Independence Day: Crucible (The Official Prequel) (30 page)

“Yes,” she said. “There’s a full range actually. Some died during or soon after their contact. Others were rendered catatonic for varying durations. Still others seemed hardly affected.”

“How do you account for the differences?” he asked.

“I can’t find a single consistent correlate,” she said. “It appears to have to do with the individual, how long the contact was, how intense. Here’s the interesting thing though.” She paused.

“Yes, what’s that?” he asked.

She leaned forward across the table, so their faces were much nearer.

“Some of them are regressing,” she said.

“Regressing?”

“Yes,” she said. “Many of my subjects report having experienced night terrors, difficulty sleeping, confusion and so forth for a short time after their contact. In most cases, this faded over time. They felt more normal. In the last few years, however, there seems to be a general trend of worsening symptoms.”

“Do you know why?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “It’s quite frustrating. I was wondering if you might have a theory.”

“Nothing I can think of,” he said.

“The captive aliens—” she said “—have they shown any sort of change?”

He laughed. “They’re playing dead, all of them. Nothing new there.”

She sighed and leaned back.

“Would it be possible for me to examine them?” she asked. “The aliens?”

David had been as diplomatic as he could about her book. Although it did raise a few interesting issues, for the most part it didn’t seem much like
science
to him, but rather more a kind of storytelling that wasn’t easily subjected to testing or verification. He found he was liking her though. So instead of going with a flat “no,” he decided to be slightly more encouraging, in a way that wouldn’t actually be a lie.

“That’s a tough one,” he said. “We only allow access to them in drips and drabs. You’ll need to write a proposal, and it will need to somehow fit with the Earth Space Defense goals. I’ll see what I can do.”

She nodded. They went on to discuss the Umbutu situation, and David had to admit that he hadn’t made any headway there. The old man was utterly inflexible, and launching any sort of invasion remained out of the question. If the heavy hitters in the global coalition were seen to be behind something like that, it could be looked upon as a new form of colonialism—which could in turn weaken trust in what was at the moment a very popular organization.

He got his American martini, and then another, and three, and soon they were no longer talking business, exactly, but had spun off into a discussion of what consciousness really was. She seemed to hold with Hofstadter in saying that what people referred to as consciousness was actually a powerful symbolic system whose most potent symbol was that of selfhood, of identity. That led to whether any part of a person’s “self” survived death, and then somehow they were on the subject of old movies.

What he really noticed about the conversation, what really impressed him, was that while she asked about him—his childhood, his education—trivial details seemed to delight her—she never once brought up the big day, the Fourth of July, the trip to the mother ship, Hiller, the president—none of it.

She smiled at him a lot, and touched his hand when she laughed sometimes. He thought he was probably looking outright foolish, and although on one level he wanted the night to go on, on another he did not.

Another finally won.

“Well,” he said. “This has been really nice, but I’ve got an early morning.”

“
Bien sûr
,” she said. “I understand.”

“Good. Good,” he said. “Well, okay.”

She stood up and reached for him.

“Um—” he started.

Then she kissed him on both cheeks.

“This is how we say good night in France, yes?”

“Yes,” David said. “Right. Good night.”

He started to turn away, but four drinks were bubbling through his veins and he was feeling as if he ought to say something. He just wasn’t quite sure what it was.

So he decided to just open his mouth and see what came out.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Would you like to, I don’t know, get together or something?”

“Huh,” she said. She looked thoughtful.

“What about this,” she said. “I know a little about Lisbon. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll take you on a walking tour. You can buy me dinner.”

David nodded, feeling like he had some sort of obstruction in his throat.

“That sounds great,” he said.

* * *

Lisbon was nestled up to the sea, but most of the city sat on hills steep enough to make San Francisco—what had been San Francisco—look like a flat plain. One particular incline was impressive enough that, more than a century ago, the city had constructed a gigantic elevator—the Elevador de Santa Justa—to transport passengers up and down it.

“It’s a work of art as much as it is a machine,” Catherine said, waving at the iron neo-Gothic arches that climbed upward from their vantage point at its base. “It was designed by a student of Gustav Eiffel—you know, the man who designed the Eiffel Tower.”

Her expression took a melancholy turn, and he understood why. As he would never see the Empire State or the Chrysler Building—or the original Statue of Liberty—she would never again see the original Eiffel Tower, the Sacré Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe. When New York had still been a place, he’d thought of such tourist attractions as just that, too hokey to go see himself. Now, they were poignant symbols of a city and a way of life forever vanished.

They entered the elevator, manned by an old fellow with a rather stern expression. Inside it was paneled in wood, mirrors, and windows. The controls were brass, and for a moment David felt as if he was inside some kind of invention from a Jules Verne novel. The lift took them to a balcony and café, where they drank coffee and looked out over rust-red terracotta roofs toward the sea, and watched Sol sink nightward.

Soon thereafter they went to a fado club and listened to music that he could only think of as some sort of Portuguese blues. Instrumentally it was mostly guitar, played in a particularly percussive manner, and the vocals wailed, rose and fell like gentle weeping. Yet there was also a sort of triumphant thread in it. Although he understood none of the words, it made him feel sad, cathartic, and uplifted all at the same time. Part of this was probably due to the freely flowing red wine.

They snacked on sausages and cheese, and when Catherine deemed him drunk enough, they had a large bowl of tiny snails. He had eaten escargot before—this wasn’t that. Escargot were sort of rubbery gray balls slathered in butter and garlic. These things looked exactly like the small garden snails he remembered from growing up, antennae and all. They were steamed, and death had fixed their necks in a fully extended position, and they were eaten by using a straight pin to pluck them from their shells.

Once he gagged the first few down, he had to admit they were pretty good. Again, the wine helped.

They danced, which he had not done since God knew when. They talked, about everything and nothing. It had been a very long time since he had gotten to know somebody, anybody, to explore another person as they explored him. It was like being seventeen again, and it was quite honestly an experience that he had never really expected to come across again.

He was delighted and terrified.

Finally, he walked her to the door of her room and when she leaned up to kiss his cheek, he shifted his head and met her with his lips. She uttered a throaty little chuckle and then kissed him back. He took her in his arms and pulled her close.

After a moment, she took out her room key and opened the door. Then she took him by the hand and led him inside.

* * *

He woke to his phone alarm going off, and stirred, groaning a bit.

Then he realized where he was, and remembered. He slowly turned to look at the other side of the bed and found Catherine there, smiling enigmatically, her hair pleasantly mussed, her eyes not fully open. She looked beautiful.

“Oh,” he said. “Good morning.”

“Is that important, the sound your phone is making?” she asked.

“Sort of,” he said. “I’ve got a flight in about two hours.”

“So you’re just dashing away?” she said.

“Well, it’s an ESD transport,” he said, “and I’m the boss, so I don’t have to show up early for baggage check and screening. I have time for a cup of coffee, at least.”

“That’s not exactly what I was thinking of,” she murmured.

* * *

Afterward there was still time for coffee, some hard rolls and cheese. They exchanged contact information, and when it was finally time for him to go, they shared their most awkward kiss.

On the plane, he began wondering what he had done. He felt guilty, remembering the last time he and Connie had made love. He hadn’t known it would be the last time. If he had known, if he had seen it coming—if she had died of cancer, or something predictable—would it have made a difference? Would it be so hard to let go if he had been able to tell her goodbye?

But he hadn’t, and he couldn’t.

He watched the gray Atlantic far below. People—his father in particular—had been urging him to get on with his life, but did that necessarily mean a new lover, or a new wife? Catherine was smart and beautiful and acerbically funny. He should be happy, counting the days until he saw her again, worried that she wouldn’t call. Instead he just felt guilty. Empty.

Connie had been the great love of his life. Maybe for him, there would not—could not—be another.

One thing felt certain. If there ever could be another, it wasn’t now. No matter what his father said, no matter what he had briefly thought he felt last night—it was too soon.

A few days later, when Catherine called, he reached for the phone—and then didn’t answer it. He didn’t know what to say or how to say it.

* * *

Dikembe didn’t know how long he had been in the hole, enveloped in darkness. He had first tried to keep track by counting the number of times he slept, but without night and day to set the pace, he soon became uncertain about the count.

After a certain point he didn’t care.

The hole was a concrete shaft about two meters in diameter. Food and water came down in a bucket on the end of a rope, apparently at night, because even then there was no light. Unable to see them, he identified the bucket and its contents by touch.

In the first few days of his captivity, he had made a grab for the rope and tried to climb up it. Whoever was at the end of it let him ascend a few meters and then simply let go of the rope.

After that the food and drink stopped coming for what seemed a very long time. Then, one night, a new rope came down. He ate and drank and placed the containers back in the basket. The rope was withdrawn. The bucket also served as his latrine, although when the food had been withheld, he had been forced to use a portion of his floor, which didn’t make things any more pleasant.

And so it went. He dreamed terrible dreams, asleep and awake. Tried to think of happier days, of his time in Oxford. Everything had been new then, life a broad river taking him somewhere brilliant. His only responsibilities in those days had been to himself, and he had stayed in England after school, might have stayed there forever. Even after the aliens came, he could have stayed, returned to Oxford for that matter.

But something in him knew he had to come to the place where he was born. For what? To watch it die of a human disease? To see his father metastasize into the very thing they had fought so hard against? To end his life at last in darkness?

He spoke to himself. He sang, and listened as his voice reverberated in the tube. He shouted and screamed and pounded on the concrete at times. He cursed Zuberi, and promised to kill him and the family he held so dear, but even that finally passed. What would more killing accomplish?

His wound healed—someone must have given him antibiotics, or perhaps they were in the food. He did jumping jacks and calisthenics and boxing footwork, punching into the darkness, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. He felt himself thinning, becoming less and less. Not physically, but inside. Despair rode on his shoulders, heavier every moment, and he knew that soon it would break him.

On one occasion when the basket came down it contained not only the usual fufu and water, but small, cylindrical objects. Most of them were quite smooth, but one was not—it had a flared end, and a little stud, and when he pushed the stud something happened, and he shut his eyes, because they hurt.

It took him several long, deep breaths to understand what was happening, that he was holding a small penlight and seeing something for the first time since Zuberi’s face had blurred into nothingness.

As his eyes adjusted, the ugly concrete wall and the filthy floor seemed like the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

It could be improved, however. Because the rest of the cylinders were pieces of colored chalk.

He took the chalk and began to draw, feeling like a cave painter at the dawn of human history, at that crucial point when something changed in humans, when they began using symbols and language to understand their world. To depict themselves and the animals around them for the spirits and one another to see. To bend sight and mind and hand into creation.

He started off trying to fashion a world for himself, a boundless savanna populated by giraffes and elephants, skies full of clouds, birds, and wind to bend the acacia trees. And yet somehow when he formed them on the concrete they weren’t the same as he remembered. The giraffes had the huge slanting eyes of aliens and were mottled gray and black. Their horns multiplied and formed a mane of squirming tentacles. He drew hyenas with flat, flaring heads but no mouths. Instead of birds and clouds his sky was populated with suns and full moons and round stars, all with lines bisecting them.

He went quickly at first, but then he began to conserve the chalk, to work less representationally and more essentially. He spent a long time on every line, curve, and dot as his drawings grew increasingly abstract—until one day he realized that he had just drawn a jumble of symbols that looked like the writing they had discovered in the alien ship. Furthermore, he thought he knew what some of them meant.