“WHAT—no. Uh . . .” How do you do this?
I don’t know. You’re the only person we’ve ever managed it with. With the others, we have to use pictures. They can’t hear us talking.
He was quite close now, so close that Conner could see that he had faint, white hair on his head and a wrinkled face.
I am old. We are all old.
Where are you from?
Endless time. We are so old we’ve lost our history.
What is your mission?
You are my mission.
What does that mean?
There was no response . . . except there was. He hung his head.
Are you . . . crying?
I think so.
Why?
He shook his head, then held out his hands. They were long and the fingers were like snakes tipped with claws. Slowly, his own hands shaking, Conner reached out to him. They stayed like that, their fingers an inch apart, both of them trembling.
The three others came closer. They hovered around the taller one, bouncing slightly in the air when a gust of wind came.
The tall one touched Conner’s cheek with the softest finger he thought you could ever feel. It did not just touch you, it made vibrating electric contact with your skin.
Little colt, not ten minutes ago, my touch would have made you run again. But you do not run.
Am I going to get to go home?
Home . . .
You’re crying now.
The gray lay down in the snow. The three others hovered over him. Something then happened that was completely beyond comprehension to Conner. They had a black object that turned out to be a jar, which they opened, screwing the top off in a flash. Out of it they drew three gleaming butcher knives.
As Conner watched in stunned astonishment, they cut open the tall gray like Dad gutting a fish. The knives made a ripping sound.
He struggled. They were killing him.
“Stop it,” Conner shouted. “Stop it!”
One of them turned toward him, brandishing his knife, and Conner backed away, holding out his hands, trying to convey that he would not interfere.
They opened the gray from his featureless groin to the top of his head, splitting his whole body in half. Inside was a swirling mass of lights in a million, million colors, and Conner recognized them. They looked like an immense star field imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. They looked like the whole universe, somehow contained inside the body of this gray.
They lifted it out, and it wobbled in the air between them, the universe in the shape of a gray, snow swirling around it, flakes blowing into it and away into the vastness of the stars.
There was humming, voices that sounded both innocent and wise, and the notes were so beautiful that Conner gasped aloud, and wanted to cry because this was the richest, the most lovely sound he had ever heard. It was a sound with a scent, almost, as if the flowers of heaven had bloomed.
THE LITTLE GROUP OF GRAYS with Conner were by no means the only ones who were witness to what was happening. On the contrary, there was vast witness in the huge device that carried the main body toward Earth. The gigantic sphere was now two light years away and had been decelerating almost since 1947, when it had turned in the direction of Earth. Large though it was, with its thousand-mile diameter, it was still far too small to be detected by earthly telescopes. In fact, it probably wouldn’t be noticed until it was actually in orbit around the planet, because its surface was black, designed to absorb any and all light energy that might reach it.
Inside, a tiny sun glared in a strangely constricted sky. In fact, this was a miniature star just six hundred feet across, built by the grays and capable of shining steadily for a million years, at which time it would explode and instantly vaporize the whole sphere. If they hadn’t made it long before then, it wouldn’t matter anyway. There would be nothing left in the sphere but dust.
Its inner surface was landscaped to an exact replica of the grays’ desert home, with cities made of white houses, domed and looking like adobe. A shield moved around the central sun, bringing fifty hours of darkness every fifty hours to each part of the sphere, the same amount of day and night that the grays had known at home.
As they needed nothing and ate nothing, the grays had no economic life. They had freed themselves from sexual reproduction an epoch ago, then discovered that pleasure is founded in desire, and without reproductive needs, desire fades.
They would have gone collectively mad in this trapped chamber, had they not been able to venture with the earthly triads into the mind of man.
They watched now, sitting in their houses, their heads bowed in concentration, as Adam gave his whole being, all of his experience, all of his knowledge, all that he was, to Conner.
An outline of the child’s body stretched across their strange sky, a body filled with stars, and with it came the wind and the night and the snow.
Slowly, as they listened and felt, one of them and then another, then more and more, raised his head and came to his feet. The tall, gracile ones, the short, squat ones, all of them in their unimaginable billions, raised their heads.
Then they ascended from their white cities, rose into the air, and began to fly like so many soaring eagles, and it became clearer what was happening. These creatures, who could neither laugh nor smile, were doing the only thing they could to express an emotion they had not known in many a long age: they were dancing with happiness.
THE STRANGE FIGURE WENT ROUND and round Conner, its head getting smaller, its legs and arms thicker, its body like a fluid of stars, taking on a different shape, the shape of a human being, and getting brighter, too.
Each snowflake that touched the thing now went up in a tiny puff of steam, and it was beautiful, the smoking snow and the brightness, and the humming of the thing as if the wind itself had learned to sing.
Conner began to quake down inside his stomach and up his spine and everywhere, even in his toes and in his eyes, and he realized that the thing was vibrating, too.
“Momma . . .”
The thing came closer to him.
“MOMMA!”
Then the humming was all around him, it was in him and his chest was vibrating with it, and he felt as if he had risen off the ground or gotten very large, and for an instant the snowflakes that had looked like stars around the thing were around him, and were, instead, a whole tremendous universe of stars.
Then it was dark again and Conner had fallen down in the snow. He could not rise. He was completely weak, and when he closed his eyes, he saw the universe in his head, and he saw it, too, when he looked at his palms, in his hands, stars swirling inside his skin.
The three grays pushed at the tall one until his body closed up again. Then he rose in the air between them, and the four of them ascended, wobbling and buzzing, into the storm.
“Hey! Hey, you! I am still willing to negotiate!”
It got cold again. Conner could no longer see stars inside himself. The wind howled around him and he screamed in agony and clutched his pajamas around him.
Whump whump whump whump.
Up in the snowy sky, a shadow, black and huge. Then light shining down, a glaring blue-white searchlight beam.
The light shone so bright on Conner that he could hardly look into it. He knew that it was a helicopter, and that it must be here to rescue him, and he got up and wallowed in the snow, into a clearing among the pines, waving and waving and yelling with all his might, “I’m here, I’m here!”
Wind from the rotors hit him and with it came ferocious, lung-shattering cold. He screamed, covered his head, and turned away from the blast.
“Conner! Conner Callaghan!” a voice shouted, barely audible over the churning of the helicopter blades and the screaming of the wind.
It was a man in a helmet, not a gray, coming down a rope ladder from the chopper. He had on a faceplate so you couldn’t see his face, but he sounded strong and, above all, normal.
The helicopter roared off into t
he storm and was gone. The guy knelt before Conner on one knee, and quickly wrapped a space blanket around him. “I’m going to take you home, boy.”
Conner threw his arms around the man, who held out his big gloved hands. “Come on, buddy.” Conner was not a small kid, but the guy was really tall, and picked him up easily. “We need to warm up those feet real quick.”
It felt so good to be carried that Conner just leaned his head against the guy’s shoulder, and let himself be cozy in the space blanket. As the guy strode along, he watched the woods slip away behind them.
“Conner, lots of new things are going to happen to you, I suppose you’ve realized that.”
“I’m sort of getting that feeling.”
“You’re going to have a teacher. You met her earlier tonight. Lauren Glass. I want you to know that you can count on her absolutely.”
“Who are you?”
“Somebody else who’s concerned with your well-being.”
He could feel that it was true, that there was goodness radiating from this man like heat. “Man, I’m glad you found me.” He closed his eyes.
“Sleep, child,” the man said, and held his head against his shoulder.
Then somebody was shaking him. He stirred, pulled at the blanket—and shot straight up in bed. “Dad!”
“You’re having a nightmare, son.”
“I was . . . outside. I was outside and—” It felt so good to see Dad there that he just threw his arms around him. “Listen, it was no dream. No dream! I was out in the woods, with—”
Conner no!
“What?”
“Conner? Out in the woods? Go on.”
“I mean, uh, in the dream. Obviously. Look, let’s go back to sleep.”
Conner lay back in the bed. Dad lingered. Good, let him stay.
Why not tell him? Conner asked.
In time, Conner, in all good time.
The voice was different, Conner noticed, bigger, somehow, echoing.
Who are you?
The collective.
Okay. What is the collective?
Conner, we are nearly seven billion, and we need your help.
“You’re kidding!”
Shh!
“What? Kidding about what?”
“Let’s go to sleep, Dad, okay?”
“Sure, Conner . . . of course.”
He could hear singing, then, the same tune that he had heard in the woods. He sensed, but in an indistinct, unformed way, an immense shadowy sea, that seemed to be made up of numbers and words and this deep, fleeting song. It was knowledge, he decided, so high and fine that it was a music, totally simple, utterly pure.
“Something’s happening to me, Dad.”
Dad had tears in his eyes. “Conner, you look like stars.”
“I do?”
DAN COULD NOT UNDERSTAND. HE saw his son, but his son now appeared to be a child made of the stuff of the night sky, a child whose body was somehow shining out of the planetarium of his own boyhood, and he heard a song from his boyhood, a beautiful voice humming “Suo Gan,” the song by which his own mother had seen him off to sleep when he was scared, just come back from a journey into the dark.
He sat on the bedside, and met the music with the words in the old Welsh tongue of his mother’s people: Huna blentyn yn fy mynwes, Clyd a chynnes ydyw hon . . . sleep, my child, at my breast, ’tis love’s arms around you.
Slowly, as Conner fell into sleep, the stars in his body faded as if with the coming of morning, and Dan was left with his boy gently breathing, lost in the deep sleep that blesses and heals childhood.
Katelyn came, and he stood up. “A miracle,” he said. “Katelyn, a miracle.” He embraced her.
“What do you mean?”
He could not explain it, not as it had been. “I just think you gave me such a grand kid.”
She leaned her head against his shoulder. Arm in arm, they returned to their own bed.
Outside, the storm howled wild, and the footprints of the man in the mask, who had carried Conner home all unseen, and entered the house by stealth and returned him to his bed, slowly filled with snow.
TWENTY-FIVE
AS THE WEE HOURS WORE on, Mike drove the car yet again out of the snow, and went to check the Keltons. He was very annoyed with this family, who were so damnably late to bed. But this time, there was only a single dim light showing out of the upstairs bathroom window.
He trotted out into the broadness of the road. In the distance, he saw a flash and thought perhaps he heard a shout carried away by the wind. A long minute’s careful watching and listening brought only the hissing of snow and the moaning of the wind.
He glanced up at the sky. According to the radio, the storm would not abate until morning. That was important to him, because his tracks had to be covered.
He proceeded up the rougher edge of the property, where there would be flower beds in a few months. Any remaining suggestion of tracks would be harder to spot here. He moved to the back of the house, then examined the doors and windows. He found an unlocked window. Carefully, he examined it for any sign of an alarm system. Finding none, he slid it open and pulled himself into the house.
He closed the window behind him. Standing absolutely still, he got used to the sounds of the place. He prepared some ether. His first challenge would be the dog. It was awake now, but would soon fall asleep again, as long as his odor didn’t reach its nostrils. The reek of the ether would cover it, however.
He closed his eyes and listened. He had to locate that animal or he had to back out of here. He moved farther in, through the dining room, to the foot of the stairs in the front hall. It was sleeping on the landing. The instinct of the watchdog is to block the path.
He took a step, another. Could he get around it? He took another step. Now he was on the step just below the landing, looking down at the animal.
The step across it was too long. So he had to use the ether. He came down on his haunches and laid the soaked cloth ever so gently over the animal’s muzzle.
He waited. The dog’s breathing deepened. Now it began to rattle in its chest. He could kill the dog. He’d enjoy that, he detested dogs and their reeking shit and their brainless fawning over people who weren’t worth a damned glance. Like this family of fatsos. But the dog was too useful. First, the grays couldn’t control the minds of dogs. Second, he could—and to great effect.
More confident now, he went to the top of the stairs. The parents would be the lightest sleepers, so he implanted and hypnotized them first. This hypnosis was a simple process, taking only a few moments. The secret of it was that the words were chanted in a rhythm that caused them to be perceived by the subject as his own thought. These people would wake up in the morning thinking violently about Conner. When they came into range of his transmitter in town, the irritation to their temporal lobes would cause the anger to become an uncontrollable obsession.
He went next into the boys’ room and did them with equal efficiency.
Just like that, and very neatly after the agonizingly slow start, his mission on Oak Road was accomplished.
THE THREE THIEVES ALL HEARD it at the same time: breath sliding through nostrils, getting louder. Then they saw Wilkes leave the Keltons’ house. Very well, the collective said, let him go. There was a flicker of suspicion, however, when no soul drifted out of the structure. If Wilkes believed that the Kel-ton child was his target, why had he not killed him?
Of course, he would want to attempt to deceive the grays. He would not want them to know he had done the murder. He would have created some sabotage within the structure that would make the death seem an accident.
The collective had one of the Three Thieves physically observe Wilkes depart in his car. The Two listened to the brown moaning of his mind as he drove away. And then the world was once again silent, and he rejoined his brothers in carrying Adam into Conner’s sleeping form.
Adam was not yet fully depleted. There remained in him structures of thought that would
organize Conner’s mind. These structures were the core of him, held in immensely complex fields of electrons that rested in permanent superposition. As such, they were both in Adam and were Adam, and were also everywhere in the universe, and potentially capable of tapping all knowledge. This core could not be implanted in Conner until the rest of Adam’s being had settled in him, or the core would burn the boy’s nervous system like an out-of-control nuclear reaction.
The transfer of this last material would result in the permanent annihilation of Adam—in fact, this was the essence of Adam, the part of him that felt real and alive. Here and now, is when Adam would feel actual death.
He was scared. In fact, so were the Thieves. This was the unspeakable thing that, as emotionless as they were, every gray still feared, the final end, wherein even the memory of self disappears and all the long years lived without emotion and thus without meaning, slide away into useless nothingness.
The whole collective watched, breathless and sorrowful, each one hoping that Conner would find a way to save them, that after this death there would be no other.
The Thieves crossed the yard and slipped into the house via the basement door, and rose quickly through the darkness to Conner. They spread Adam’s body, now thin and as pale as a wraith, and guided it over Conner.
Adam had wondered how this would be, to die into another. He’d feared it, and out there in the woods, he’d cried. Do it.
He felt himself dwindling into the boy, sifting downward as lightly but as inexorably as dew. All that had enabled him to relate to and understand man, what he had learned from Eamon Glass and Lauren Glass, slipped away into the sleeping child.
He had given Conner all he knew, and his ancestors knew, of the universe. Now he gave him himself. As each tiny bit of his being detached and flowed into the hungry new nervous system that was spreading like a fire through the boy, he felt not regret but an abiding joy, an emotion that he had not known he could feel.
Thus, as he died, this ancient creature regained all that time and age had taken from him, the once-rich spirit of the grays with its love of truth and appreciation for the glory of the universe.
It had been eons since a gray had felt. Now, though, Adam’s experience hummed across the gulfs of space, and the whole collective felt with him the anguish and joy of his death.
The Grays Page 26