by John Barnes
“Yes, Daddy.”
I was watching out the window over his shoulder. Up in the sky, the little black things were bigger now, black balls rather than specks, and there were more and more of them. Daddy looked over his shoulder and said the bad word again. But his voice was gentle when he asked me, “Where do you stay?”
“Here.”
“What do you do when that black surface glows and turns gray?”
“Run through it”
“Who tells you what to do?”
“Pinky.”
One of the big black balls bounced lightly off the windows, and was gone. They were huge, I realized, the size of a trakcar, but floating down like beach balls.
Daddy put a hand under my chin and peered into my eyes. “What do you do if Pinky says to show yourself to the robots?”
“Take Pinky off me.”
“What do you do if Pinky says to turn lights on or make noise or anything that would give away your hiding place?”
“Take Pinky off me.”
“And if Pinky says not to go through the gray glow on the doorway—”
“Take Pinky off me. And run through.”
“Don’t take Pinky off for any other reason. You need him to tell you what to do, and you need to take him to Earth with you if you can. The people on Earth will need to talk to Pinky, so you need to take him with you if you possibly can, but if the aliens take him over, don’t let him stop you from going. Now I need to go get Mama. And Pinky will tell you how to do this: we need to fill up all the clean containers you can find with clean water. Start doing that. I need them all full by the time I get back, all right?”
“Sure, Daddy.” I went and got two beakers from a lower shelf and started filling one with water. “Is that right?”
“That’s right. Get them all filled up before I get back. Put them around on all the tables in here. Now I have to go get Mama. I’ll be back in just a little while.” He hugged me so tight it stopped my breath for an instant, and was gone.
Filling up jars and beakers was fun. While I did it, I looked out the window.
The big black balls were everywhere on the wide lawns and in the street now, and even more were in the sky than on the ground. When they hit, their first bounce was as high as the second-story windows. They bounced and rolled madly across the streets and lawns, till they bumped something and stuck to it; delivery trucks were zigzagging to miss them, and I saw one trakcar drag one of the balls half a block before it broke loose.
Out on the lawn between the big buildings, one of them fell in half, cracking open like an egg. Others opened the same way. They lay on their rounded backs like two halves of a cantaloupe.
“You should finish filling the water containers,” Pinky said.
I went back to doing that but I kept looking out the window. The trakcars were still moving. Mama should be here any minute.
One ball popped open right down below the window, so I could see down into it, into something that glowed and looked like a puddle of mercury that Daddy had shown me once, or like … “can you see the inside of that ball?” I asked Pinky, pointing his eye at it.
“Yes.”
“Is that what a doorway is going to look like when it opens?”
Pinky said, “Have to search and the net is very busy—keep filling water containers—”
I switched the jar from where it was overflowing beneath the faucet, and put another in its place.
“Got a result,” Pinky said. “Yes, that is what it looks like. When it looks like that on the dark surface, run through it. That’s what your daddy wants.”
“All right.” I moved another filled jar up onto the counter. I looked back out the window.
A trakcar was just gliding to a stop, dragging two balls that were sticking to it. As it stopped, the balls split in half, revealing more of those puddles of gray light at their centers.
Mama got out of the trakcar. She had a big backpack on and was carrying the good picnic basket, the one we took to family reunions, our biggest. I saw Daddy running toward her. She saw him too and ran toward him.
From each black hemisphere, as far as I could see, simultaneously, as if choreographed, a metal cone rose up, point first. The cones were the size of a grown man’s body. Under each cone a bundle of dozens of pipes, perhaps twice as long as the cone, emerged and pushed upward, so that from each hemisphere a sort of minaret protruded.
Daddy had just taken Mama’s hand and they were running back for the building. Everywhere I saw people either running or staring with their mouths open at the cones-on-pipes rising from all the balls.
The cones were about a meter long, the pipes about three, so when they stood upright, they were about as tall as a high ceiling. The analysts extracted that from me under hypnosis.
Still in perfect unison, all the pipes under the cones bent, some stepping outward to squat, others curling upward above the cones. Like immense spiders with too many legs, holding too many hands aloft like ballerinas—the whole effect so graceful and so simultaneous that I think even then I thought “ballet for giant spiders”—the silvery monsters bounded out of the half spheres.
The robot that had reared out of the ball-half near the door of the building bounded forward, moving faster than I had ever seen anything that size move. Two of its arms lashed out like metal whips, and their tips slipped down over Daddy and Mama’s heads in a blink of an eye.
“Don’t look,” Pinky said. “Point my eye at it but don’t look yourself.”
Daddy’s and Mama’s headless bodies fell to the sidewalk, blood streaming from the stumps of their necks. Inky-black smoke clung for an instant to the robot’s leg tips, like ghostboogers to the metal fingers of a huge hand.
The big robots were everywhere now, lunging like the way Daddy made his hand run toward me when he was going to tickle. All over the courtyards and streets, they raced toward the nearest people, grabbing people, chasing them down before they could take more than a few steps.
Pinky said again, “Don’t look. Don’t look. Close your eyes.”
A robot ripped a trakcar open, jammed several arms into the passenger compartment, and pulled them back trailing black smoke. On the far side of the square, another robot ran up the side of a tall building, metal tentacles lashing into windows and coming back out an instant later, trailing smoke.
I jumped at a painful shock. “Shut your eyes,” Pinky said. “Shut your eyes so that you can get away from the window. If they see you through the window they will come and kill you. Shut your eyes.”
Do everything Pinky tells you, right away.
I shut my eyes.
“Now keep your eyes shut and reach over for the faucet,” Pinky said. “Turn it off. We will have to stop filling water containers now, because the aliens may be able to detect a running faucet. It’s a good thing you filled so many already.”
I turned the faucet off.
“Now crouch down low and don’t look out the window, but open your eyes.”
I did.
“Reach up and get a beaker of water.”
I got one and took it down from the counter.
“Stay real low, and try not to spill water. We’re going to hide in the closet closest to the windows,” Pinky said.
I stayed very low, and only spilled a little water. I climbed in, reached out, and brought the water in with me. With the closet empty, it wasn’t even a tight fit. “Are we in?”
“Yes.”
“Now close the door. Look through the crack of the door. Can you see the black metal thing that we’re supposed to watch?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Now we need to stay right here, for a long time, and not make any noise. And keep watching the black thing.”
Long after the screams and noises outside had died down, I whispered, “Pinky.”
“Right here.” Pinky’s voice was so soft I could hardly hear it.
I lowered my own voice. “Daddy and Mama are dead, aren’t they?”
“Yes. Do you understand what that means?”
“They got hurt real bad and I’ll never see them again.”
“Not till your next lifetime. A long long time in the future. I’m very sorry. You loved them very much.”
“Am I going to die too?”
“Not soon. I promised Daddy I would do my best to get you to Earth, alive, and I am going to do it.” Pinky sounded very confident. “So I’m watching out for you,” he said, his voice soothing as a lullaby. “And you need to do just what I—quiet.”
Something scraped in the hallway.
The analysts think the next sound I heard was a door being pushed in the center hard enough to break it in half.
Through the crack in my closet door, I saw broken pieces of door crash across the floor. Robot arms scraped around on the floor.
As an adult I see the mystery: this robot didn’t have an infrared eye, a microphone that could pick up my heartbeat or breathing, a CO2 detector, or any other sensors that would have spotted me. Or if it did, it never pointed one my way. Perhaps the Invaders are just patient; they knew that after they grab most of the population by surprise, the rest will pop up soon enough due to hunger, thirst, or carelessness.
I held my breath till the robot went crashing down the hall. Every few seconds I would hear a skree-crash-bang-tinkle, and the crunch of metal and glass under the metal tentacles. Later we guessed that, as the tall robot was striding down the hallway, like a cartoon squid walking on its legs, it dragged down overhead lighting fixtures, indifferently, with its metal head.
Sweat ran down the sides of my neck, tickling and irritating, but I didn’t wipe at it, afraid to move.
Two more times I heard it crunch a door. Once, I heard a scream cut from full volume to nothing.
The crashing and thundering the robot made in one room down the hall was so loud that I felt the vibrations. I imagined the robot smashing all the furniture in that room to pieces, looking to see if there were any more people whose heads it could take, the way a man picks through the emptied shells when he has not quite finished a plate of shrimp. The aintellects disagreed; they thought it must have found a room full of processors and servers, and gone tearing through to grab copies of all the aintellects.
The underside of my thigh was cramping. I worked at it with my fingers, listening to the destruction two rooms away, terrified that my foot might kick the closet door and make a noise.
I heard the robot tear down more lights (if that was what that sound was) and crunch more doors, but if it found any people, they didn’t make any sound before they were consumed, and there was no smashing and crushing of metal either.
I was afraid to tell Pinky how bad I needed to pee. Through the crack of the closet door, I watched the black metal surface and thought glow, glow, glow, come on, glow now, but it didn’t.
Away down the hall, one more door crunched. Metal banged and thundered like a trash can full of pots and pans rolling down the stairs.
Probably the robot was so durable that it didn’t bother walking back to ground level, but just tucked and rolled to the bottom. After all the crashing, I heard a more distant boom—the outside door, or a big front window, being knocked down?
Silence fell like a mudslide over a tomb.
I was quiet for a long time, trying to imagine how long it was going to be till my next lifetime, when I could be with Mama and Daddy. There was no sound at all. The crack of the closet door dimmed slowly to blackness.
I really wanted Mama and Daddy and our house.
I started to cry. I was afraid Pinky would have to shock me to make me stop, even though I was being as quiet as I could, pinching the sobs down in my throat.
“I am so sorry you feel so bad,” Pinky said, his voice very soft. “And sorry you have to stay in here. Just be as quiet as you can.” After a while, when we had listened for a long, long time and heard nothing, Pinky sang to me, very softly, and I whisper-sang along, really just moving my lips.
Pinky tried playing me the Twelve Day Song in Mama’s voice—Pinky said he had lots of recordings of Mama and Daddy and whenever we didn’t have to be perfectly quiet, I could listen, if it would help. But it didn’t help; it made me cry harder, so we went back to singing together.
Nothing glowed. I made sure I kept my eyes open. My throat was sore from crying, so I drank some water. Pinky said to put the beaker down carefully so it wouldn’t spill. We might have to live on that water for a while.
Crashing far away. Big robots digging through things, trying to find people?
After a while it was quiet again. Still no glow.
At Council Intelligence Headquarters, on Earth, back before there was an OSP, they analyzed and interpreted every detail of every conscious moment from when Daddy and I left for the park till I arrived on Earth.
Processing my memories over and over, they learned the names of my favorite toys, and what I liked on my cereal in the morning, and every nursery rhyme Pinky knew, and all the furniture in our house. They were terribly sorry but they found nothing to correlate with any external data, so they could never identify the house we lived in, or Daddy’s job, or whether Mama had a job. All I recalled was that I had been told many times that if I were lost or in trouble, Pinky would be able to tell people whatever they needed to know, and if I had lost him, then any other robot or aintellect could get me home.
Apparently on some deep level I do know my name, but every gentle method of finding it out leads only to moments when I know it was spoken, but recall only blur and garble.
Truth is always different from the report. (That is why people who consume reports all day long, as I did later in life, are always so hungry for the truth.) My five-year-old self, hiding in that closet, heard the sounds; at the time, I doubt I tried to guess what was making them, but that is how I remember it, now, because those memories are overwritten with so many attempts to interpret them.
Iawoke. It was still utterly dark. The background hum of machinery, never absent in all my life, had stopped.
“Pinky, does the doorway run on electricity?’Cause the electricity just went off,” I whispered.
Pinky’s voice was very soft. “It can get electricity from the other side, from Earth, when it needs to. So that’s okay.”
“Pinky, how long is it till the next lifetime?”
“A very, very long time. I’m sorry about Mama and Daddy. Would you like to hear their voices again?”
“Not right now.” I finished my water. “Can we go home?”
“No, we can’t. The robots would get us and do what they did to Mama and Daddy.”
“Oh. Okay. I have to use the bathroom.”
We sneaked over to another closet, taking along the empty water jar, and I peed into the jar, there, and pooped on the closet floor. It felt dirty and nasty.
On my way back I got a full jar of water, and I sneaked a look out the window. One of the other buildings was burning, so even though neither Hull nor the sun was in the sky, and it was very dark with clouds (like always on a two-three day), I could see Mama and Daddy’s bodies on the sidewalk. The rain had washed most of the blood away. Pinky made me point his eye at them, then nagged me to get back into hiding.
In my closet, I cried till I fell asleep. It was still dark when I woke up, but not pitch-black, so it must have been the latter half of two-three day outside, when one horn of the crescent Hull is above the horizon, behind the clouds.
Pinky and I crawled down to the closet that we were using as a bathroom, and I went again, being very careful to get all the pee into the big beaker and not to step in the poop from before. Later, I got another beaker of water.
It stayed dark and I could hear the rain. Lightning lit up the laboratory so that I occasionally saw everything in sharp brightness through the crack of the closet door.
As it grew dark again and the rain ceased, Pinky talked to me in Mama’s voice, and I went back to sleep, careful to make sure I curled around, and tugged Pinky a
round on my belt, so that his eye was at the crack and he could watch the doorway while I slept. Do everything Pinky tells you, right away.
Yes, Daddy.
I don’t remember when I awoke but I could tell from the bright sunlight in the room that it was now morning of threeone day (“the brightest rays, all the raindrops go away”). I was sucking my thumb, now, all the time, and I didn’t even care that that was just for babies. Sometimes Pinky played me Mama’s voice.
What could be taking the Earth people so long?
4
“Pinky, I’m so hungry. And it’s getting dark again. And we only have two jars of water left.”
“I’m thinking about it,” he said.
“Do your batteries get low or anything? Cause I’m a big boy and I can stand being hungry but we need more water and, and maybe you need batteries, and we’d have to go for those, even if Daddy said to stay right here.”
“My batteries last for many years,” Pinky said. “I can hide here for a long time, but you can’t. Sooner or later we’ll have to try to get the food Mama was carrying. In fourteen more hours we’ll get two hours of full dark again, and I suppose we should try then. There’s very likely to be bottled water and maybe some juice in the things Mama packed, too. And your water will last out the fourteen hours. I’m sorry you’re so hungry and uncomfortable.” In his extra-soothing voice, the one that always meant he was very worried about me, Pinky added, “You might have to be extra-extra brave though. When we sneak down outside.”
“Can the aliens see us in the dark?”
“I don’t know. If they’re watching for us and ready to pounce, there just won’t be anything we can do. But you’ve only got a little tiny body and we can’t let you go too long without food or water. You have to be ready to run through the doorway.”
“What if the doorway comes on while we’re down there?”
“I’m afraid of just that,” Pinky admitted. Nowadays, as an adult, I know that the aintellects in the little devices were supposed to model appropriate feelings for children, but of course aintellects couldn’t relate to human beings if they didn’t have emotions anyway, and I’m sure that Pinky was telling the truth about his fear. “Your father said that when it does come on, you have to go through it right as soon as it comes on.”