The survivor didn’t run. Rather, it stood up, and, in the increasing light, waved its arms over its head.
“It’s me you want.” The voice came in over the all-band radio. “She’s done nothing to you, never heard of the Katsaros family until I told her. She’s just my boss.”
Beau restrained his laugh only by habit. Not that the noise would have mattered, with his suit telemetrics fastidiously set to “off.”
She was a lot more than boss, from what he could tell. Unconsummated love, left so forever because one of them had foolishly angered the wrong people. His clients really were going to like this.
He kept walking. The lighting was getting better by the second. Now, even from 400 meters, he could tell that the one on the ground was female. He folded the tripod up against the stock of the rifle. Lowered the gun and fired from the hip. A miss. But not by much. He’d seen the dust puff behind the hare. On Earth the man might have flinched, but here, unless he saw the muzzle flash, he might not even have known he’d been shot at.
Beau continued to walk. As long as the guy didn’t run, Beau could be as nonchalant as he wished. And the guy clearly wasn’t going to leave the woman. Stupid because she was dead, no matter what. Maybe Beau would even get to record his face as he blew her brains out.
Two hundred meters away, and suddenly he realized he had a shadow. That wasn’t right. No way was the image enhancement that good. He turned it off and the shadow was still there. How could there be a shadow here in the land of eternal night?
He wheeled back to look at the top of the crater rim behind him. The crescent of sunlight was still there, a bit thicker than before, but not much. But above it was a flare of unbelievable brightness; so bright his suit’s sunshield automatically kicked in to dim it.
He wheeled back toward the prey, but could no longer see them. He fired vaguely in the right direction, but he was now in the center of a spotlight, so bright everything outside was impenetrably dark.
The one good thing was that he could now truly see his footing. He tried to run, but the light followed him, the beam contracting by the second.
It was getting warm. Not just warm, but hot. He dodged right, then left, but the intolerable brightness remained. There were voices yelling at him to do something, but he tuned them out.
Belatedly he realized that the way to go was toward the prey: force the operators of this blinding, searing light to aim it not only at him, but at them. But he was in a land of brightness surrounded by dark and he no longer knew where his targets were. The brightness contracted, the darkness drew closer, and the heat rose and rose until the ground steamed, as ices, trapped for a billion years, felt the light of a thousand suns they’d never seen before and Beau’s suit, black as the night he’d hidden in, absorbed every erg. As did the gun. Stumbling, burning, he dropped it. Zigged. Zagged. Tried to get into the dark.
Then, blessedly the light was fading.
But his suit was still burning, burning, burning, and he needed out, out. Needed a breath of coolness. Just a whiff. Anything but the fabric that still burned his skin, the air that still seared his lungs, even as the light faded to that which he’d remembered from a distant Earth.
He couldn’t think. He was confined in something. A suit. That was it. A hot, horrible suit. All he needed was air. Cool air. Just a breath. He’d stripped off his outer gloves some time ago; he couldn’t remember when. Now he fumbled at the latches for his helmet. Cool. He had to have cool . . .
Razo hadn’t needed McHaddon’s telescope to watch the assassin die. Once the light got bright enough, there were plenty of perfectly ordinary cams near the volatile mines to use as Lum’s crew put the adaptive optics of the stills’ mirrors through tricks they were never intended to do. Pure, raw sunlight, stolen from an area a hundred meters on a side and focused into a beam of blinding heat. So what if, up on the rim, only a sliver of sun was yet above the horizon?
“Poor bastard,” he said.
Caeli gripped his hand.
“In twenty years, I’ve never had to kill anyone. Never thought I’d have to.”
Caeli didn’t say anything, which was probably best. He squeezed back. Then it was time for business.
“Sarah?” he said on the all-suits channel. “Drew? You still with us?”
“Yeah.” Drew’s voice seemed surprisingly close. “Though we could use some help. What the hell was that?”
“Home-made heat ray.” Suddenly he felt unbearably tired. “Ask Lum.”
Ask your future father-in-law, he’d almost said. Some tea leaves were easy to read. Even with Caeli still holding his hand, Raz felt old.
He shut off the com. “He went back for her. He could have run, but he went back.”
“Of course.”
“I didn’t.”
It took her a moment to get it. “It’s not the same, Artie. Nobody was pointing a gun at her and your situation was absolutely no-win.”
“He didn’t leave her.”
“Yeah, and look how it worked out. He’d have been dead if he had, shot before he took two steps. Would you concede, for just a minute, that had you gone back to Earth you might have died? Not the same way, but in some other?
“Or how about this. If you had, Drew and Sarah would be dead. Give yourself a break, Artie. Sometimes good things come out of bad. And new starts don’t have to be instantaneous.”
XIII
“How’s Damien?”
By now, Drew knew Sarah well enough not to be surprised that these were her first coherent words once she’d recovered from surgery. The bullet had shattered her femur, narrowly missing the femoral artery, and it had taken eight hours and a hardware store’s worth of titanium to put it back together. Still, the docs had assured Drew she’d not only walk again, but someday challenge him at running the plates. Bones knitted well under low gee.
But of course Sarah hadn’t asked about that. Oh, she would eventually. Descending into the crater with her, Drew had been amazed by how gracefully she moved, how easily she maintained the effort. On Earth, she’d have had a sport. Gymnastics, perhaps. Or maybe tennis. Something that demanded poise and strength.
Or maybe he was just biased.
Meanwhile, the issue was Damien.
“It looks like he’s going to make it. The docs gave him a seventy-five percent chance, last I heard. They’re really stunned he even got back to the tunnels alive.”
The meds made her voice groggy. “We’re a good team.”
Drew grinned. “Never doubted it.” Though it wasn’t just them. When the assassin had blocked his and Sarah’s run for help, the rest of the PEL crew had done everything else as close to perfectly as humanly possible. A lot of hands had worked to save Damien, a lot of folks who’d never before met him. Hell, Drew had never met him. He was just a guy who’d accidentally taken a bullet—three bullets, actually—for him, and been saved by a clan of folks he’d never known before.
Drew finally knew why he’d come to the Moon. It wasn’t just a new start. It was a new family. The real thing. Bound by . . . well, he wasn’t sure what. But something thicker than blood.
Meanwhile he had other news.
“I’m dead.”
Sarah was recovering quickly from the meds. “You don’t look it.”
“Good.” He laughed. “I wasn’t meaning it literally. But while you were under . . .” Briefly, he choked up. Even though the docs had been optimistic, there’d always been a chance she’d never wake up again . . . “While you were under, Razo—he’s a good guy, you know—he told me that as long as the guy trying to kill us was dead, he was putting out the word that there were two casualties, Drew Zeigler being the other. The official story is that I got killed before Razo and Lum got him.”
Unexpectedly, he felt smothered in a confusing mix of emotions. Gratitude. Relief. The dregs of leftover fear. Saving him would have been the pinnacle of Razo’s career: the stuff of tabloids from here to Ceres. Instead, he’d given it up to truly save him.
“Anyway,” he said, “he’s going to need some help keeping the secret.”
“No problem. Nobody’s going to have any trouble with that.”
“And I’m going to need a new name. Something Loonie would be good.”
Sarah’s smile was tired and he knew that sleep beckoned. But not yet. “Janes?”
XIV
“When you go back to visit, I want to meet her too,” Caeli said.
She and Raz had wound up in his quarters, still too wired to make more than the most chaste moves toward that which they’d joke/flirted about so often.
“Who?” Raz was still thinking about fresh starts, good-coming-from-bad.
“You know. Your daughter. She’s got to be in college now, right?”
“Yeah. She’s a sophomore at Macquarie, majoring in Renaissance literature.”
“Really?”
He shrugged. “What makes you think she’ll even talk to me?”
Caeli’s eyes were far away. “Oh, she will.” She hesitated. “You’re not the only one to hit space with secrets.”
“Don’t say anything you don’t want to. It’s the real you that matters.” He tapped his chest. “The one that lives in here.”
“Yeah. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. But this is part of what made me who I am. And probably brought me to space.” She paused. “You would have brought Jenn and Lily back here if you could. My daddy . . . well, let’s just say I’d give my right arm to have him show up from wherever he went.” Her eyes were moist. “I might beat him black and blue with it, but I’d give it up. But I’d not give up space. Not for all the daddies in the world.”
Her mood brightened. “I’ve got a better idea. Don’t go visit her. You didn’t want to train for the gravity, anyway. Invite her here. How could she resist?”
“And who, pray tell, would fly her up?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, I bet you could find someone.”
He stared at the com. It would take a while to work up the courage. But family—true family anyway—was more than the accident of birth. It was about choices. Maybe sometimes you could choose both.
CLOSE ENCOUNTERS
Andy Duncan
Andy Duncan made his first sale, to Asimov’s Science Fiction, in 1997, and quickly made others, to Starlight, Sci Fiction, Amazing, Science Fiction Age, Dying For It, Realms of Fantasy, and Weird Tales, as well as several more sales to Asimov’s. By the beginning of the new century, he was widely recognized as one of the most individual, quirky, and flavorful new voices on the scene today. His story “The Executioner’s Guild” was on both the Nebula Awards Final Ballot and the final ballot for the World Fantasy Award in 2000, and in 2001 he won two World Fantasy Awards, for his story “The Pottawatomie Giant,” and for his landmark first collection, Beluthahatchie and Other Stories. He also won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2002 for his novella The Chief Designer. His other books include an anthology coedited with F. Brett Cox, Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, and a nonfiction guidebook, Alabama Curiosities. His most recent books include a chapbook novella, The Night Cache, and a new collection, The Pottawatomie Giant and Other Stories. A graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, he was born in Batesberg, South Carolina, and now lives in Frostburg, Maryland, with his wife, Sydney. Duncan is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Frostburo State University. He has a blog at http://beluthahatchie.blogspot.com.
The simultaneously sad and funny story he offers us here is a treat for anyone who grew up in the flying saucer–mad days of the ’50s and stayed up late, eyes wide, reading battered old paperback copies of Donald E. Keyhoe’s The Flying Saucers Are Real. . . .
SHE KNOCKED ON my front door at midday on Holly Eve, so I was in no mood to answer, in that season of tricks. An old man expects more tricks than treats in this world. I let that knocker knock on. Blim, blam! Knock, knock! It hurt my concentration, and filling old hulls with powder and shot warn’t no easy task to start with, not as palsied as my hands had got in my eightieth-odd year.
“All right, damn your eyes,” I hollered as I hitched up from the table. I knocked against it and a shaker tipped over: pepper, so I let it go. My maw wouldn’t have approved of such language as that, but we all get old doing things our maws wouldn’t approve. We can’t help it, not in this disposition, on this sphere down below.
I sidled up on the door, trying to see between the edges of the curtain and the pane, but all I saw there was the screen-filtered light of the sun, which wouldn’t set in my hollow till nearbouts three in the day. Through the curtains was a shadow-shape like the top of a person’s head, but low, like a child. Probably one of those Holton boys toting an orange coin carton with a photo of some spindleshanked African child eating hominy with its fingers. Some said those Holtons was like the Johnny Cash song, so heavenly minded they’re no earthly good.
“What you want?” I called, one hand on the deadbolt and one feeling for starving-baby quarters in my pocket.
“Mr. Nelson, right? Mr. Buck Nelson? I’d like to talk a bit, if you don’t mind. Inside or on the porch, your call.”
A female, and no child, neither. I twitched back the curtain, saw a fair pretty face under a fool hat like a sideways saucer, lips painted the same blackred as her hair. I shot the bolt and opened the wood door but kept the screen latched. When I saw her full length I felt a rush of fool vanity and was sorry I hadn’t traded my overalls for fresh that morning. Her boots reached her knees but nowhere near the hem of her tight green dress. She was a little thing, hardly up to my collarbone, but a blind man would know she was full growed. I wondered what my hair was doing in back, and I felt one hand reach around to slick it down, without my really telling it to. Steady on, son.
“I been answering every soul else calling Buck Nelson since 1894, so I reckon I should answer you, too. What you want to talk about, Miss—?”
“Miss Hanes,” she said, “and I’m a wire reporter, stringing for Associated Press.”
“A reporter,” I repeated. My jaw tightened up. My hand reached back for the doorknob as natural as it had fussed my hair. “You must have got the wrong man,” I said.
I’d eaten biscuits bigger than her tee-ninchy pocketbook, but she reached out of it a little spiral pad that she flipped open to squint at. Looked to be full of secretary-scratch, not schoolhouse writing at all. “But you, sir, are indeed Buck Nelson, Route Six, Mountain View, Missouri? Writer of a book about your travels to the Moon, and Mars, and Venus?”
By the time she fetched up at Venus her voice was muffled by the wood door I had slammed in her face. I bolted it, cursing my rusty slow reflexes. How long had it been, since fool reporters come nosing around? Not long enough. I limped as quick as I could to the back door, which was right quick, even at my age. It’s a small house. I shut that bolt, too, and yanked all the curtains to. I turned on the Zenith and dialed the sound up as far as it would go to drown out her blamed knocking and calling. Ever since the roof aerial blew cockeyed in the last whippoorwill storm, watching my set was like trying to read a road sign in a blizzard, but the sound blared out well enough. One of the stories was on as I settled back at the table with my shotgun hulls. I didn’t really follow those women’s stories, but I could hear Stu and Jo were having coffee again at the Hartford House and still talking about poor dead Eunice and that crazy gal what shot her because a ghost told her to. That blonde Jennifer was slap crazy, all right, but she was a looker, too, and the story hadn’t been half so interesting since she’d been packed off to the sanitarium. I was spilling powder everywhere now, what with all the racket and distraction, and hearing the story was on reminded me it was past my dinnertime anyways, and me hungry. I went into the kitchen, hooked down my grease-pan and set it on the big burner, dug some lard out of the s
tand I kept in the icebox and threw that in to melt, then fisted some fresh-picked whitefish mushrooms out of their bin, rinsed them off in the sink, and rolled them in a bowl of cornmeal while I half-listened to the TV and half-listened to the city girl banging and hollering, at the back door this time. I could hear her boot heels a-thunking all hollow-like on the back porch, over the old dog bed where Teddy used to lie, where the other dog, Bo, used to try to squeeze, big as he was. She’d probably want to talk about poor old Bo, too, ask to see his grave, as if that would prove something. She had her some stick-to-it-iveness, Miss Associated Press did, I’d give her that much. Now she was sliding something under the door, I could hear it, like a field mouse gnawing its way in: a little card, like the one that Methodist preacher always leaves, only shinier. I didn’t bother to pick it up. I didn’t need nothing down there on that floor. I slid the whitefish into the hot oil without a splash. My hands had about lost their grip on gun and tool work, but in the kitchen I was as surefingered as an old woman. Well, eating didn’t mean shooting anymore, not since the power line come in, and the supermarket down the highway. Once the whitefish got to sizzling good, I didn’t hear Miss Press no more.
“This portion of Search for Tomorrow has been brought to you by . . . Spic and Span, the all-purpose cleaner. And by . . . Joy dishwashing liquid. From grease to shine in half the time, with Joy. Our story will continue in just a moment.”
I was up by times the next morning. Hadn’t kept milk cows in years. The last was Molly, she with the wet-weather horn, a funny-looking old gal but as calm and sweet as could be. But if you’ve milked cows for seventy years, it’s hard to give in and let the sun start beating you to the day. By first light I’d had my Cream of Wheat, a child’s meal I’d developed a taste for, with a little jerp of honey, and was out in the back field, bee hunting.
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