Songs of Love & Death (52 page)

On the fourth night, sleepless, he finally wandered to his worktable, sat down at the laptop, and played several games of solitaire, as he could have done at any of the store computers. Then he reread his e-mail, browsed a favored newsletter, played a round of Battleship against himself, and tapped the One Key, almost diffidently, with his head turned away from the screen. He had not even put his earphones on.

When he heard the static of the spheres, he did not turn immediately, but moved very slowly, as though that other place were a wild bird he was trying not to startle away. The screen was, as before, aswarm with wheeling green sparks, and though Martin waited patiently, neither words nor the image of the wondrously alien beauty appeared. Finally he was unable to resist typing once again
My name is Martin
, and then, after some thought, adding boldly,
Your
name is Kaskia.

The reply was long in coming, leaving him to fear that he really had frightened her off; and then to speculate on whether an astronomer or mathematician could work out, just from the time it took his electronic missive to receive an answer, how distant Kaskia’s world actually might be. He vaguely recalled Barry as having been good with algebra and trigonometry in high school, and thought about setting him the problem.

Words shivered into place on the screen.

Kaskia. You Martin. Where you.

Martin slapped his palms exultantly on the table, and then quickly deadened the vibrations, for fear of waking Lorraine. “It’s real!” he whispered, raising his head to look toward the ceiling, and far past it. “Oh, sonofabitch, it’s real!” And either her English or the transmission was clearly improving, along with her comprehension. She must have one of those universal translators, like on
Star Trek
and those other shows. Or maybe she was just a fast learner.

He was up most of that night, happily reenacting all the first contact scenes and dialogue he remembered from movies and television. He placed himself and his planet in the universe for her, as best he could (though she seemed, to his chagrin, to have little knowledge of her own world’s relation to any other); and even told her, out of his own small store, something of the Earth’s history and geography. Kaskia was rather less informative, which he put down to her continuing difficulties with the language and her consequently understandable reticence. He did learn that she lived in some sort of grandly sprawling extended-family setting, that she was a singer and musician—apparently quite well-known, as far as he could make out—and that she felt happy and fortunate (if that was what the word she used meant) to find him a second time. The galaxy was very big.

The contact began to break up toward morning, presumably due to the rotation of both worlds and the slow, endless drift of the entire cosmos. But he understood by now when it would be possible for them to speak again; and when he asked her shyly if he might see her image once more—it took her some little time to grasp the meaning of the request—the face that had so literally made him forget how to breathe reappeared for a moment, sparkling against the stars. Then it was gone, and the screen of the laptop went blank.

Sleep was neither an issue nor an option. He lay down on the living-room couch—not for the first time—and stared at the ceiling, consumed by a need to
tell
someone
about his discovery, whether or not he was believed. Lorraine was out of the question, for a good many reasons, while Jaroslav was still avoiding him in the hall, and shopping elsewhere. As for his fellow workers, matters of authority forbade his taking any of them into his confidence… except perhaps for Ivan, the black security guard. Ivan read on the job, whenever he could get away with it—he had often been seen reading as he walked through the parking lot—and Martin, as management, should not have sympathized with him, or protected him, for a moment. But he did. Most of the books Ivan read were science fiction; and Martin had a growing feeling that, out of all the people he knew, Ivan might very well be the only one who might sympathize with
him
, for a change.

Ivan did. Ivan said, “Wow, man, that is a
good
story.” He slapped Martin’s shoulder enthusiastically. “That’s like Niven writing Bradbury. I didn’t know you were into that stuff. You got any others?”

Martin did not waste time protesting the complete truthfulness of his account. He said, “Well, I’m not a writer, you know that—I’m just fooling around. You think I ought to change anything? I mean, if
you
were writing it?”

Ivan considered. “One thing, I’d find a way for them to meet up. Not rocket ships, no Buck Rogers shit like that, I’m thinking transporters or some such. I mean, that’s exciting, man—that’s
risky
. Yeah, he’s seen her picture, he’s seen
somebody’s
picture, but what if she turns out to have a tail and horns and six-inch teeth? Mail-order brides, you know?”

“Well, I don’t think the guy’s thinking about getting together with her. I mean, she’s sort of famous on her world, and he’s married, and he could be a lot older—”

“Or
she
could. He don’t know how long it takes her planet to get around the sun, or anything about the biology. She could be seven hundred or something, you never know.” Ivan patted Martin’s shoulder again. “Tell you one thing,
I’d
sure like to have a laptop like the one you thought up. Dell ever makes that puppy, I’m first in line.”

Martin spent a good deal of time looking at the computer himself, even when the link to Kaskia was not open. His growing sense of the laptop’s true potential had, paradoxically, begun to distance him from the machine that he still believed loved and cared for him. “You scare me,” he said aloud to it more than once. “You’re with the wrong guy, we both know that.” To his mind, the One Key, employed skillfully by someone who knew what he was doing, could probably open channels quite likely beyond the reach of the Hubble Telescope. “But that’s just not me,” Martin said sadly. “I wish it were. I really do.”

He did finally get in touch with Barry, who, as expected, claimed absolute
ignorance of the laptop’s provenance, and could offer no clues toward tracing its history. “I told you everything I know the day I put it in your hands, kid.” He gave Martin the warm, confiding smile that not only attracted new victims every day, but continued to reseduce the old ones, who knew better. “I told you, you belonged together. Was I wrong? Tell me I was wrong.”

Martin sighed. “It’s like the time you sold me the motorcycle.”

Barry’s grin widened. “The Triumph. The Bonneville T100. You looked great on it.”

“I almost killed myself on it. It was way too much power for me. I sold it two weeks later and only got half what I paid you for it.” Martin rubbed his left shoulder reflectively. “This computer’s the same way.”

“I can’t take it back,” Barry said quickly. He looked alarmed, which was exceedingly rare for him, and it was Martin’s turn to smile reassuringly.

“I don’t want to sell it. I just wish I could live up to it.” He sighed again. “I wish we really did belong together.”

Lorraine came home from work then, and Barry promptly disappeared without a further word. Martin thought,
Those two understand each other better than I understand either one of them
. He wondered whether Lorraine had heard the last thing he said to his cousin. He wondered whether he cared.

The link, or channel, or the hailing frequency, or whatever it actually was, seemed to be open to wherever Kaskia was every five days, sometimes in the afternoon, like that first time, but most often at one or two in the morning. He often asked Kaskia what time it was there, but she seemed to have no concept of measuring time that Martin could translate into his mind. They usually spoke, through the good offices of the laptop screen, until nearly dawn, when Martin would slip quietly into bed beside Lorraine and try to catch at least two or three hours of sleep before heading off to work. It was a wearying regime, but generally manageable.

Kaskia’s English had improved further each time they communicated. When Martin questioned how she could be learning the language so fast, since she had not known of its existence until a few weeks before, she replied lightly,
Must be good teacher you
. Asked whether Martin could possibly learn her language in the same way, her answer was a somewhat puzzled
How could you
. She had not yet mastered question marks, or else there was a translation issue involved that he did not understand.

Which did not mean that she did not ask questions. She asked constantly and charmingly—if sometimes startlingly—about the smallest details of Martin’s life, from when and where and how he slept, to the names of every fruit
and vegetable he handled in his work, and whether there were
nildrys
on his planet. Martin never found out what
nildrys
were, but retained the distinct impression that a planet—or did she mean a house?—without
nildrys
was beneath contempt.

She herself liked best to talk about her pet, whose name on the computer screen was
Furtigosseachfurt
, and who sounded, in Kaskia’s description, like a cross between a largish ferret and a squirrel. He was quick and affectionate, liked to have his back scratched and his belly tickled, and on occasion he hid from her behind a rock or high in a tree, and then she had to find him. Her messages regarding the creature took up so much time that Martin would rather have spent on many other matters, and he even found himself skimming a bit over writing from the stars. But they were also so tender and guilelessly touching that they brought Martin just as often close to tears. Once she wrote
Sometimes he is all I have. Sometimes not. You.
Because of the lack of question marks, you could imagine, if you wanted to, that she might be saying that Martin was at times all she had. Martin wanted to think so.

One day the green sparks on the screen formed one word and nothing more.
Dead
.

Martin never thought for a moment that she was speaking of anything but the ferret-squirrel. She never mentioned family at all, and only rarely spoke of friends or acquaintances. He wrote as earnest a condolence as he knew how, sent it off into space expecting no reply, and got none. He wrote another.

Not being an obsessive person by nature, it never occurred to him that his concern for the sorrow of a person infinitely far away across the galaxy might in any way affect his work, or concern anyone else. But in fact, his increasing distraction had indeed been noticed by his superiors at the market, and by Lorraine as well. This was less of a worry for her than it might have been—Lorraine had survived far worse disasters, and had already chosen her parachute and a cozy landing strip. But she retained a certain rough fondness for Martin, and actually wished him well; so when she confronted him for the last time, it was without much malice that she said, “I have a bet with myself. Twelve to seven that when I walk out of here, you won’t notice for three days. Want to cover it?”

Martin’s response was as distant as Kaskia’s planet, though of course Lorraine couldn’t know that. He said quietly, “You left a long time ago. I did notice.”

Somewhat off balance, Lorraine snapped, “Well, so did you. I’m not even sure you were ever
here
. Stop playing with that damn computer and look at
me—you owe me that much. I’m at least more interesting than a blank screen!” For Martin had the laptop open, and was indeed staring at the empty screen, only now and then cutting a quick peripheral glance at her. Lorraine demanded, “What the hell are you looking at? There’s nothing there!”

“No,” Martin agreed. “Nothing there at all. Good-bye, Lorraine. My fault, I know it, I’m really sorry.” But the last words were entirely by rote, and he was looking at the computer screen again while he was speaking them. Lorraine, who had not planned to leave quite this soon, gave a short sneeze-laugh and went to make a phone call.

She would have collected on her bet, for Martin was too occupied with the One Key to be paying attention when she did leave the next day. They were into the second five-day cycle since his last communication from Kaskia, and he was growing anxious, as well as frustrated. He had reached the point lately of stepping outside when the night was at its darkest, and staring until his eyes blurred and burned up at the black, empty sky, currently just as much help to him as the empty computer screen. He would never have said—and never once did—that nothing else mattered but hearing once again from a nonhuman woman unimaginably far away on the other side of the other side, and he could not make anything else be real. All he could do, at this point, was simply to keep saying her name, as though that would make her appear.

And when he returned to the laptop she was there. Rather, the green sparks were crowding his screen, leaping this way and that, like salmon fighting their way home. And there was that unchanging alien face that chilled and haunted him so… and there was a message, as the sparks flew upward into words:

I miss

so much so much

I miss

help me

It was as though her grief had driven her language back to the basics with which their conversation across the night had begun—how long ago it seemed now to Martin. Nevertheless, the cry for comfort was clear; and he, whom so few had ever truly needed or called on for aid, would respond. He began to type, letting the words come without reading over them:

Dear lovely Kaskia,

I too know something about loss.

I never had such a pet as yours—

I cannot have pets, because I have

always been allergic to animals.

Do you know what that means,

allergic?

It means that the skin and the fur

and the hair of most animals

makes you ill,

sometimes very ill indeed.

I think sometimes that I have been

allergic to people,

even to my customers in the produce department,

and to my fellow workers.

I think I would do better with animals than people,