“Nerdy bird,” her brother chimed.
“One day I found a book of his under the bed. I left it on the kitchen counter, debating whether I should donate it to the library or send it down the garbage disposal in a kind of modern-day voodoo. When I walked back into the room half an hour later, Luke was standing in the middle of the room, reading the book.”
There. It was out. The single most astounding thing that had ever happened to her, finally given wings. She waited to see if it flew.
Cable turned to Luke. “I thought she said you weren’t very good at reading.”
“Reading sucks.”
“And the words look all funny to you when you try?”
“They’re scrambled eggs.”
Mira saw the skepticism in the man’s eyes when he returned his attention to her. “So let me see if I have this straight. Someone who can hardly read a lick, someone with dyslexia, someone who says reading sucks was apparently contradicting all of that and reading nonetheless.”
“There’s no apparent about it. He can do it. He can read only one book. I’ve tried others. Believe me. From children’s books to the Bible to Web sites to a hundred things pulled randomly from the bookstore shelves. The only thing he can read is one book. Your book. Like magic.”
“Magic,” Luke repeated, the wisp of wonder on his face.
Cable put his cooling coffee on the floor beside his chair and folded his fingers in his lap. “Show me.”
Mira was ready. From her oversized, zebra-print handbag she produced a road-weary paperback copy of the Nebula Award finalist This Mayflower Mars.
The cover depicted a tortured orange landscape crisscrossed with tire tracks. Thrust partially up from the ground was a human hand. The fingers were frozen as if grasping for something that would remain forever out of reach.
“Third printing of the mass-market edition,” she said.
“Too bad it didn’t see a fourth. Maybe I could have afforded a better place.”
“You wrote it five years ago.”
“No, actually I wrote it about eight years ago. It took a while to see the light of day. Nature of the business. Or so they say. It’s not my business anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I thought we were going to have ourselves a reading?”
Mira wanted to press him, but again she curbed her eagerness. She’d waited for this meeting so long that she couldn’t afford to screw it up now.
She tossed the book to Luke.
He was ready, and he caught it like his summer softball coach had taught him, looking it all the way into his hands. As he had done so many times before, he licked the tip of his finger and slowly turned through the copyright and title pages, none of which he could read without the usual nagging difficulty. He reached the story’s prologue, settled back in his seat—
“Wait,” Cable said.
Mira was so intent on her brother’s pending display that she started at the sudden sound of Cable’s voice.
“Not the first page,” he said. “Open it up to somewhere in the middle. Somewhere random.”
Luke’s thick eyebrows met in the middle of his forehead. “Random?”
“I realize that you probably won’t find anything in there but purple prose and an overuse of adverbs, but humor me. Just flip to a page and start from there. Any page. You pick.”
Luke shrugged. “Okeydokey.” He used his thumb to produce a satisfying fan of pages, and then stopped dramatically somewhere in the thicket that was the novel’s midpoint plot. Mira had read the book three times herself, hoping to find some kind of clue, some key that would unlock the box of this riddle. Though she’d admitted she wasn’t into sci-fi, she knew this particular work as well as anyone. It involved the second human expedition to the Red Planet. The team’s flight engineer was a clone of the man who’d served the first crew, all of whom had lost their lives twenty-four years before the second ship touched down. Though on the outside This Mayflower Mars was an adventure story—the reviewer from Kirkus had referred to it as “Isaac Asimov meets The African Queen”—on a deeper level it was the story of someone trying to find his own identity in the shadow of a man who’d come before, a man who looked exactly like him. In a way, Benjamin Cable’s book was a tale of twins.
Luke leaned toward the pages, cleared his throat, and read. “‘The sun when seen from this series of Valles Marineris cliffs always reminded him of frail things. It was so distant that it was nothing more than a dandelion head, yellow but pale, waiting, or perhaps hoping, to be blown by the breath of a passing boy so as to seed more interesting places.’”
Goosebumps rose on Mira’s arms. No matter how many times she heard him read like this, she still felt its sheer incredibleness in her spirit.
“‘Lieutenant Dycar clung to the cliff face and stared at the sun, its luminescence dulled by the vast gulfs of space. The ancient civilizations of Earth had worshipped it. But he couldn’t help but wonder what they would have thought of its far less impressive persona had they built their ziggurats here on this volcanic plateau where the sun played little more than a supporting role. Dycar asked himself if something so fragile was worthy of sacrifice and beating drums.’”
Luke looked up. “More?”
Cable scrutinized him. But he said nothing.
Luke tried his sister. “Gretel?”
“Mr. Cable?” She saw the puzzlement on his face. It was not unlike that on the faces of the doctors and specialists who had ultimately written off Luke’s feat as a developmental and neurological anomaly without medical explanation. There were autistic savants who could play classical piano with the mastery of a Juilliard graduate and wards of psychiatric facilities who could recite the Chicago phone book from memory.
Suddenly Cable applauded. “That, my young friend, was a hell of a reading.”
“That’s what everybody says!” Luke exclaimed. “But they don’t say hell.”
“My apologies.” His dark eyes jumped to Mira. “He can’t read anything else?”
“We could show you, if you’d like.”
“I think I would. But if all this is true, then why me? Why my book?”
“I don’t know. No one does. But that’s why we came here. We want you to help us find out.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The body bag was too big.
Gabe watched them transfer it from the back of the off-road Toyota to the ambulance. They’d rolled the bag’s excess plastic like a toothpaste tube.
“Jesus.” He fumbled for his cigarettes and vowed to quit after the pack was empty.
Though he’d dreaded making the call to the carabineros and requesting an encore of their performance of hours earlier, he had no choice. They’d followed him through the desert, the pinwheel like a road sign in a land with no roads. When they saw the boy, their reactions were not those of trained professionals but those of fathers, brothers, human beings.
Someone approached him from behind. He heard the footsteps long before anyone else would have, having trained himself to make up for his disability. By the slight shuffle in the gait, he guessed it was Rubat.
“What is happening here with you?”
Gabe turned toward him. Though he could see nothing in Rubat’s features, he knew the observatory’s elder statesman was glaring at him. The man’s gray hair had parted, revealing a bald valley along the center of his scalp.
“They told me to wait here,” Gabe said, glad to hear that his voice no longer quavered like an old telegraph wire. “So I’m waiting.”
“Waiting?”
“Following orders. I figure they’ll be along with their rubber hoses pretty soon and beat the truth out of me.” He wanted to add So can you cut me some slack? But Rubat was in full administrator mode and had forgotten he’d once gotten drunk and cried on the shoulder of the man he now confronted.
“You need please to stop this.”
“Stop what? I haven’t done anything.”
“Having the police authoritie
s here once is an unfortunate occurrence, but twice within twenty-four hours is unacceptable. The company already is close to shutting us down. No money, they say. Now they just look for a reason, and I will not give them one. Do you realize how this will look in the newspapers?”
“The newspapers?” Gabe gave a sharp bark of laughter. “I found two bodies today, dead people, so pardon me for having to involve the cops. I suppose I should’ve considered all the bad press and just buried them myself.”
Rubat crossed his arms. “I enjoy you, Gabriel. You make good sense of humor, and you will be fine astronomer. But we answer to higher powers, you and I. If the agency in Europe says cut you loose, I will of course follow instructions.”
Though Gabe had anticipated an ass-chewing, he hadn’t considered that somehow this could cost him his residency and thus his doctorate. “You called them?”
“It is part of my job. They should hear it from me instead of read about it online.” He sighed. “Gabriel, let us not get our claws out over this. Do not make any trouble for us, for me. The policemen will find out what this is all about. And you will do your work, and that will be it. This too shall pass, yes?”
Gabe wasn’t so sure. But he didn’t know what to say.
“I plan one day to speak well on your behalf and see that you are called Dr. Traylin. But that is not today. You will not make further inquiry into this … this matter of the corpses. You will not give interviews, and you will stay out of the desert. These are my conditions for you to remain as a student.”
“I’ve done my part for king and country. I’ll gladly let the cops take it from here.”
“Very good. Best of luck to you, because here comes one of them now.”
The man’s hat gave him away. Fontecilla snapped the cover shut on his tablet computer. “Walk with me, please.”
Gabe fell into step beside him. He was out of his depth and in increasing need of a shower.
“Do you mind,” Fontecilla said, “if I burden you with the usual questions?”
“I’m not sure if I know what the usual questions are.”
“I believe you do. They are the same questions the TV policemen would ask, yes? For example, did you know this boy?”
“I answered this already. I’ve never seen him before. I was trying to figure out where that guy had come from. I think he was carrying the boy on his back, and when the boy died, he went on alone.”
“Have you traveled here before, in this Atacama?”
“Only as a sightseer. On a bus. One of those weekend things for tourists.”
“Do you know what could account for the condition of the deceased?”
It took Gabe a moment to figure out what he was being asked. “You mean, do I know why he was cut up like that?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll have to leave that up to you. All I know is that he didn’t lose all three limbs at once, or at least that’s how it looked. They were removed at intervals.”
“Why?”
“You tell me. Or do you already know?”
“I wish I did. Matters would be so much easier if I had learned the art of augury. My grandmother, she claimed to see things from afar. Clairvoyance, they call it, yes? Apparently it is not a genetic trait. To be quite frank with you, Señor Traylin, I am presently as confused as I have ever been as a professional. I believe the proper English term is baffled.”
“Join the club.”
Fontecilla stopped, removed his hat, and used a blue handkerchief to dab his brow. “I am going to instruct an officer to take down more details from you as part of our report. From your friend, as well. Here is my card so you may contact me directly, for whatever reason. We will also issue to the media a statement. But I would ask as a personal favor that you refer the journalists to me.”
“Sure.”
“Are you going to be well?”
“Maybe after I throw up.”
“I could arrange for a physician.”
Instead of declining the offer outright, Gabe let it linger in the air between them. He wasn’t opposed to the idea, if only because he could take the opportunity to ask the doctor about the amputations.
“¿Señor?”
“Sorry.” He gave Fontecilla the best eye contact he could. “There’s something going on out there, isn’t there?”
“Perhaps. But perhaps not. I know that a boy died in the desert. Only that. No more.”
“Then maybe we should call your grandma.”
“I am afraid the Lord has done so already. He called her home last winter.” Fontecilla fixed his hat on his head. “Please try to go the rest of the day without requiring my assistance. What do those TV policemen say? The paperwork is starting to pile up.”
Gabe didn’t watch him walk away, but instead looked in the direction of where the pinwheel had stood before being stowed in an evidence bag. It had been the boy’s last banner. He’d stabbed it into the ground, proclaiming himself, and then he died.
“Who were you?” Gabe whispered.
The boy’s spirit, lost somewhere in the desert, made no reply.
* * *
Though his body needed the rest, Gabe’s imagination would not relent. In his mind he’d linked himself to the dead boy and the Messenger by way of his prosopagnosia because he knew that one day he’d die as they had, without seeing the face of someone he loved. And when the dead dragged you on a mission, you could seldom resist the pull of their chains. At some point in the middle of the afternoon, when he was usually snoozing with a book on his pillow, he took a seat beside the foosball table and opened his laptop. He logged on to one of the facility’s shared hard drives and accessed the seldom-used folder labeled TOPOGRAPHY.
Gigante won’t be found on any map.
True enough. But he had to see what, if anything, was out there.
The maps revealed nothing. They were strong on geological features but lacked the detail he sought. The observatory itself wasn’t even marked on them, so Gabe didn’t know where to place himself on the map. Without the benefit of the stars, he was a shoddy navigator.
Okay, Magellan, now what?
He knew how the nightmares would play out if he slept. The boy would crawl across the sand, dragging himself with one arm, trying to reach safety. Gabe would be unable to see the anguish on his face, but he’d damn sure hear his lamentations.
To fend off those images, he went online and tried to read the news.
That lasted only fourteen seconds, and then he pinched his bottom lip between his teeth, opened a mapping program, and zoomed in on the observatory. Using satellite imagery, he panned across the Atacama in broad strokes, then tightened his field of vision to the smallest degree of detail possible. He located the general area where he thought the boy had died. Tracking outward from there, he looked for anything that stood out in the wasteland.
The word nothing seemed inadequate. The virtual map revealed extinct volcanoes, fluted escarpments, and long tongues of russet-colored stone. The Midnight Messenger and his pinwheel-bearing passenger had a point of origin unobserved by satellites.
Gabe closed the laptop and tipped his head back. The tiny canals in the ceiling tiles offered him as much information as the Atacama atlas.
“What about the autopsy?”
Gabe looked at the man in the doorway. It was Mick Jagger. Or Prince Charles. Or the soccer star Jorge Valdivia.
“Vicente?”
“Do you think they will find anything?”
“Anything like what? They’ll learn the cause of death, if that’s what you mean.”
“What are you doing in here?”
“Things I shouldn’t be doing.”
“Playing with yourself?” Vicente laughed, though Gabe could tell it was forced.
“He was trying to save him,” Gabe said. “He was trying to get that kid out of the desert.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“And they shot him for it.”
“They who?”
“Space
men, cannibals, the Israeli secret police. I don’t know.”
Vicente leaned in the doorway. “The detectives asked a lot of questions. I told them everything I know, which is nothing, really.”
“They think I’m a suspect.”
“Huh? Why do you say that?”
“I look suspicious. Just ask Rubat.”
“One, you don’t look suspicious, and two, Rubat is overreacting. He’s not going to fire you, because you’re not going to give him a reason.”
Gabe sat up and put the laptop aside so he could rest his elbows on his knees. It was a better position if he wanted to resist the weariness that tugged at his bones. “What I don’t understand is where they were coming from. That’s the craziest thing. Assuming they didn’t cross the whole damn desert, all the way from Bolivia, they had to have something as a starting point. And there’s nothing out there.”
“Well … that’s not entirely true.”
Gabe had no luck trying to deduce the man’s sincerity through his body language. Was Vicente just playing him again? Was he about to expound upon the alien landing pad the government was concealing in the desert? Or the taco stand operated by the ghost of Elvis?
“Speak,” Gabe said.
“You’re new here, so maybe you don’t know. But this used to be prime saltpeter country. Hundreds of millions of pesos were made around here. Trains and trucks went back and forth twenty-four hours a day from the mines.”
“I’ve heard. But then it went bust.”
“True. Synthetic nitrate took over. Everybody left.”
“So?”
“So … there are ghost towns out there, amigo. And graveyards.”
CHAPTER NINE
Ben Cable stared at himself in the bathroom mirror and wondered if the Westbrook twins were trying to scam him.
“You ain’t worth scamming.”
Maybe that was true. His reflection remained unconvinced.
Santiago had been his home for the last year. Outside the tiny bathroom were the sounds of his neighborhood and a partial glimpse of his new life. On the corner stood the cluttered cigarette shop where he liked to visit just to smell the pipe smoke, the little Mapuche Indian woman behind the counter wearing her turquoise bracelets and hand-woven straw hats. The fishmonger two doors down with his baskets full of salmon heads, the kids on skateboards listening to their weird fusion of folk music and American rap—these were his people now, even though they were not really his at all. He’d come seeking inspiration on the suggestion of none other than a NASA field scientist. Ben had taken the man’s advice not only because he’d served as technical adviser when Ben was crafting This Mayflower Mars but because he was, as it turned out, Ben’s older brother.
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