by Neil Gaiman
“May I ask your age?”
This time it’s he who pauses, anticipating her reaction. “The station was established in 429, CE.”
She stares, saying nothing. Her skepticism races to catch up with her astonishment.
He restates his answer, trying to help her register the fact. “I arrived fifteen hundred and eighty-one years ago.”
“You’re sixteen hundred years old?”
“Eighteen hundred and seven. Which is fairly ancient even on my planet.”
Finally, she thinks, yes: “on my planet.” It had seemed impossible, but it also seemed like the only plausible explanation. She tries not to hyperventilate. “Where-what planet are you from?”
“We call it”-for an instant his voice slips into an inhuman half hiss, half buzz-“Vrizhongil”-and then back to English with no trace of an accent: “It’s a moon, really, which orbits a large planet. Which orbits our sun, of course. About sixty-two light-years away. Very close by, in the scheme of things. But far enough, it turns out, that it made me expendable.”
Nancy says nothing, and continues to stare. Can this be happening? Can all of this possibly be real?
He had imagined this encounter hundreds of times, thousands, even rehearsed it. “You’re wondering if I’m insane, I expect. Well, there have been moments over the years when I’ve begun wondering that very thing: Am I mad? Is this story-spy from another planet stationed on Earth and abandoned by his superiors, almost two thousand years old, undersea polar base-is this all delusion, some sorry old man’s schizophrenic gibberish? And when I’ve reached those moments of existential crisis, this is one of the things I do, to prove to myself that I’m sane, that I am who I believe I am.”
He picks up a pair of nail scissors from the coffee table and jabs hard into the palm of his right hand. His blood is a kind of Day-Glo orange, and as it drips from his hand onto the table it sizzles and burns the wood like acid.
“Of course,” he says, grabbing a tissue to wipe his hand and the wood, “a skeptic would think this is a trick, some theatrical special elect. But you, Ms. Zuckerman, you have seen the Arctic station. And you found my picture there.”
“Yes.”
“So given the evidence, perhaps I don’t need to perform any further mortifications to establish my bona fides.” He’s smiling. He really does not want to remove his eyes from their sockets, or show her that he has a bifurcated phosphorescent penis and no anus at all.
“I believe you,” she tells him.
He explains that his government established a system to monitor civilizations on planets feasible for Vrizhongilians to reach, and that Earth was one of those 116 designated planets when he embarked on his 83-year-long flight here. The big ship carried four other intelligence agents headed for four other planets in the vicinity, along with their terrestrial stations in prefabricated pieces and individual expeditionary aircraft. A reconnaissance probe was sent to the surface to photograph humans, so that the necessary reconstructive surgery-remodeling ears, removing external neck cartilage, giving his skin a convincingly soft texture and pinkish tint, and so on-could be performed by doctors aboard the mother ship. His station was installed beneath the polar ice. And, voilà, he was on his own.
Sending a message between Earth and Vrizhongil took sixty-two years, so communication was impractical. He spent six weeks each year doing the field work-flying around the world, observing human settlements, taking pictures, making videos, scribbling notes-and the rest of his time organizing and distilling his material.
“Huh,” she says.
“What?”
“That’s so much time for assembling and editing.”
“Well, yes. Our productivity problem. You see, we sleep twenty or twenty-one hours a day. It’s the single thing I envy most about you. About people here, I mean.” Eating and digestion, he did not add, were what he found monstrous about humans. No doubt all intelligent species have their horrific and pathetic outliers, the psychopaths and murderers, the self-mutilators and televangelists. But on Earth, every single person chews food and swallows and shits, and it still disgusts him.
Once each century, he says, a mother ship would visit to resupply him and take back home a copy of his meticulous multimedia chronicle of another Earth century. And by the way-every one of his first six chronicles received the highest possible rating from headquarters.
“So your people, back on your planet, were only seeing your reports of life on Earth a hundred years after the fact.”
“Or longer.”
“And you wouldn’t hear back from them for another hundred years after that.”
He shrugs. “The speed of light is the speed of light.”
At the end of his standard eight hundredth tour of duty, which fell in the thirteenth century, he was to have been replaced by a young agent, and return to Vrizhongil for a headquarters job for another five hundred years before retiring. But no mother ship arrived in 1229. No mother ship ever showed up again. He’s been waiting ever since. And he never retired. The chronicle, he tells her, “is rather absurdly up to date.”
He explains that his people possess, by human standards, an uncanny ability to learn languages, so that during his biannual field expeditions, the northern hemisphere in December and the southern in June, he could move among people incognito. When he was threatened with harm or capture, he protected himself with a weapon, a long wand, which temporarily paralyzed every creature (“except, oddly, marsupials”) within 200 feet. He used the weapon, according to his records, 373 times in 1,442 years.
Quite often, however, when his aircraft hovered for long periods at very low altitudes, people saw it and became alarmed. To demonstrate his peaceful intentions, he would give away tokens, beads and bits of gold.
“The way that poll takers,” he says, a little defensively, “offer small cash payments in exchange for participating in a survey. It was one of our standard protocols.”
“And the station was established in the Arctic,” she asks, “for secrecy’s sake?”
He nods. “Yes, and for my personal comfort as well. Vrizhongil is a cold planet. During these hellish months,” he says, nodding toward the windows, “I give thanks every day for the invention of air-conditioning.” Outside it was almost ninety degrees, but Nancy had put on his sweater. “The region of my birth is considered warm, and temperatures there are the equivalent of Fairbanks. Or were, anyway.”
“But so-why are you here now, in Chicago? Why aren’t you in the Arctic?”
“Because it’s my kind of town?”
She doesn’t get the joke.
“An accident,” he says. He was wrapping up one of his annual northern field surveys, having just revisited and filmed the large Indian city of Cahokia, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Flying north, back toward the station, he suddenly lost power, and crash-landed in Lake Michigan. He managed to get gold, as well as the paralyzer, video equipment, and portable beacon-he touched the blinking device on the table-into the emergency raft. His aircraft sank.
“Our orders were unequivocal-remain as close as possible to one’s last position and wait for…rescue. Besides, back then I had no means of returning to the Arctic. So I built a home in the woods and coexisted with the natives. Every so often I brandished the paralyzer to reestablish my bona fides.” He smiles. “And I’m afraid I never disabused them of their ‘White God from the Heavens’ idea.”
“But what about, you know, the Europeans, the settlers?”
“They came later. Much later.” He pauses, possibly for dramatic effect. “Three hundred and fifty-six years later. I crashed in February 1317. When the French arrived, fortunately, they ignored the stories the Indians told about me. I was just another supernatural character in one of the savages’ supernatural myths. Fiction.”
“So for food, you hunted and gathered?”
“I don’t eat. As such. My body absorbs nutrients from the air.” This tangent makes him dread that she will ask to u
se his bathroom. He has no toilet paper.
He tells her about moving into Chicago not long after it was founded, about buying what he needed with pieces of his gold, about working at odd jobs in order to conserve the gold, about losing his video camera and paralyzer in the great fire of 1871, about the difficulty of employment in this era of income taxes and Social Security and government IDs. He has, of course, never sought medical care from a physician, and has kept changing residences so that neighbors don’t get too curious about why he doesn’t seem to age, or die. This is his fourteenth apartment. But except for the years he spent up in Winnetka, from the 1940s through the 1960s, in order to experience suburban life firsthand-“Once an anthropologist, always an anthropologist”-he has lived in Chicago since 1837.
They had talked for more than three hours, and Nicholas had awoken three hours before she arrived. He’s getting drowsy.
“You’ve told me almost nothing about your planet,” she says. “Your people, your history. We have so much to talk about. So much.”
“We do indeed. But if you don’t mind, perhaps we can finish for the day and continue our conversation tomorrow?”
“Oh, yes, of course, yes, absolutely.” But what if he runs away? What if he dies overnight? Then she reassures herself. She had today’s recordings. She’d taken pictures of him. She’d photographed the station, and knows its location exactly. Everything would be okay. She reaches over and touches his shoulder.
“Thank you. This is so extraordinary, I can’t…words really don’t…thank you.”
“I’m pleased, too. Extraordinarily pleased that it was you who made the discovery. I’m very, very lucky.”
“You’re lucky? Well, this is-I mean, I’ve won the lottery to end all lotteries, right? It’s Christmas in July!”
He chuckles, and the chuckle becomes, as he sits back, a full-throttle guffaw.
She’s horrified. Is he about to tell her that this has all been a practical joke, a hoax? That he’s an actor in some incredibly elaborate reality show?
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, still chuckling. “My fatigue has ruined my manners. I’m so sorry.”
“What?”
“There’s another part of the story you need to know. I was going to save it for tomorrow. But now that I’ve upset you, that won’t do.”
He begins by describing his aircraft in more detail than he had before: small, just twenty-six feet long, a large transparent canopy, landing rails instead of wheels, and a thicket of navigational probes extending from the front of the fuselage.
“When the people of the north, the Nordics and the Lapps and the rest, saw me flying, cruising at low altitudes through their midwinter skies nine hundred years ago, eleven hundred years ago, what do you suppose they thought they were seeing?”
Nancy shakes her head. She has no idea what he’s getting at.
“A flying sleigh, driven by a large bearded man who had given them gifts.”
“Oh my God.”
“And a flying sleigh pulled by what? By nothing? Literally unimaginable, so the array of antennae on the nose of the aircraft appeared to them as-what?”
“Oh my God.”
“Antlers, on a team of flying reindeer.”
“Oh my God.” She’s had three weeks to get used to the idea that she’d discovered an extraterrestrial base, and that she might actually find a creature from another planet. But this-meeting Santa Claus-is almost too shocking to process.
“When people would ask my name, I gave the one I’d always used, adapted to the local language-Nikolaos, Nikola, Nicholas. And when they asked where I lived, I saw no reason to conceal the truth-‘beyond the mountains of Korvatunturi,’ I told them, ‘near the top of the world.’ Although I don’t believe I ever said, ‘At the North Pole.’”
WHEN SHE ARRIVES THE next afternoon, he doesn’t answer the buzzer. Oh, Christ, no. She presses again. As she’s about to press a third time she hears his voice over the speaker.
“Nancy? Very sorry! Come right up.”
Has she ever been so thrilled? He’s still here, still friendly, his windows still improbably frosty. And she sees he has been scanning through his documentary videos. He invites her to sit next to him on the sofa and watch on a small, black spherical device that reminds her of Magic 8-Ball.
“I’m afraid I’ve never figured out a way to hook it up to the television,” he tells her as he touches the Play button.
“Holy Christ, they’ve got sound!” Nancy says, embarrassing herself. “Excuse me. I’m an idiot. Of course they have sound.”
She sees aerial panoramas of Lakota Indians chasing a bison over a cliff in the Sand Hills, junks and gondolas on the Tigris in Baghdad, China’s Great Wall half built. She watches and listens to slightly furtive-looking shots inside a bustling Viking tavern in northern England, men packing a piece of bronze statuary into a crate in eleventh-century Benin, a mock sea battle at the Colosseum in Rome, a smiling toddler in Edo speaking Japanese directly to the camera, a tall beardless man delivering a speech in Chicago in the summer of 1858. “Yes,” he tells her, “Abraham Lincoln.”
She is wonderstruck. She could keep watching forever. But after yesterday she’s more conscious of the time. Before long, he would get sleepy again.
“I want to discuss with you, Nicholas, exactly how you’d like us to proceed.”
“We can watch some more of this footage. We can talk. As you wish.”
“I mean longer term. I’ll do whatever you say. If you want, I could take you back up to the station, and you could see if the people on Vreez-honk, Vreez…I’m sorry. You could see if your headquarters has sent any messages to you, there, during the last seven hundred years. And couldn’t you send them a message?”
“And then wait 124 years for a reply? If there’s anyone there to reply.” He shakes his head. If he could cry, he might cry.
She says nothing for a few seconds. “Well, if I have your permission to tell your story to the world-I mean, if you prefer that I wait until after you, after you’re gone to reveal everything, posthumously, I would completely understand. If you want to maintain your privacy, I mean.”
“Thank you. Thank you. But while I am very old, it’s true, I might have another thirty or forty or fifty years left. Vrizhongilians have lived to be two thousand.”
“Good!”
“But I think you would find it a great burden and disappointment to be obliged wait that long, would you not? And when someone else stumbles across the station in the meantime?” He leans forward. “I’m tired of keeping my secret. All right, Nancy? I’m ready.” He’d thought about saying, “All right, Ms. Zuckerman, I’m ready for my close-up,” but figured she probably wouldn’t get it.
She wipes away tears. “I thought I was going to have to convince you.”
“You know, my dear, I’ve had more than enough time to consider this.”
He lays out his thinking, his concerns, his plan. The biggest problem, he believes, will be persuading the world that the Arctic station is not some kind of military base, that no invasion of Earth is imminent. Before anything becomes public, he thinks it might make sense to get Rupert Murdoch on board, possibly even offer him some kind of media exclusive, in order to keep Fox News from terrifying Americans unnecessarily. Nancy thinks he’s joking. He assures her he is not.
“Now I know this will sound corny in the extreme. Especially given the ‘Santa’ business. But I believe the best way for us to create goodwill from the outset is to describe what I have in mind as, quote, ‘Gifts to the People of Earth.’”
He will hand over his chronicle-all 2.4 million words he has written and, “far more interesting, I should think,” all 73,496 of hours of video that he shot on every continent but Antarctica in every year from the early fifth century to the late nineteenth century.
He will tell everything he knows about life in our part of the Milky Way, corroborated by the library of text and images stored at the station. “It’s all badly out of date
, of course,” he says, “but it’s better than nothing.”
And he will give to the people of Earth his surviving pieces of technology-in particular the batteries that power the video player and portable beacon and Arctic station, all still operating 1,581 years after installation. “I should think,” he says, “that some bright scientists somewhere will be able to reverse-engineer them.”
As she wonders how many billions of dollars his Vrizhongilian batteries might be worth, she feels a jolt of self-loathing. “This is going to be unbelievable, Nicholas.”
He smiles. “Let’s hope not.”
“I mean, this will be the biggest thing…ever.”
“I suppose. I do hope that people, anyway most people, will be glad to learn, finally, definitively, that they’re not alone in the universe.” Because, he thinks to himself, I know I am inexpressibly happy that my loneliness is finally about to end.
“Nicholas?”
“Yes?”
“May I hug you?”
Michael Moorcock. STORIES
THIS IS THE STORY OF MY FRIEND Rex Fisch who blew out his complicated brains in his Lake District library all over his damned books one Sunday afternoon last September. Naturally the place was a horror to clean, but Rex never really cared much about the mess he left in his wake. What pissed me off was the waste: each blasted cell was a story he’d never tell; a story no one else would ever tell. Rex knew how to hurt himself and the old friends who loved him. Only a few of us are now left. Cancer took Hawthorn, Hayley, Slade and Allard that same year. The first three had shared digs with Rex when he first lived in London. It didn’t seem fair of the bastard to deliberately deplete what remained of our joint memory.
As I said at his funeral Rex had more fiction in him than could ever come out, no matter how long he’d lived. A superb raconteur, he produced stories in every form, from dry, funny narrative verse to self-dramatising social lies. Novels, plays, short stories, comic strips, operas, movies, RPGs: throughout his career he was never stuck for a narrative. In that respect we were pretty much alike and shared a kind of discomfort at our own facility. We both identified with Balzac, sharing a fascination for Jacques Collin, his sinister and ubiquitous many-named master villain who set out to ruin La Torpille in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes. Rex discovered that most people prefer a good story and a bit of conventional prejudice to honest ambiguity; they made their most profound life decisions based on tales they saw in the tabloids or on reality TV. That didn’t stop Rex telling the truth when it frequently occurred to him. Truth was always in there somewhere, even when he thought he was lying. For all his later right-wing posturing, he had, like Balzac, a way of tapping into poor peoples’ dreams and understanding what they wanted most in the world. I envied him his empathy, if not his ambition. There was one story he couldn’t write. I think it was what we were all waiting for and which might have brought him the literary recognition he longed for. But he believed Paris Review editors could “smell the pulp writer on you,” while as an editor I rejected stories because I could smell Paris Review on them. I believed we were too good for the reviews even when we appeared in them. The conventions of genre were staler in literary writing than Harlequin romances: exactly why Rex turned out to be the writer we most needed on Mysterious.