by Neil Clarke
She lay there trying to read for a while, but the story couldn’t hold her attention. She kept listening for some sound from beyond the door, some indication of how they were doing. At last she got up quietly and went to listen. Hearing nothing, she tried the door and found it unlocked. Softly, she cracked it open to look inside.
Lionel was not asleep. He was lying on the bed, his head next to the alien’s tank. But the alien was no longer in the tank; it was on the pillow. It had extruded a mass of long, cordlike tentacles that gripped Lionel’s head in a medusa embrace, snaking into every opening. One had entered an ear, another a nostril. A third had nudged aside an eyeball in order to enter the eye socket. Fluid coursed along the translucent vessels connecting man and creature.
Avery wavered on the edge of horror. Her first instinct was to intervene, to defend Lionel from what looked like an attack. But the expression on his face was not of terror, but peace. All his vague references to exchanging neurotransmitters came back to her now: this was what he had meant. The alien communicated by drinking cerebrospinal fluid, its drug of choice, and injecting its own.
Shaken, she eased the door shut again. Unable to get the image out of her mind, she went outside to walk around the bus to calm her nerves. After three circuits she leaned back against the cold metal, wishing she had a cigarette for the first time in years. Above her, the stars were cold and bright. What was this relationship she had landed in the middle of—predator and prey? father and son? pusher and addict? master and slave? Or some strange combination of all? Had she just witnessed an alien learning about love?
She had been saving a bottle of bourbon for special occasions, so she went in to pour herself a shot.
To her surprise, Lionel emerged before she was quite drunk. She thought of offering him a glass, but wasn’t sure how it would mix with whatever was already in his brain.
He sat down across from her, but just stared silently at the floor for a long time. At last he stirred and said, “I think we ought to take him to a private place.”
“What sort of private place?” Avery asked.
“Somewhere dignified. Natural. Secluded.”
To die, she realized. The alien wanted to die in private. Or Lionel wanted him to. There was no telling where one left off and the other began.
“I know a place,” she said. “Will he make it another day?”
Lionel nodded silently.
Through the bourbon haze, Avery wondered what she ought to say to Henry. Was the country in danger? She didn’t think so. This seemed like a personal matter. To be sure, she said, “You’re certain his relatives won’t blame us if he dies?”
“Blame?” he said.
That was conscious-talk, she realized. “React when he doesn’t come back?”
“If they were going to react, they would have done it when he left. They aren’t expecting anything, not even his return. They don’t live in an imaginary future like you people do.”
“Wise of them,” she said.
“Yes.”
They rolled into St. Louis in late afternoon, across the Poplar Street Bridge next to the Arch and off onto I-70 toward the north part of town. Avery knew exactly where she was going. From the first moment Frank had told her the destination was St. Louis, she had known she would end up driving this way, toward the place where she had left the first part of her life.
Bellefontaine Cemetery lay on what had been the outskirts of the city in Victorian times, several hundred acres of greenery behind a stone wall and a wrought-iron gate. It was a relic from a time when cemeteries were landscaped, parklike sanctuaries from the city. Huge old oak and sweetgum trees lined the winding roadways, their branches now black against the sky. Avery drove slowly past the marble mausoleums and toward the hill at the back of the cemetery, which looked out over the valley toward the Missouri River. It was everything Lionel had wanted—peaceful, natural, secluded.
Some light rain misted down out of the overcast sky. Avery parked the bus and went out to check whether they were alone. She had seen no one but a single dog-walker near the entrance, and no vehicle had followed them in. The gates would close in half an hour, and the bus would have to be out. Henry and his friends were probably waiting outside the gate for them to appear again. She returned to the bus and knocked on Lionel’s door. He opened it right away. Inside, the large picnic cooler they had bought was standing open, ready.
“Help me lift him in,” Lionel said.
Avery maneuvered past the cooler to the tank. “Is it okay for me to touch him?”
“Hold your hand close to him for a few seconds.”
Avery did as instructed. A translucent tentacle extruded from the cauliflower folds of the alien’s body. It touched her palm, recoiled, then extended again. Gently, hesitantly, it explored her hand, tickling slightly as it probed her palm and curled around her pinkie. She held perfectly still.
“What is he thinking?” she whispered.
“He’s learning your chemical identity,” Lionel said.
“How can he learn without being aware? Can he even remember?”
“Of course he can remember. Your immune system learns and remembers just about every pathogen it ever met, and it’s not aware. Can you remember them all?”
She shook her head, stymied.
At last, apparently satisfied, the tendril retracted into the alien’s body.
“All right,” Lionel said, “now you can touch him.”
The alien was surprisingly heavy. Together, they lifted him onto the bed of dirt and wood chips Lionel had spread in the bottom of the cooler. Lionel fitted the lid on loosely, and each of them took a handle to carry their load out into the open air. Avery led the way around a mausoleum shaped like a Greek temple to an unmowed spot hidden from the path. Sycamore leaves and bark littered the ground, damp from the rain.
“Is this okay?” she asked.
For answer, Lionel set down his end of the cooler and straightened, breathing in the forest smell. “This is okay.”
“I have to move the bus. Stay behind this building in case anyone comes by. I’ll be back.”
The gatekeeper waved as she pulled the bus out onto the street. By the time she had parked it on a nearby residential street and returned, the gate was closed. She walked around the cemetery perimeter to an unfrequented side, then scrambled up the wall and over the spiked fence.
Inside, the traffic noise of the city fell away. The trees arched overhead in churchlike silence. Not a squirrel stirred. Avery sat down on a tombstone to wait. Beyond the hill, Lionel was holding vigil at the side of his dying companion, and she wanted to give him privacy. The stillness felt good, but unfamiliar. Her life was made of motion. She had been driving for twenty years—driving away, driving beyond, always a new destination. Never back.
The daylight would soon be gone. She needed to do the other thing she had come here for. Raising the hood of her raincoat, she headed downhill, the grass caressing her sneakers wetly. It was years since she had visited the grave of her daughter Gabrielle, whose short life and death were like a chasm dividing her life into before and after. They had called it crib death then—an unexplained, random, purposeless death. “Nothing you could have done,” the doctor had said, thinking that was more comforting than knowing that the universe just didn’t give a damn.
Gabrielle’s grave lay in a grove of cedar trees—the plot a gift from a sympathetic patron at the café where Avery had worked. At first she had thought of turning it down because the little grave would be overshadowed by more ostentatious death; but the suburban cemeteries had looked so industrial, monuments stamped out by machine. She had come to love the age and seclusion of this spot. At first, she had visited over and over.
As she approached in the fading light, she saw that something was lying on the headstone. When she came close she saw that some stranger had placed on the grave a little terra cotta angel with one wing broken. Avery stood staring at the bedraggled figurine, now soaked with rain, a gift to her daughter from som
eone she didn’t even know. Then, a sudden, unexpected wave of grief doubled her over. It had been twenty years since she had touched her daughter, but the memory was still vivid and tactile. She remembered the smell, the softness of her skin, the utter trust in her eyes. She felt again the aching hole of her absence.
Avery sank to her knees in the wet grass, sobbing for the child she hadn’t been able to protect, for the sympathy of the nameless stranger, even for the helpless, mutilated angel who would never fly.
There was a sound behind her, and she looked up. Lionel stood there watching her, rain running down his face—no, it was tears. He wiped his eyes, then looked at his hands. “I don’t know why I feel like this,” he said.
Poor, muddled man. She got up and hugged him for knowing exactly how she felt. They stood there for a moment, two people trapped in their own brains, and the only crack in the wall was empathy.
“Is he gone?” she asked softly.
He shook his head. “Not yet. I left him alone in case it was me . . . interfering. Then I saw you and followed.”
“This is my daughter’s grave,” Avery said. “I didn’t know I still miss her so much.”
She took his hand and started back up the hill. They said nothing, but didn’t let go of each other till they got to the marble mausoleum where they had left Mr. Burbage.
The alien was still there, resting on the ground next to the cooler. Lionel knelt beside him and held out a hand. A bouquet of tentacles reached out and grasped it, then withdrew. Lionel came over to where Avery stood watching. “I’m going to stay with him. You don’t have to.”
“I’d like to,” she said, “if it’s okay with you.”
He ducked his head furtively.
So they settled down to keep a strange death watch. Avery shared some chemical hand-warmers she had brought from the bus. When those ran out and night deepened, she managed to find some dry wood at the bottom of a groundskeeper’s brush pile to start a campfire. She sat poking the fire with a stick, feeling drained of tears, worn down as an old tire.
“Does he know he’s dying?” she asked.
Lionel nodded. “I know, and so he knows.” A little bitterly, he added, “That’s what consciousness does for you.”
“So normally he wouldn’t know?”
He shook his head. “Or care. It’s just part of their life cycle. There’s no death if there’s no self to be aware of it.”
“No life either,” Avery said.
Lionel just sat breaking twigs and tossing them on the fire. “I keep wondering if it was worth it. If consciousness is good enough to die for.”
She tried to imagine being free of her self—of the regrets of the past and fear of the future. If this were a Star Trek episode, she thought, this would be when Captain Kirk would deliver a speech in defense of being human, despite all the drawbacks. She didn’t feel that way.
“You’re right,” she said. “Consciousness kind of sucks.”
The sky was beginning to glow with dawn when at last they saw a change in the alien. The brainlike mass started to shrink and a liquid pool spread out from under it, as if it were dissolving. There was no sound. At the end, its body deflated like a falling soufflé, leaving nothing but a slight crust on the leaves and a damp patch on the ground.
They sat for a long time in silence. It was light when Lionel got up and brushed off his pants, his face set and grim. “Well, that’s that,” he said.
Avery felt reluctant to leave. “His cells are in the soil?” she said.
“Yes, they’ll live underground for a while, spreading and multiplying. They’ll go through some blooming and sporing cycles. If any dogs or children come along at that stage, the spores will establish a colony in their brains. It’s how they invade.”
His voice was perfectly indifferent. Avery stared at him. “You might have mentioned that.”
He shrugged.
An inspiration struck her. She seized up a stick and started digging in the damp patch of ground, scooping up soil in her hands and putting it into the cooler.
“What are you doing?” Lionel said. “You can’t stop him, it’s too late.”
“I’m not trying to,” Avery said. “I want some cells to transplant. I’m going to grow an alien of my own.”
“That’s the stupidest—”
A moment later he was on his knees beside her, digging and scooping up dirt. They got enough to half-fill the cooler, then covered it with leaves to keep it damp.
“Wait here,” she told him. “I’ll bring the bus to pick you up. The gates open in an hour. Don’t let anyone see you.”
When she got back to the street where she had left the bus, Henry was waiting in a parked car. He got out and opened the passenger door for her, but she didn’t get inside. “I’ve got to get back,” she said, inclining her head toward the bus. “They’re waiting for me.”
“Do you mind telling me what’s going on?”
“I just needed a break. I had to get away.”
“In a cemetery? All night?”
“It’s personal.”
“Is there something I should know?”
“We’re heading back home today.”
He waited, but she said no more. There was no use telling him; he couldn’t do anything about it. The invasion was already underway.
He let her return to the bus, and she drove it to a gas station to fuel up while waiting for the cemetery to open. At the stroke of 8:30 she pulled the bus through the gate, waving at the puzzled gatekeeper.
Between them, she and Lionel carried the cooler into the bus, leaving behind only the remains of a campfire and a slightly disturbed spot of soil. Then she headed straight for the freeway.
They stopped for a fast-food breakfast in southern Illinois. Avery kept driving as she ate her egg muffin and coffee. Soon Lionel came to sit shotgun beside her, carrying a plastic container full of soil.
“Is that mine?” she asked.
“No, this one’s mine. You can have the rest.”
“Thanks.”
“It won’t be him,” Lionel said, looking at the soil cradled on his lap.
“No. But it’ll be yours. Yours to raise and teach.”
As hers would be.
“I thought you would have some kind of tribal loyalty to prevent them invading,” Lionel said.
Avery thought about it a moment, then said, “We’re not defenseless, you know. We’ve got something they want. The gift of self, of mortality. God, I feel like the snake in the garden. But my alien will love me for it.” She could see the cooler in the rear view mirror, sitting on the floor in the kitchen. Already she felt fond of the person it would become. Gestating inside. “It gives a new meaning to alien abduction, doesn’t it?” she said.
He didn’t get the joke. “You aren’t afraid to become . . . something like me?”
She looked over at him. “No one can be like you, Lionel.”
Even after all this time together, he still didn’t know how to react when she said things like that.
About the Author
Carolyn Ives Gilman is a Nebula and Hugo Award-nominated writer of science fiction and fantasy. Her most recent novel, Dark Orbit (2015), is about a scientific expedition to a crystalline planet where the explorers must confront mysteries about themselves and their reality in order to escape alive. Her other novels include Halfway Human and the two-volume novel Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles. Her short fiction appears in many Best of the Year collections and has been translated into seven languages. In her professional career, Gilman is a historian specializing in frontier and Native history. She is author of Lewis and Clark: Across the Divide, and five other books on aspects of Native American and western history. She lives in Washington, D.C. and works as an exhibit developer for the National Museum of the American Indian.
Balin
Chen Qiufan, translated by Ken Liu
I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of you
r resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.
—Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Balin’s dark skin, an adaptation for the tropics, appears as aphotic as the abyss of deep space, all reflected light absorbed by the thick layer of gel smeared over his body and the nanometer-thin translucent membrane wrap. Suspended between bubbles in the gel, microsensors twinkle with a pale blue glow like dying stars, like the miniature images of me in his eyes.
“Don’t be afraid,” I whisper. “Relax. Soon it’ll be better.”
As though he understands me, his face softens and wrinkles pile up at the corners of his eyes. Even the scar over his brow is no longer so apparent.
He’s old. Though I’ve never figured out how to tell the age in his kind.
My assistant helps Balin onto the omnidirectional treadmill, securing a harness around his waist. No matter in which direction he runs and how fast, the treadmill will adjust to keep him centered and stable.
The assistant hands the helmet to me, and I put it over Balin’s head myself. His eyes, bulging with astonishment like two light bulbs, disappear into the darkness.
“Everything will be fine,” I say, my voice so low that no one can hear me, as though I’m comforting myself.
The red light on the helmet flashes, faster and faster. A few seconds later, it turns green.
As though struck by a spell, Balin’s body stiffens. He reminds me of a lamb who has heard the grinding of the butcher’s knife against the whetstone.
A summer night the year I turned thirteen: The air was hot and sticky; the scent of rust and mold, prelude to a typhoon, filled my nostrils.
I lay on the floor of the main hall of my ancestral compound. I flattened my body against the cool, green mosaic stone tiles like a gecko until the floor under my body had been warmed by my skin; then I rolled to the side, seeking a fresh set of tiles to keep me cool.
From behind came the familiar sound of scuffling leather soles: crisp, quick-paced, echoing loudly in the empty hall. I knew who it was, but I didn’t bother to move, greeting the owner of those footsteps with the sight of my raised ass.