Neptune's Tears

by Susan Waggoner

  CHAPTER 2

  CLOSE ENCOUNTERS

  Zee didn’t know what she’d find in A&E. She hoped it wasn’t severed body parts. Blood always made her queasy, and a severed part made the whole body angry and difficult to work with.

  Dr Morgan was waiting for her with a grim look on his face, but that didn’t mean anything because Dr Morgan always had a grim look on his face. Except when the problem turned out to be routine. Then he looked disappointed.

  ‘Gash to forehead,’ he said, steering Zee towards A&E exam room two. ‘He refused a head scan and now wants to check out AMA.’

  Against medical advice. Yes, that would certainly annoy Dr Morgan.

  ‘Do you think he has a concussion?’ she asked.

  ‘I think he has a subdural haematoma. It could blow like Vesuvius any minute.’ His eyes sparkled with anticipation as he gestured at the door of the examining room. ‘See if you can keep him here.’

  Zee took a clearing breath and entered the room. The young man sitting in the cubicle wasn’t that much older than she was. Zee had been trained to notice the small gestures that took place in the first few minutes of an encounter, revealing the patient’s state of mind and openness to non-invasive healing. She caught a blur of motion. The young man seemed to have been rubbing a small metal bar against his forehead, but it disappeared into his pocket so swiftly she couldn’t be certain.

  When he lifted his head, Zee felt a tug. Involuntary personal attraction. A reflex, like coughing when you walked into a dusty room. She’d felt it before with other patients, but not quite like this. When he looked at her, his deep grey eyes seemed to draw her towards him. She wanted to go on looking at him, at the way a few strands of dark hair fell across his forehead. Clearly, Piper had created more than a tiny pinprick in her calm. She’d never felt so open to someone before, and was determined to regain her sense of calm.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Zee, your assigned empath.’

  ‘I’m David Sutton, unassigning myself.’ When he smiled, his eyebrows lifted, as if inviting her to share a secret joke. Then, looking at her, the smile changed into a different kind of expression. Instead of hopping off the hospital trolley, he stayed where he was. Everything about him seemed to stop and the room floated into stillness, like a leaf or a feather settling to earth. For a long moment he simply stared at her, and Zee allowed him to, without moving or closing her face to him.

  It wasn’t easy to let someone look at you like that, but many patients seemed to need to. ‘Like someone taking a car for a road test,’ their instructor had explained during training, ‘only you’re the car.’ They’d laughed, but that didn’t make it easier. Five in her class had washed out because they could not be looked at without posturing or fidgeting. It was harder than it sounded. At first, Zee had felt so naked standing before a patient she’d had to distract herself by making lists of song titles that started with certain letters of the alphabet, or by wondering why two-hundred-year-old movies like Titanic were often better than the hologram remakes. Now that she was more confident, she’d begun to use these small capsules of time to begin building a healing bridge to the patient.

  But that wasn’t happening tonight. She was having trouble re-establishing her calm, and felt as naked as she had the first time she’d been with a patient. No sooner had she dropped the foundations of the bridge into place and sent invisible blue vines twining through the air than they crumbled and vanished from her mind.

  David Sutton’s eyes were still on her. She felt her skin grow warm and tried to think of song titles that began with the letter A. She drew a blank, so moved on to the letter B. ‘Bitter Poison’, ‘Borrowed Time’, ‘Been Around and Down’, ‘Boomdance’. It usually took patients less than thirty seconds to satisfy themselves, but more than a minute passed and Zee still felt his gaze.

  Suddenly he smiled again. ‘You’re one of us,’ he said.

  Now what was that supposed to mean? Maybe Dr Morgan was right – this patient really did have a subdural haematoma, and his brain was already starting to suffer from hypoxia. Or did he mean that he was also an empath? That would explain the ribbon of energy she’d begun to feel pulsing between them.

  He spoke again in a voice that was almost a whisper, the words such a quick, soft rush she could not even tell what language they might be.

  This was not going according to plan at all, and she tried to steer it back. ‘Dr Morgan thought we might talk for a few minutes.’

  ‘Great. I’ll just get my stuff and we can go.’ He grinned. ‘Your place or mine?’

  Okay. He wasn’t so weird after all, just flirty. She’d had lots of practice handling flirts.

  ‘Dr Morgan wanted me to make sure you’re all right. According to your chart, you were unconscious when they brought you in, with quite a lump on your forehead.’

  He looked confused. ‘Who are you again?’

  Did he not see the glowing blue of her badge? ‘Zee McAdams, empath. I can help you with the bump on your head.’

  Suddenly there was a wrenching in the energy field. He jerked his whole torso backward, as if taking himself out of reach. The light she’d felt between them, or thought she’d felt, was gone.

  ‘A mind reader?’ He looked shaken, almost angry. ‘No thanks. If I want my fortune told, there’s a carnival on the other side of town.’

  ‘I don’t read minds,’ she explained. She’d had this conversation too many times to count, but usually it was with older patients who thought psychic healing was a scheme to pump up their hospital bills.

  ‘No?’ he challenged.

  ‘No. I read bodies.’ She hadn’t meant to emphasise bodies. Her voice had tricked her and now she felt the warmth of slight embarrassment creeping into her cheeks. Often when she worked with a patient she laid her hands on them, palms open to facilitate the energy flow. She wondered what it would be like to feel the smooth warmth of David’s body through his clothes. Stop it! she told herself. Stop it, or you’ll slide right out of the zone and have to go back to divesting.

  ‘But aren’t the mind and body one?’ he was asking. To her surprise, he seemed genuinely interested, no longer flirting or dismissive.

  ‘In a way,’ she answered. The mind and the body were one, in ways that even science didn’t fully understand. But she shouldn’t have said she read bodies. It wasn’t technically true. What she did, both consciously and subconsciously, was make an infinite number of tiny observations and allow a pattern to emerge, a pattern that guided the healing energy she sent to the patient.

  ‘I’m only here to help you,’ she said, stepping towards him and extending her hand. ‘According to your chart, we really should make sure about that bump —’

  ‘Stay away from me,’ he said, raising both hands, as if ready to push her back.

  Zee stopped. She shouldn’t have taken that last step, or extended her hand. Now she’d lost the patient. ‘Sorry. It’s just that you were brought in unconscious, and Dr Morgan wants to —’

  ‘Have a look around inside my head. I get that. No thanks. I’m leaving now.’

  Zee bit her lip. If he left and collapsed in the street, it would be her fault.

  ‘Look,’ he said, softening slightly at seeing her concern. ‘I’m fine. No, really – look.’ He gestured to his head. ‘Do you see a bump on my forehead?’

  ‘Well, not exactly, but . . .’

  But there had been one there before. Hadn’t there? She realised he was still staring at her. In fact, his eyes hadn’t really left her since she’d entered the room. She felt the tug of attraction again. This time, in spite of the disastrous way things were going, it wasn’t so easy to dismiss. When she tried, exactly the opposite happened. She felt a longing she’d never felt before and knew that, for the first time ever, she’d have to return to the unit and re-divest before she could see another patient.

  And of course she’d have to write up a full report of everything that had happened, which would be tricky because she wasn’t at
all sure what had happened. Was it David Sutton’s steady gaze causing her distraction? The way his arms looked strong but gentle at the same time, and made her wonder what his hand would feel like touching her? And the energy pulse she thought she’d felt between them . . . She couldn’t imagine putting all those things into words for someone else to read. She couldn’t even mention her suspicion that Piper had enjoyed taking her assigned patient away from her, and deliberately tried to get her rattled. She had no proof and would only make Piper resent her more. Zee glanced at David Sutton. ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why do you keep looking at me like that? Have you seen me before? Have I done something . . . ?’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ he said. ‘It’s your hair.’

  ‘Oh.’ Zee raised her hand to tuck the usual stray strands behind her ears and realised she’d lost her band and her tangle of auburn curls had come loose. So that was it. Her hair often took people by surprise, but not so much that they stared at her so long. His steady gaze set her on edge.‘It’s not like I’m the only redhead left, you know. There are almost a hundred thousand of us. It’s a recessive gene, not an extinct one. Haven’t you ever seen a holo of a redhead at least? Zeesh. What planet are you from?’

  David Sutton stood up, a graceful unfolding that made her realise how tall he was. ‘You call it Gliese 581 C,’ he answered. ‘We call it Omura. Or didn’t Dr Morgan tell you?’

  CHAPTER 3

  THE DAY THEY LANDED

  Zee flew down the corridor so fast she felt cool air against her face. An alien? How had that happened?

  There were few things in the world Zee truly disliked – she had even learned not to recoil at the sight of stewed tomatoes on the breakfast table of her residence hall – but the idea of aliens still spooked her. And even though she’d never actually met one, she’d always been sure she’d know right away.

  And now exactly the opposite had happened. No matter how fast she walked, she couldn’t forget the moment of connection between them. She felt tricked into opening herself to someone who didn’t belong here, whose civilisation’s arrival she held responsible for ruining her father’s life.

  Zee didn’t slow her pace until she passed through the double doors of the empaths’ unit. Home safe. She paused and took a deep, forgetting breath.

  The aquatic blue lights had just begun to calm her when she saw Piper’s dark, seal-like head bent over the circular main desk. Hadn’t Piper been on her way to work with Antoine, her leg bud patient? Learning that Zee had been attracted to David Sutton would just be the icing on Piper’s cake, Zee realised, and tried to hurry past the desk without attracting attention. But it was useless. She felt the heat of a blush creeping up her throat and into her cheeks, where they burned like twin bonfires.

  Piper noticed right away. ‘Why, Zee!’ The look of exaggerated concern on Piper’s face, like the sugar sweetness in her voice, was totally false. ‘Are you all right? Is something wrong?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Zee answered, sounding a lot less casual than she’d hoped. She lifted her chin a little. ‘I’m fine.’

  Piper raised her eyebrows and let the obvious question float in the air. If you’re fine, why are you back here re-divesting? When she spoke, her voice was edged with a frill of sarcasm. ‘I’m glad you’re fine, Zee, because if I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d been pierced.’

  Zee refused to acknowledge the comment. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be working with my leg bud patient?’ she asked.

  ‘Just getting some additional input,’ Piper said breezily, slipping her handheld into her pocket. ‘Have a great shift.’

  Zee could almost see the smirk beneath Piper’s smile. But as she started down the corridor to re-divest, that wasn’t what bothered her. What bothered her was the thought that, for all the mocking exaggeration, Piper was actually right. She had been pierced. By an alien.

  The aliens had arrived the summer Zee was six, just before school began. She didn’t even know what aliens were back then, but she would remember that weekend for the rest of her life. It was the first time she’d ever noticed that the world was bigger than herself and her parents and their friends. Bigger and quite a bit different. Until then, she’d thought the whole world was the way her world was.

  They’d spent the weekend working, as they almost always did, at a Woodstock revival festival. Her parents were professional re-enactors, living history, and Woodstock was their specialty. To Zee, it seemed the most natural thing in the world for her mother and father to wear patched bell-bottom jeans and raspberry-tinted wire-rim glasses and slide back in time to relive an event that had happened two centuries before either of them had been born. It was in their blood and part of their romance, because they had first met at Woodstock 200, the bicentennial, when her mother was four and her father was five. According to both of Zee’s grandmothers, her father had given Zee’s mother a handful of pretty weeds and said, ‘I like you. Let’s do this forever.’ And her mother had said, soberly, ‘We could, but only if they have banana ice pops next time.’ They met again at the same festival twenty years later and fell in love for real. It was the most romantic story Zee knew, and part of the reason she had always been so certain she could never be pierced by love. She was waiting for a story like that of her own.

  The weekend the aliens came, her mother wore a long billowy gown with tiny mirrors sewn all over it. While her father was on stage singing, her mother sold T-shirts tie-dyed to look like sunsets and starry explosions and galaxies in collision. Zee’s job was to fold up the T-shirts people bought and put them in a bag with a sprinkle of what her mother called ‘good karma’ – dried pink petals that forever after would make Zee think good karma whenever she smelled a rose.

  It was Sunday and just when the sun was beginning to slant and things should be winding down, a jolt of excitement went through the crowd. It started by a booth where antique radios blared, and fanned out from there. Some people screamed, others cheered, and others began to cry. Zee didn’t know if something good had happened or something bad. On stage, her father’s band stopped playing. Someone holding an old-fashioned transistor radio to his ear took the microphone and said, ‘How far out is this, man? They’re here! The President just made a special announcement! They’re finally here! The aliens, man. The aliens are on the White House lawn!’

  When Zee’s father finally made his way through the crowd to Zee and her mother, he had a huge smile on his face. He talked about portals opening and the Age of Aquarius being here at last. Then he scooped Zee up and said, ‘You’ll see it all, Zee. Wonderful things are going to happen. These people have the answers. An end to war. Energy that never runs out. How to travel all over the universe. And they’re here to tell us about it.’

  All the way home her father talked about the things that would happen now. He was full of plans – for himself, for Zee, for their whole family. He kept telling Zee that she was going to grow up in a whole different world. ‘What the heck – now that the door to galactic travel has been blasted wide open, we might pick up stakes and move to another planet!’

  ‘Earl!’ her mother said. ‘You’re scaring her.’

  ‘No I’m not. Am I, princess?’

  Zee remembered shaking her head no, she wasn’t scared, because his smile was so sweet she wanted it to go on forever.

  She often wished she could go back in time, grab that day, and shake it until it came out the way her father wanted it to. She wished she could protect him from all the disappointment that was to come.

  Because, in the end, the aliens disappointed almost everyone. For hundreds of years, people had been wondering if aliens existed and trying to imagine what they would look like if they did. The one thing people agreed on was that the aliens would look alien. Zee’s father expected them to have big brains and communicate by telepathy. They would be gentle and intelligent, and tell the world’s governments how to achieve peace. They would share the secret of free-energ
y and a never-ending food supply.

  Instead, the aliens looked like humans, only slightly taller. They didn’t have giant brains and in fact seemed no smarter than humans – or, more accurately, humans who didn’t know much. They weren’t here to share great wisdom but to seek it out. When asked, they couldn’t explain how their own spacecraft worked, or how it had suddenly appeared over US air space, requesting permission to send down a landing vehicle. Everything on the craft, they said, was run on software from the home planet. Education on their home planet was complex and specialised, they explained. Instead of being taught the technology at which the planet had always excelled, they were a special student class who’d been educated instead in Earth’s languages, learning to speak from amplified radio transmissions that had drifted out of Earth’s atmosphere hundreds of years before. Which explained why their vocabulary was so limited at first. All they could really say were lines they had heard over and over again, like For whiter whites and bold colours, always use All! and Clear with a chance of showers. Reading Earth’s languages had taken several trips to master, and now they were here to study Earth’s masterpieces of literature.

  Long before Zee knew the word ‘sceptical’, she was familiar with the feeling. She couldn’t believe that the aliens had come all this way just to use the library. Lots of adults agreed with Zee. They insisted the aliens would unzip their human suits at any moment and reveal the scheming reptile within. There were riots and protests saying they should be sent back up the space ladder and shot back into space. But when the aliens made it clear to the government that they were willing to pay astronomical fees, in gold, for student visas and library cards, the case was settled. The aliens were allowed to stay.

  Other governments envied America’s good fortune and the massive wealth flowing in from the aliens. The French government was the first to let it be known, over the protests of their people, that they too would welcome those who came peacefully to study. England and Sweden soon did the same. Over the course of Zee’s lifetime, what had begun as a few dozen aliens was now several thousand scattered all over the globe. Technically, they were scarcer than redheads, but their presence was a constant point of friction. Ordinary people didn’t trust them and didn’t want them here; only the governments did. Anti-alien demonstrations became a way of life. Thousands in just ten years – how many more would come? Wasn’t that the aliens’ plan from the beginning, to arrive little by little, invited by the very governments they planned to overthrow?