Time Past

by Maxine McArthur

  Murdoch and I eased away from the Assembly group and threaded our way back to the road, the sun hot on the backs of our necks. I turned to look once more at the sky over the city. Something flashed silver and I thought it was an airplane banking.

  Only it wasn’t banking, it was hovering. And it was far too large to be an aircraft. Far too large to be anything made by humans.

  I reached out and grabbed Murdoch’s arm. “Ow. What are you...” He followed my trembling finger pointed east. “Shit. It’s them.”

  Behind us in the park, somebody with a radio receiver stuck to their ear was yelling. The media reporters were running toward the edge of the park, cameras raised. The pipes faltered, then stopped.

  Two media helicopters rattled overhead toward the city.

  “What is it?” Grace came up behind us, shading her eyes and frowning over the tops of the heads in front of her.

  Neither Murdoch nor I answered. I couldn’t speak at all. They’re here.

  “It’s a UFO,” someone said.

  “One of those hoverjets,” suggested another.

  “Must be big if we can see it from here.”

  “Hey, over here!” someone yelled. There was a rush out onto the road. Murdoch grabbed my hand and we were carried along with the crowd. I looked for Grace but she’d been whirled away.

  We ended up in front of an electronics shop near the park. A whole window full of televid screens. All showing the same image.

  Blank, fuzzy blue. The bottom half of the screen was full of lines and blocky angles. The blurring cleared, and we realized it was the city center seen from above, probably from a helicopter. Then that disappeared and we were looking at an Invidi ship.

  It hung motionless in the sky. Must have been about a kilometer up. Faintly pulsing with a greenish light on the lower surfaces. Nobody could possibly mistake its bulbous diamond shape for a plane.

  Thus it ends, I thought. Our anthropocentric universe, gone with the simple overlay of that shape on the sky.

  Then the audio channels of radios, televids, public announcement systems all over the city crackled. A mechanical, unaccented voice.

  We are the Invidi. We come in peace.

  Exactly as the history files said. My knees went watery with relief. We didn’t screw up. Everything is as it should be. The image on the screen blurred as my eyes filled with tears. Murdoch’s arm, heavy and damp with sweat, squeezed my shoulders. His voice low in my ear.

  “Right on time. Reliable bastards, aren’t they?”

  Twelve

  If we didn’t get our signal off soon, the rest of the world would begin trying. I imagined the number of amateur radio operators and astronomers who’d be even now reaching for their emitters.

  “We have to go.” I turned to wriggle out of the crowd but they were packed tight, three deep, all watching with faces still slack with shock. I found myself pressed chest to chest with Murdoch, slightly off balance. He couldn’t back up or turn around, I couldn’t step sideways.

  He put his hand on my hip to steady me and I found I was breathing quickly. I could hear the beat of my own pulse in my ears, and feel the thudding of his heart through the muscle of his chest. Without thinking, I pressed closer. An impulse impossible to resist. I could smell human sweat and also a pinelike scent—H’digh sweat.

  Murdoch drew a short, sharp breath and his hand tightened on my hip. Then it relaxed again as I pulled away, stumbling over the person next to me, forcing a way through the line.

  “I’m sorry.” I was furious at myself for confusing him, at Henoit for intruding, at the Invidi for coming before we could get our signal set up. Most of all, furious at not being able to enjoy the feeling of Bill’s body against mine.

  He ran his hand over his head and cleared his throat. “Halley, I know it’s not the time, but we gotta talk about this.”

  “We will,” I said, and grabbed his hand. “Later.”

  We hurried down the middle of the main street. Every car had stopped. Some of them stood with doors wide open while their owners got the news.

  “Damn.” I stopped. “I should have made sure Grace was all right.”

  “She’ll be fine,” said Murdoch. He kept glancing at the sky in the east. Everyone in the street kept stopping what they were doing to look up.

  We walked down Victoria Road, passing through groups of people huddled together in shock. The shining point of light over the city was hidden now, but we stopped to listen to the first, barely coherent announcement on public media on the televid in a café. On the screen, a white-faced official assured us everything was under control and exhorted us to remain calm and keep listening for more news. The white-faced café owner kept making cups of coffee. There were at least ten cups set neatly on the counter and he was twisting the espresso machine handle again.

  We kept walking. I looked at Murdoch. “What do you think happens now?”

  He frowned as a man ran out of a shop doorway in front of us carrying a carton. Another man followed, calling out for the first to stop, waving his fist.

  “Hard to say. These bits don’t get into the history files, do they?”

  We knew that the official response would be cautious, that for a while governments thought it could be a hoax, despite what their scientific and military advisers told them. But we didn’t know what ordinary people did on the day the Invidi arrived. Did they pick up their children from school and go home and cook their dinners as usual? When you come to think of it, what else could they do?

  Many of the people in the street wore blank, shocked expressions. A woman in a white dress cried continuously as she walked, oblivious to stares or pats of comfort from strangers. I saw kindly people twice steer her out of the way of poles before we turned a corner.

  In front of one house, a red-faced man in a gray business suit, out of his own territory, harangued an interested crowd on the theme of “it’s all a hoax.” It said much for the strangeness of the day that he hadn’t been mugged yet.

  “They don’t believe it.” Murdoch looked back as four children capered in a doorway and made “alien” faces at passersby.

  “It’s hard to take in at once. This is so far from...” I waved upward. “All that.”

  “That” being places that were not of this planet, words spoken by beings who were not us, a universe no longer empty. For a fleeting moment I shared their sense of wonder.

  It was nearly four when we crossed the river and walked back into the world of the out-town. The air was still thick with smoke.

  Two buildings in Creek Road were gutted from the fire, and the nearby shacks gone. Other houses had escaped with only smoke damage. The Assembly building itself still stood, although the outside walls were blackened and sodden black mush around it showed how close the fire had burned. The betting shop downstairs was waterlogged, but the fire must have been doused before it grew strong enough to do more than darken the walls. All the windows were smashed and the door swung open on its hinges.

  “Don’t like the look of that.” Murdoch pointed at the windows. “Someone’s been in here.”

  The side door was open too, the stairs slippery with water and papers. Papers that had drifted out the open door of the Assembly office.

  “Look out for glass,” Murdoch said behind me.

  I hardly heard him.

  Someone had systematically stripped everything from the walls and bookcases and flung it all in the middle of the room, which was now a soggy mass of half-burned paper and plastic. They had set a fire here, too, but it hadn’t had time to burn properly. The computer, battery, and strongbox were gone, although I’d taken all my money from the strongbox for the laser. The box containing my telescope was also gone. The bastards had even taken my box of primitive tools, which took me months to find in junk piles and then recondition.

  I couldn’t find an expletive strong enough. I drew breath, stopped, felt my chest grow tight with the pressure of unexpressed frustration. Then realized I truly couldn’t brea
the.

  “Damn,” I gasped, scrabbling in my pocket for the inhaler. Had I even brought it out of the tent last night... ?

  “What’s the matter?” Murdoch’s voice sharp behind me.

  I tapped my chest, unable to talk. Not in the other pocket, either. What the fuck does it matter anyway? If we can’t contact the Invidi I’m going to die in this goddamn century...

  Got it. Down the bottom of the pocket. Murdoch’s large hand warm around mine as he steered the inhaler up to my face.

  In, out. Not going to die today.

  Murdoch shook glass and soggy papers off the upturned chair and set it to one side of the door, away from the worst of the mess.

  “Sit there. Don’t move. I’ll go and check on the tent.” His sandals flapped on the stairs.

  I sat in the chair, not caring that the moisture on the seat was soaking into my trousers. I was glad he’d gone for a while, because at this moment we didn’t need me breaking down. Breathe, Halley. Don’t think about anything just yet.

  Light footsteps on the stairs. Florence poked her head carefully around the door.

  “Hello, Maria.” She trod carefully inside and hung her large black handbag on the remains of the door instead of on the corner of her desk. “Were you here last night?”

  I shook my head. “We just came.”

  “I came to see if we’d been looted.” She looked carefully at each part of the mess.

  “Was everyone all right at your place?” I said.

  “Yes, thank you. I would have come sooner, but this other business with the aliens took up most of the day.”

  I waited to see what else she had to say. Disbelief? Anxiety?

  Florence merely took a pair of thick rubber gloves out of her bag and pulled them on. She stepped carefully over the fallen desk leg and, squatting on the other side, began to sort rubbish into piles.

  Murdoch looked around the door. “Tent’s gone completely. G’day, Florence. Everyone okay at your place?”

  “Yes, thank you, Mr. McGrath.”

  He looked back at me. “Tent’s wiped out. At least there was nothing much to steal there. Except my timer.”

  Except my collection of Alvarez material. My anger drained away until I just felt sick.

  Florence clicked her tongue. “I wonder what fun they get out of this. And of course the police will be too busy chasing aliens to do anything about it.”

  “I’ll be back later,” I said abruptly.

  Florence nodded without looking up as I picked my way over the debris and slid down the stairs.

  Across the river, the tent city looked like the aftermath of a battle with old-fashioned explosives: flattened, blackened rubble broken by dwellings or areas that had somehow escaped the flames.

  “Why do you think they took all our stuff?” My voice wasn’t as steady as I’d hoped.

  “Probably took everything in all the empty houses,” said Murdoch, who’d followed me outside. “Not just ours.”

  “What a waste of time it all was.”

  “Getting the telescope ready, you mean?”

  I nodded, not trusting my voice.

  “They might contact us, find you like I did.”

  “With the transponder? I don’t think they will. They don’t go out and look for things. Remember the Invidi on Jocasta? They stay put and let trouble come to them.”

  At the end of the street a wide mass of smoking debris blocked the way to the tent city. Two boys about Will’s age looked up from poking the pile with iron bars.

  “We’ll have to find another way to contact them,” I said.

  “Can we use ordinary radio?” Murdoch said.

  “We’ll have to try. And as soon as they decide to land, we’ll go and watch. See if there’s a way to sneak in and get to see them.”

  He sighed tiredly. “You’d think we could just go and say hello.”

  “You, me, and the rest of the planet.”

  Will met us at the door of Levin’s house. His face was solemn but his body twitched with excitement.

  “Hey, the aliens are here! We finished school at lunchtime. They reckon there’s no more school.”

  “Which aliens?” asked Murdoch.

  “The ones in the ships. Are there other ones?”

  “Could be all sorts of aliens out there.”

  Will didn’t get the joke, which wasn’t surprising. Nobody would get the joke for another sixty-two years, until Earth joined the Confederacy.

  Another small boy waved at Will from the back entry. Will dashed out between us with a hurried “see you later.”

  Grace appeared and blocked the doorway while she yelled at Will, “Don’t you go anywhere. Stay in this yard.” Then she turned to us. “Glad yer okay, you two. What do you think, eh?” She gave me a quick hug and led the way into the house.

  “I thought she’d be cranky we left her at Ryde,” whispered Murdoch.

  “Me too,” I whispered back.

  I headed for the bathroom. All I wanted at that moment was to get rid of my smelly, sticky coating of smoke, dust, and sweat. My hair felt almost solid with muck.

  The pipes produced only a trickle, but Levin had buckets of tepid water in his bathroom. This time I had no problem with using his bathroom and couldn’t remember why I’d minded this morning. This morning seemed a long time away. I scrubbed and then sluiced myself on the tiled floor, and watched runnels of brown water trickle out the hole in the floor, making slow, hypnotic patterns around the raised edges of the tiles. My clothes went into the last twenty centimeters of water in the bucket, to soak.

  “Maria, you finished?” Murdoch’s voice, full of guarded concern.

  “Nearly, why?”

  “Don’t fall asleep in there.”

  “Huh. Can you ask Grace if I can borrow one of her sarongs?”

  When I came out, feeling closer to human, Grace sat in front of the vidscreen in the living room with her two old neighbors, Phuong and Eric. It was a shock to see Phuong, usually trim and neat, looking grimy and exhausted too. You didn’t notice it as much with Eric, who was always dirty.

  Murdoch sat on a chair and leaned his elbows on the table. He smiled at me and pointed at another chair.

  “You reckon this is for real?” Grace waved her beer bottle at the screen.

  We watched a wide-eyed commentator sputter his report while the same image of the Invidi ship I’d seen that morning floated in the upper part of the square.

  “Looks real to me,” I said shortly. For all Grace’s offhandedness, two backpacks with emergency supplies and water containers stood at the back door, ready for her and Will should they need to run.

  “I’m glad you’re all right,” Phuong said to me. “We looked for you last night but there were people everywhere.”

  Eric grunted and popped the top off a cold beer. As an afterthought, he reached down beside his chair, grabbed another one, and slid it across the table at Murdoch.

  “Dangerous in the dark,” Murdoch agreed, and popped the beer. “Anybody seen Levin?”

  “Not since yesterday,” said Phuong.

  I poured myself a glass of filtered water. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Levin had been part of any unrest leading to the fire. Or, at least, part of the looting afterward.

  “Incredible,” breathed Grace. Her eyes, fixed on the Invidi ship, had a glazed look.

  “The government’s working out what to do now.” Phuong turned his head to speak to Murdoch. “They’re trying to stop all private communications to the ship in case some crackpot says the wrong thing. Science groups are pissed off, but the gov’ment wants to keep it simple.”

  “Can the authorities jam the whole ionosphere?” said Murdoch, raising his eyebrow at me.

  “They’ll use satellites to jam the space around the ships.” Which is why, I thought gloomily, using shortwave bands probably won’t work. What am I going to do? Short of physically approaching them. At the moment, I was too tired to move anywhere at all. I leaned on the ta
ble beside Murdoch.

  A hurried meeting of the Security Council had agreed no military aircraft were to fly within several kilometers of the twelve alien ships hovering at various locations all over the world.

  “Who’s talking to them?” said Phuong.

  “The heads of governments, I s’pose,” said Grace.

  “Is there anything to eat?” said Murdoch.

  Grace turned back to the screen. “How can you eat at a time like this?”

  Eric proffered a soggy bag of chips. Murdoch took a couple, I refused with a grimace. The televid voices hammered at us.

  In the United States, reports from Alabama, Georgia, and New Mexico of mass cult suicides have been confirmed. At least three thousand believers...

  “It’s like the terror wars,” said Phuong. “You think it’s never going to happen, then it’s all over the news. Some people can’t take it.”

  “Didn’t anyone see them arrive?” I said. “Surely NASA has some probes out there?” If no one registered the Invidi approach, it would support my theory that they had some sort of field dissipation device, presumably in Murdoch’s ship and probably built into Calypso II ’s engines as well.

  “What does it matter?” Grace spread her arms, nearly tipping beer into Phuong’s lap. “They’re here. Shit, they’re really here.”

  The screen changed to a collage of images accompanied by a voice-over. Different Invidi ships had appeared in evening, daytime, and morning skies over different cities.

  ... showed no hostile action. At present they seem to be waiting for our reply. A spokesman for the Eastern States said they are awaiting a go-ahead from the U.N. Security Council...

  “Why can’t I get Channel Five?” Grace asked me.

  “It’s broken. I told you weeks ago.”

  “Shit.” She fiddled with the controls, but the channel stayed the same.

  ... and the Pentagon says their experts are still considering the evidence.

  Eric burped. “They don’t believe it either. I reckon it’s some publicity stunt.”

  “They acted pretty quickly to jam communications, then,” I said sourly.

  “And what would they publicize?” said Phuong. “It’s gone too far for that.”