by Neil Clarke
“I, I can’t read your expression. Like Star Trek and that stuff, we expect aliens to be like humans, really.”
The alien wrote:
<>
“You don’t have our facial expressions.”
<
“Of course. So I can’t tell if you care whether your young killed two men on fishing boats.”
<
“We don’t know! Our government has not told us. Why?”
The man holding the computer opened his mouth to say something and thought better of it. The alien wrote:
<
“People are okay with your visit. They might not like your seeding our oceans and moving in. Plus killing us.”
This time it took a while to answer:
<
McKenna blinked. “Is that a religious idea?”
<
“Uh, sky? . . .”
The computer guy said, “Mistranslation. I saw that one with the astro guys last week. The software combines two concepts, see. Sky—means astronomy, ’cause their world is always cloudy, so the night sky is above that—and history. Closest word is cosmology, astronomy of the past.”
McKenna looked at the alien’s flat, unreadable gaze. “So it’s . . . science.”
<
McKenna could not see where this was going. He had read some pop science about something called dark energy, sure. It supposedly was making the whole universe expand faster and faster. “So what’s it . . . this dark heaven . . . do?”
<
McKenna blinked. “You mean we . . . our minds . . . send out their . . .”
<
“This sounds like religion.”
<
McKenna was getting in over his head. He felt light-headed, taking shallow breaths, clenching his hands. “You don’t regret that those men died?”
<
“Around here murder is a crime.”
<
“Look, even if spirits or whatever go someplace else, that doesn’t excuse murder.”
<
“Being dead matters to us.”
<
The Centauri blinked slowly at McKenna with its clamshell opening in the leathery, round eyes. Then it stooped to get its sprayer. From its wheezing spout moisture swirled around all of them.
The giddy swirl of this was getting to him. “I, I don’t know where to go with this. Your young have committed a crime.”
<
McKenna stood up. The damp scent of the alien swarmed around him. “Some more than others.”
He barely made it to LeBouc’s funeral. It was a real one, with a burial plot. At the church he murmured soft words to the widow, who clung to him, sobbing. He knew that she would later ask how her husband had died. It was in her pleading eyes. He would not know what to say. Or what he would be allowed to say. So he sat in the back of the whitewashed Baptist church and tried to pay attention to the service. As LeBouc’s partner he had to say something in the eulogies. A moment after he sat down again he had no idea what he had said. People looked oddly at him. In the graveyard, as protocol demanded, he stood beside the phalanx of uniforms, who fired a popping salute.
At least LeBouc got buried. He had washed up on a beach while McKenna was in the hospital. McKenna had never liked the other ways, especially after his wife went away into cremation. One dealt with death, he felt, by dealing with the dead. Now bodies did not go into the earth but rather the air through cremation or then the ashes into the sea. People were less grounded, more scattered. With the body seldom present, the wheel working the churn between the living and dead could not truly spin.
God had gone out of it, too. LeBouc’s fishing friends got up and talked about that. For years McKenna had noticed how his friends in their last profile became not dead Muslims or Methodists but dead bikers, golfers, surfers. That said, a minister inserted talk about the afterlife at the grave site and then the party, a respectable several hundred, went to the reception. There the tone shifted pretty abruptly. McKenna heard some guy in a seersucker suit declare “closure” just before the Chardonnay ran out.
On his sunset drive back down by the Bay he rolled down the windows to catch the sea breeze tang. He tried to think about the alien.
It had said they wanted privacy in their reproductive cycle. But was that it? Privacy was a human concept. The Centauris knew that because they had been translating human radio and TV dramas for a century. Privacy might not be a Centauri category at all, though. Maybe they were using humans’ own preconceptions to get some maneuvering room?
He needed to rest and think. There would for sure come a ton of questions about what happened out there in the dark Gulf. He did not know what he would or could say to LeBouc’s widow. Or what negotiations would come between Mobile PD and the Feds. Nothing was simple, except maybe his slow-witted self.
What he needed was some Zinfandel and an hour on his wharf.
A black Ford sedan was parked on the highway a hundred yards from his driveway. It looked somehow official, deliberately anonymous. Nobody around here drove such a dull car, one without blemish or rust. Such details probably meant nothing, but he had learned what one of the desk sergeants called “street sense” and he never ignored it.
He swung onto the oyster drive, headed toward home, and then braked. He cut his lights and engine, shifting into neutral, and eased the car down the sloping driveway, gliding along behind a grove of pines.
In the damp night air rushing by he heard the crunching of the tires and wondered if anybody up ahead heard them too. Around the bend before the house he stopped and let the motor tick, cooling, while he just listened. Breeze whispered through the pines and he was upwind from the house. He eased open the car door and pulled his 9mm from the glove compartment, not closing it, letting the silence settle.
No bird calls, none of the rustle and scurry of early night.
He slid out of the car, keeping low under the window of the door. No moon yet. Clouds scudded off the Gulf, masking the stars.
He circled around behind the house. On the Gulf side a man stood in shadows just around the corner from the porch. He wore jeans and a dark shirt and cradled a rifle. McKenna eased up on him, trying to ID the profile from the dim porch light. At
the edge of the pines he surveyed the rest of his yard and saw no one.
Nobody carries a rifle to make an arrest. The smart way to kill an approaching target was to bracket him, so if there was a second guy he would be on the other side of the house, under the oak tree.
McKenna faded back into the pines and circled left to see the other side of his house. He was halfway around when he saw the head of another man stick around the corner. There was something odd about the head as it turned to survey the backyard but in the dim light he could not make it out.
McKenna decided to walk out to the road and call for backup. He stepped away. This caught the man’s attention and brought up another rifle and aimed straight at him. McKenna brought his pistol up.
The recoil rocked his hand back and high as the 9mm snapped away, two shots. Brass casings curled back past his vision, time in slow-mo. The man went down and McKenna saw he was wearing IR goggles.
McKenna turned to his right in time to see the other man moving. McKenna threw himself to the side and down and a loud report barked from the darkness. McKenna rolled into a low bush and lay there looking out through the pines. The man was gone. McKenna used both hands to steady his pistol, elbows on the sandy ground, knowing that with a rifle the other man had the advantage at this distance, maybe twenty yards.
He caught a flicker of movement at his right. The second man was well away from the wall now, range maybe thirty yards, bracing his rifle against the old cypress trunk. McKenna fired fast, knowing the first shot was off but following it with four more. He could tell he was close but the hammering rounds threw off his judgment. He stopped, the breech locking open on the last one. He popped the clip and slid in another, a stinging smell in his widened nostrils.
The flashes had made him night blind. He lay still, listening, but his ears hummed from the shooting. This was the hardest moment, when he did not know what had happened. Carefully he rolled to his left and behind a thick pine tree. No sounds, as near as he could tell.
He wondered if the neighbors had heard this, called some uniforms.
He should do the same, he realized. Quietly he moved further left.
The clouds had cleared and he could see better. He looked toward the second guy’s area and saw a shape lying to the left of the tree. Now he could make out both the guys, down.
He called the area dispatcher on his cell phone, whispering.
Gingerly he worked around to the bodies. One was Dark Glasses, the other Mr. Marine. They were long gone.
They both carried M-1A rifles, the semiauto version for civilians of the old M-14. Silenced and scoped, fast and sure, the twenty-round magazines were packed firm with snub-nosed .308s. A perfectly deniable, non-Federal weapon.
So the Feds wanted knowledge of the aliens tightly contained. And Dark Glasses had a grudge, no doubt. The man had been a stack of anxieties walking around in a suit.
He walked out onto the wharf, nerves jumping in the salty air, and looked up at the glimmering stars. So beautiful.
Did some dark heaven lurk out there? As nearly as he could tell, the alien meant that it filled the universe. If it carried some strange wave packets that minds emitted, did that matter?
That Centauri had seemed to say that murder didn’t matter so much because it was just a transition, not an ending.
So was his long-lost wife still in this universe, somehow? Were all the minds that had ever lived?
Minds that had lived beneath distant suns? Mingled somehow with Dark Glasses and Mr. Marine?
This might be the greatest of all possible revelations. A final confirmation of the essence of religion, of the deepest human hopes.
Or it might be just an alien theology, expressed in an alien way.
A heron flapped overhead and the night air sang with the chirps and scurries of the woods. Nature was getting back to business, after all the noise and death.
Business as usual.
But he knew that this night sky would never look the same again.
Molly Tanzer is the author of Creatures of Will and Temper, Creatures of Want and Ruin (November 2018), and the weird western Vermilion. For more information about her critically acclaimed novels and short fiction, sign up for her newsletter at mollytanzer.com, or follow her @molly_the_tanz on Twitter.
Nine-Tenths of the Law
Molly Tanzer
Donna had picked up Jared’s favorite—Romano’s to go, he liked the rosemary bread and the penne rustica—and was just putting it in the oven to keep warm when they brought him in. They being EMTs, after pounding urgently on the door, and brought him in meaning he was on a stretcher. He had an IV in his arm and his eyes were bandaged with thick layers of gauze.
Donna felt a flash of annoyance as the EMTs wheeled him toward their bedroom, sending their cat Skimbleshanks hissing and skittering nervously out of the way. She had planned to propose they separate that night, over the tiramisu she’d put in the fridge. Then Jared moaned, and she chided herself. She was still his wife . . . for now, at least. She ought to be beside herself with worry, not annoyed over having to put off an awkward conversation.
“What happened?” she asked, hovering in the doorway while they got him into his pajamas and between the sheets, fumbling in the darkness of the room. Jared seemed pretty out of it. Doped up on painkillers, maybe? “Why didn’t someone call me?”
“Workplace accident,” the woman replied, answering only the first of Donna’s questions. “He’ll be fine, he just needs to rest. Please don’t turn on those lights. His eyes are very sensitive right now.”
Jared worked in administration at Denver International Airport. “What sort of workplace accident?”
“Someone will be by to talk to you,” the woman assured her, her eyes flickering to the other EMT, a buff young man with tattoos and one of those man-buns.
“What sort of someone?” Donna did not have to fake the concern in her voice, as it was due to the oddness of the situation rather than her husband’s condition.
As if on cue, there was a knock at the front door. Donna left the EMTs to let in a man in a gray suit. His hair was short; his shoulders, broad. Donna thought he looked vaguely military, but the pin on his lapel was the new DIA logo, the white peaks of the airport’s distinctive roof against a dark blue background.
“Mrs. Crane?”
For now. She pushed away the thought, and nodded.
“My name is Mr. Smoot. I’m sorry to meet you under these circumstances, but it’s a pleasure.” He did not try to shake her hand. “How is he?”
“He’s in bed,” she said. She suddenly smelled the food, and rushed into the kitchen to turn down the oven temperature. Mr. Smoot followed her. “That’s all I know at this point,” she said, over her shoulder. “What happened to him?”
“Nothing a few days of rest won’t cure.”
She frowned. “That he needs rest is all anyone’s told me.”
“There’s not much to tell. Just a workplace accident.” Donna was becoming annoyed; given how everyone was putting her off, she suspected something might really be wrong. Her face must have betrayed this, as Mr. Smoot set his briefcase on the table and opened it, withdrawing a single sheet of paper from one of the files. He handed it to her—it was a photocopy of an incident report.
She began to skim it as Mr. Smoot spoke; he and the document said basically the same thing: “He was riding in the employee train. They were testing a new sort of lighting system down there, and a bulb flared and burst. He was looking in the wrong place at the wrong time. We had him rushed to the hospital. They did a quick surgery—with a laser, nothing to worry about. Really, he will be fine. He’ll have to wear the bandages for a few days. When they come off, he’ll have two black eyes, but that should be it.”
“I see.” Donna set the paper on the table. She was relieved to finally have an answer, and understood why they’d wanted a D
IA rep to tell her. Damage control; lawsuit avoidance. “I’m glad it’s not serious.”
Mr. Smoot smiled. “We are, too. Now, as to the logistics, you work as a dental hygienist, correct?”
Donna frowned. “Um, yes.” Creepy that he knew, but it must be in Jared’s file somewhere . . . ? And yet, every time a new acquaintance learned her husband worked at Denver International Airport, they inevitably asked about one or more of the X-Files-style rumors that floated around the place like cottonwood fluff in the springtime. Was DIA where they’d take the President in the event of a global crisis? Did its murals predict the rapture? Were the delays and budget increases that had plagued its construction due to the secret alien research facility beneath the tunnels? The truth is out there . . . except it wasn’t. She’d been on tours of the facility with Jared. It was just an airport.
“We’ll make sure you get all the paid time off you need to take care of your husband. Or would you prefer a nurse be assigned? One will stop by, of course, to check in on him until the bandages come off, but without being able to see, he’ll need someone here to help him. We’ll of course cover any and all costs of home health care if you choose the second option, but we thought you might like a little mini-break.”
“Sure . . .” Donna may have gotten her GED, but she was no dummy. This was definitely lawsuit avoidance. “Thanks.”
“Excellent. Well, I’m sure you’d prefer to be in there with him than out here with me.” Mr. Smoot sniffed the air. “Smells like you had dinner ready for him . . . so sorry.”
“It’s just takeout,” she assured him. “Would you . . . like some?” Jared wasn’t going to want the penne rustica that she’d driven twenty minutes into Aurora to get. Someone ought to enjoy it, and Mr. Smoot wasn’t bad looking, actually. It might be nice to have dinner with someone different, just for a change. What might they talk about? The possibilities were endless! “I got wine. He probably can’t have any of it.”