Lydia and Phrygia, Pontus and Macedonia! They gave up. They
converted
." He always said that word as if it were a mouthful of mud.

"But Spain -- we retreated up into the Pyrenees. Navarre, Aragon, Leon, Galicia. They could not get us out of the hills. And slowly, year by year, city by city, village by village, orchard by orchard, we won it back. 1492. We drove the last of the Moors out of Spain, we purified the Spanish civilization, and then we went out and conquered a world!"

To goad him, friends would remind him that Columbus was Italian. "Yes, but he had to come to
Spain
before he accomplished a damn thing! It was Spanish money and Spanish bottoms that floated him west, and we all know it was really Spanish sailors who did the navigation and discovered the new world. It was Spaniards who in their dozens conquered armies that numbered in the millions!"

"So," the daring ones would say, "so what happened? Why did Spain topple from its place?"

"
Spain
never toppled.
Spain
had the tragic misfortune to get captured by foreign kings. A pawn of the miserable Hapsburgs. Austrians!
Germans
. They spent the blood and treasure of Spain on what? Dynastic wars! Squabbles in the Netherlands. What a waste! We should have been conquering China. China would have been better off speaking Spanish like Peru and Mexico. They'd have an alphabet! They'd eat with forks! They'd pray to the god on the cross!"

"But
you
don't pray to the god on the cross."