Phytosphere

by Scott Mackay

  “Did you make a head count?”

  “Three for sure. But there could have been four.”

  “So you remember what I said?”

  “That the old rules don’t apply, and it’s okay to kill if I have to.”

  “Just pretend it’s one of your Handheld Sport games.”

  “Mom, it’s a little scarier than that.”

  “I know… I know. Take up your position in the back. Don’t come forward unless I give you the signal.”

  “I feel a little sick.”

  “Are you going to throw up?”

  “I’m just really scared.”

  “Let’s get ready.”

  They went into the house. Glenda walked to Hanna’s room.

  Hanna had now put her book aside and was looking out the window. “Is it them?”

  “Buzz stopped up the hill. I think you and Jake should go to the woods, like we planned.”

  “I never liked Buzz. He was such an asshole at Marblehill. He actually came on to me.”

  “He did?”

  “I never told you.”

  “But you were only twelve.”

  “Like I said, he’s an asshole.”

  They left Hanna’s room.

  Jake and Hanna went to hide in the woods out back.

  Glenda stayed alone in the house, on her knees at the front window, her rifle ready, scanning the highway, hoping Jake would give her a whistle if Maynard and his crew came from the back. She waited and waited, and slowly the hole in the sky got darker until finally it shone with the eternal blue of

  nighttime, a shade a hundred times darker than indigo, a ragged continent shiny with stars in the pitch-black of the shroud.

  She crawled back to the coffee table and groped for her high-powered flashlight, glad Leigh had stashed away so many extra batteries. She struggled back to the window and looked out at the front lawn. It was now a shade brighter than it had been a moment before—and looking at that hole in the shroud, she saw that its edges were growing brighter as well.

  After another fifteen minutes, a pale fingernail of Moon peeped out at her from behind the shroud, and she couldn’t help thinking of Gerry.

  When Sheriff Fulton finally came, he didn’t show his face, but megaphoned from somewhere out in the dark.

  “Glenda?” He waited for a response. “Glenda, we know you’re in there. And we know you have food.

  Why don’t you do the sensible thing and give it all up?”

  She left the living room, went into the den, placed the flashlight on the high window ledge, turned it on, and shone it out at the front lawn. She left it there, beaming out into the dark, then retraced her steps through the dining room, then the kitchen, grabbed her second flashlight, moved quickly through the dining and living rooms to the other side of the house, and went into Jake’s room.

  She put the second flashlight on the window ledge and shone it out at the front lawn as well. Its beam intersected with the one coming from the den. She paused to measure the effect. A pale glow now lit the yard. Fulton would be a fool to come in from the front. Which meant he was going to come from the back. At least she didn’t have to fight this war on two fronts. Not unless they shot out the flashlights, and she didn’t think any of them were good enough marksmen for that.

  She left Jake’s room, feeling her way through the dark house until she got to the kitchen, carrying her rifle loosely in her right hand. She grabbed her extra purse from the top of the refrigerator, the one she kept all her rounds in now. She slung it over her shoulder and exited by the back door.

  In the light of the Moon, she saw a ground-clinging mist creep over the lawn. She scanned the backyard.

  Her eyes strayed to the woods, and as the Moon clawed its way further out from behind the shroud, the poor dead things that used to be trees glowed as if from nuclear waste; not silver, not orange, but somewhere in between.

  She leaned her rifle against the house. She heard Fulton’s megaphoned voice from out front, like a nasal and electronic ghost moaning out of the darkness, his words now unintelligible because the house blocked the way. How long before he gave up trying to convince her?

  She hurried to the fence that ran between her lot and Leigh’s.

  She got a ladder from the fence and carried it quietly to the back of the house. Made of Duratex, the ladder was light and easy to carry. She placed it against the mudroom, climbed to the top, put her rifle on the mud-room roof, dragged the ladder up, then leaned it against the side of the house so that it reached the top. Making sure the feet of the ladder straddled the mudroom peak securely, she climbed to the main roof.

  She maneuvered around the low-pitched slopes with relative ease. She took up a position behind the satellite dish, and scanned the backyard. She had great lines of fire.

  She got to her feet and moved to the front of the house.

  The Moon was brighter now and she saw Buzz Fulton’s truck parked at the top of the east hill, and two police cruisers further down.

  She waited.

  After several minutes she saw men crossing the highway to the east and disappearing into the yard of the house beyond Leigh’s. Fear momentarily weakened her because up until now she had been hoping that they might never make a try for her food. She maneuvered back to her spot by the satellite dish and waited.

  After about fifteen minutes, she saw two men at the back. They inspected the ground. Checking for buried food maybe? Then they came along the fence, crouched over. One of them was Maynard, the other Brennan. She had half a mind to let them break into the house and have their look around. When they found it empty, they might go home and never bother her again.

  But then she decided it was best to end it once and for all.

  “Maynard,” she called, “I’d stop exactly where you are. One step further and you’re going to have a bullet through your head.”

  The two men stopped.

  “You’re up on the roof?” called Fulton.

  “Where’s your brother?” she called. “Are there other men?”

  “Glenda, why don’t you come down from there and talk to us? We might as well try to be reasonable.”

  “Why don’t you get off my property? You’re trespassing.”

  “You know what we come for, Glenda,” called Brennan. “We know you been hoarding. Just give us your food, and we’ll be on our way. No one will get hurt.”

  “I don’t think so, Brennan.”

  “Why don’t you come down to the detachment office and join us?” said Fulton. “We’ve made quite a little place down there. I could protect you.”

  “For what price, Maynard?”

  “Glenda… Glenda, I’m going to give you to the count of three to come down. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to hurt your kids. But I got to do what I got do. We’re talking survival here, Glenda.

  You know how it is. Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning. One…”

  And suddenly it made complete sense to her, in the way anything can possibly make sense after such a long time in the dark.

  “Two…”

  Fulton was the enemy. The county’s principal purveyor of death.

  “Three…”

  Yes, he was the heart and brains of the whole operation, and it was monstrous that he should have the county’s women under his “protection,” and it was up to her to stop all that…. Now careful, Glenda, are you thinking straight? Have you taken all things into consideration? You’re about to shoot a cop, and not just any cop. And yet…shoot him, and you shoot the whole works. Get rid of the head, and the body dies. Yes, it made perfect sense to her, in a fear-crazed way.

  “Glenda, you leave us no choice but to—”

  And before he could say another word she targeted the sheriff’s head—and it all came back to her, those weekends on the Smoky Hill River with her father, when the sun went down and the sky turned orange, and the partridges leaped into the sky. She took a bead on the sheriff’s head with automatic reflexes and h
ands as steady as iron, and caressed the trigger so that the rifle fired by itself, adding her own bit of Armageddon to the Apocalypse, the shot rocketing through the air with a roar that echoed in the hills, the bullet hitting its mark as if foreordained.

  She heard the sheriff grunt, and he went down like a cow in a slaughterhouse, just so much meat thumping against the poor, dead grass.

  Brennan did an odd little jump, his legs splaying, his arms jerking, like he was on thin ice and had just heard a crack. Then he ran toward the back, and she had the oddest sensation that she was floating, because she suddenly felt invincible—but so worried, so terrified for her children, because Brennan was running toward the woods where they were hiding.

  So she shot Brennan too, and she must have got him in the spine because his legs gave out from under him, and his handgun flew off toward the shed, a speck of darkness in the gathering moonlight. He dragged himself along with his hands, grunting and groaning, until she lost sight of him in the woods.

  22

  Gerry knew Kafis from Marblehill, but every time he saw the alien—and Kafis was here on the Moon with a contingent of five other aliens—he had to get used to the Tarsalan’s appearance all over again, especially the bicephalic nature of his cranium. Under the alien’s coarse, dark hair the impression of two separate casings was disconcertingly unmistakable.

  Kafis’s face was blue, the color of a robin’s egg. The quality of his skin was like the quality of human flesh, with all the imperfections of pores, wrinkles, and blemishes.

  His eyes were a little over twice human size, and were divided into sclera, iris, and pupil, like human eyes. His irises were amber, like Stephanie’s were today, the color of a fine scotch whiskey, and his pupils, black like human pupils, were highly reactive, but not necessarily to light. The way the alien’s pupils dilated and contracted reminded Gerry of the way a hummingbird dances around a bloom, in sudden shifts, so that when Malcolm Hulke burped after a particularly capacious gulp of synthi-beer, Kafis’s pupils twitched open, then twitched closed, then twitched to the halfway point, the changes in aperture occurring with lightning quickness.

  The alien’s lips were delicate, a dark shade of blue. Kafis’s teeth, though white, weren’t really so much teeth as upper and lower semicircular serrated blades fitted along his gums like a mouth guard. Below his mouth was a delicate, pointed chin, impossibly small considering the size of the rest of his head.

  As for his body, it was about the size of a Vietnamese man’s, smallish and agile-looking.

  And his hands… interesting… six digits—like those cats with six toes.

  These particular Tarsalans spoke English. Physiologically, their tongues, mouth cavities, and larynxes were equipped for verbal language.

  Kafis spoke English best of all—those summers at Marblehill with the Thorndike family had taught him well. And because he had learned most of his English from Neil, Gerry occasionally heard Neil’s phrases in the alien’s voice.

  “It’s a wisdom your negotiators should embrace,” he was telling Hulke, who was halfway to getting drunk and arguing for the sake of arguing. “Think of it. As a species, you’ve been confined to this one system ever since you evolved from apes. What if something were to happen to this system? And something eventually will, of course. Your sun will, in a few billion years, go into its red-giant phase, and that will be the end of you. We’ve already talked to at least ten worlds, and they would be willing to welcome you as émigrés.”

  “I don’t think you’ll get many takers,” said Hulke. “You may get a few screwballs.”

  “But then you might at least have a handful of humans on other worlds. The future of your race would be assured. And that’s all we want as well. To plant some of our people on Earth. There’s plenty of room on Earth, and my colleagues and I are at a loss to explain your intransigence.”

  “It’s not my intransigence, Kafis. As far as intransigence goes, you’ll have to talk to Earth.”

  “We would prefer you talk to Earth for us. It’s been more than apparent these last nine years that our own negotiators aren’t getting anywhere with them.”

  “Uh… Kafis… it’s their ball of wax, not ours.”

  Kafis stared at the mayor as if he hadn’t understood a word. Then he rubbed his long, delicate, six-fingered hands together, and glanced at his five silent colleagues.

  Kafis turned back to the mayor, and stared at Hulke for a long time, his eyes inscrutable. It really was hard to tell what he was thinking because it was like staring into the eyes of a cat or fish, especially because, characteristically, there wasn’t much play of muscle around his eyes. But at last the alien seemed to dismiss the mayor. He focused on Gerry instead. Some of the muscles around the alien’s small mouth twitched.

  “Why do you attack us?”

  Here it was, what Gerry had seen so often at Marblehill, the human mind confronting the alien mind, unable to traverse the gulf between.

  Kafis continued.

  “Why do you allow millions of your own people to die daily? We never meant this. Why do you set fire to your own house…then lock the door and stay inside? We came as your benefactors. We tried to teach you the way of things. But at last you made us force you to kneel, as we make our children kneel, even though it was the last thing we wanted. This you must understand: When the knee is on the floor, it’s time to acknowledge that the lesson is learned. And this is the lesson we have tried to teach you. Life is worth living no matter what the cost. We mean to be your friends and help you any way we can. But you are like the bluntwog, who fights for the sake of fighting. The bluntwog doesn’t understand the ways of harmony, or how the resolution of conflict should best be treated like a ceremony, something that must be performed so all sides can save face. We understand the nature of pride. But the true mark of a civilized being is humility. You show none. Instead of acknowledging our wisdom, you attack us. You force us to use the violence we abhor.”

  Gerry sat back and shook his head, feeling the gulf more than ever. “Earth has offered compromise after compromise, Kafis. In case you didn’t know, compromise is a form of wisdom.”

  “But you attack us. You kill us. We have suffered ten thousand casualties.”

  There it was again, the unbridgeable chasm… and a certain inflexibility to the way Kafis thought about things, as if his way of thinking was too evolved, too hardwired, and too insufferably condescending. Put the phytosphere around the Earth and surely the humans will come to their senses and follow not human cultural norms, but Tarsalan cultural norms. Surely the humans will get down with humility on bended knee and acknowledge that the Tarsalans aren’t their enemies but simply their teachers, wise ones who want only to welcome them into the Commonwealth of Worlds, to disperse the human race so that it can survive when the sun’s red-giant phase at last comes. And if passive protest in the form of the phytosphere is needed as a teaching tool—a cinerthax —then surely the humans won’t lock themselves in their own house and burn it down.

  Kafis looked perplexed by the whole situation.

  “Let me teach you a fundamental lesson about human beings, Kafis,” said Gerry. “Push us, and we push back. No one’s going to tell us what to do.”

  “Yes, but why push against reason and common sense? Do you not value your lives?”

  “Of course we do. But we value freedom more.”

  “And we offer freedom. Freedom to live wherever you want on any of the habitable worlds. Wouldn’t you like to see the Sungeely Falls on the planet Yravo from their two-mile summit? Wouldn’t you like to see the ringed gas giants Osa and Meta so close in the sky of Hita that you can nearly touch them? And what about the diamond caves of Farostatar, where whole cities are built out of the precious gems?

  These are the wonders we offer. These are the freedoms that can be yours. Any of these planets would welcome you. And on any of these planets you would see a mix of races, species, and genera hailing from all parts of the local Milky Way. We offer you the
galaxy, and in return, you fire your weapons at us so that we are forced to convert our peaceful shuttles into birds of prey, and shoot down your pilots like pesky insects. We now understand that the mothership is your next objective.” Kafis sat back and his pupils twitched open to their fullest size. “And in that regard we have something we wish you to convey to your United Nations for us. We’ve tried to convey it to them ourselves, but so far they haven’t acknowledged our overtures.”

  “Kafis… we’ve been told by Earth that they’ve abandoned any and all diplomatic initiatives.” He thought

  of the most recent Earth drop, and how Earth planned to board the TMS and abscond with the phytosphere control device. “They’re not even going to try with you anymore. They’re going bluntwog on you.”

  Kafis continued right along, ignoring Gerry’s interjection. “Please convey to them that should they actually succeed in damaging the mothership to the point where its life-support systems no longer function, we will then unilaterally claim as places of refuge those areas marked in the most recent U.N.

  counterproposal. Namely, the Kanem Region of Chad, the Arnhem Land Reserve in the Northern Territory of Australia, and the Chattahoochee National Forest in America’s state of Georgia. We will secure these areas with military force and use their hinterlands as regions of supply, regardless of the cost to human life.”

  Gerry’s face sank, and Kafis must have noticed it because his pupils shrank. In one of those brainstorms Gerry sometimes had, he realized he had made a breakthrough. He no longer wondered why Neil had such an easy time communicating with Kafis, and was pissed off at Neil for not telling him of this discovery sooner. If Gerry had discovered on his own that the whole key to understanding Tarsalans lay in the movement of their pupils, it would have been one of the first things he would have shared with his brother.

  “You’re on weak ground, Kafis. You obviously never expected us to respond with such overwhelming force, and now you’re on the run. You can’t go dictating.”

  “Nonetheless, we will stake these claims if life support on the mothership becomes unviable.”