Phytosphere

by Scott Mackay

  Gerry stared at the crowd of Lunarians. Fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, daughters, children—every one of them. “We could indeed take the Tarsalan deal,” he began. “The Tarsalans could rig the Moon so that it would indeed become a self-sustaining outpost for the next thousand years. But make no mistake. It would be their outpost, not ours. And in forty years a backup force from their homeworld would arrive, and they would use a new gravitational device to dismantle the shroud, and they would then, at last, immigrate to Earth, just like they’ve always wanted. Only there would be no human survivors left down there anymore, and Earth would be theirs for the taking. Is that what you want? For the Tarsalans to come in and take over? Kafis isn’t dumb. He’s got two brains. He has a million years of technological culture behind him. That’s why I didn’t invite him to this meeting. That’s why I had Ian spray the whole room for bugs. Because Kafis knows it’s possible. He realizes there’s a way we can save ourselves. But is he letting on?”

  He stopped, once again thinking of his wife and kids.

  “Please, I’m asking you… we’ve got this chance. We can do it. Mitch and I have gone over the mission specs again and again. It will work. Do we tie our destiny forever with the Tarsalans? Do we let them control us? Or do we take control of our own fate? There are those of you out there who I know have people on Earth.” He ventured to his own thoughts of a moment ago. “You have fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, wives, and daughters. You have husbands. Are you just going to abandon them? Are we going to desert our brothers and sisters on Earth? Do you want that on your conscience? I know I don’t. So let’s do what Ian says. Let’s take this chance, and do what’s right. Not what’s safest for ourselves, but what’s right and decent for all of humankind.”

  32

  Neil, sitting next to the helicopter door, banged his head as the aircraft shifted suddenly—and from that moment, his left contact lens wouldn’t work, no matter how many times he tapped his left temple.

  In the wake of his great failure, nothing seemed to make sense anymore. His life became little more than a series of disconnects, and it became a lot worse when Lenny swerved to avoid incoming fire.

  Morgan cried the whole way. Lenny kept glancing at her, as if he wished she’d shut up. And while the two other airmen seemed miffed about the whole rescue operation, Neil couldn’t really tell, because he couldn’t see them that well anymore, not with one eye in focus and the other eye out of focus.

  At one point Lenny tried to tell him something, but the helicopter was too loud, there were only enough headsets for the three airmen, and, try as Neil might, he couldn’t make out a word Lenny was saying.

  He asked one of the airmen, Douglas, what was happening, and Douglas had to shout to be heard. All he said was that they were being engaged—sporadically—then added that it was amazing what those fatheads could do in the way of weapons, given a minimum of materials.

  Neil just smiled; and this was the other thing that bothered him—the smile on his face, the one he couldn’t seem to shake. It was an apologetic grimace, a bewildered one, like the smile of a man in the first stages of Alzheimer’s, fighting to remain polite even though his life was in flames. He couldn’t look at Douglas. As if he had failed Douglas in some way.

  And then there came another disconnect. He zoned out. He didn’t know where he went. It was another big blank. Until the third airman, Fernandes, swung the big side door open and started firing his fifty-caliber machine gun at the ground. His children cowered. His wife looked catatonic. And the repeated muzzle flashes from the big gun lit up Fernandes’s face as if with a strobe, so that Neil saw the light-collecting goggles over Fernandes’s eyes, and the way the sweat dripped down his cheeks and off his chin, as if manning the big gun was hard work, like operating a jackhammer. Fernandes didn’t look particularly worried that he was in the middle of combat, though occasionally the corners of his lips twitched downward, as if involuntary spasms of the face were necessary to work the big machine gun.

  Louise said something to Neil, but she had such a soft, delicate voice that she couldn’t make herself heard, so he just nodded… and then… and then…

  Another disconnect.

  They were on Marblehill’s big front lawn, and he had the distinct sense, as Lenny helped him out of the helicopter, that he had crossed over into another era, and that he was now in an age where only bad things happened, so different from the previous age of smiling good fortune. He was sure he heard Lenny say, “Your girls will have to learn how to shoot, of course.” And then he said something about tactical advantage and strategic value, words Neil didn’t understand because he had that smile on his face again, and when he had that smile on his face the whole world became opaque.

  He caught sight of Marblehill. Huge bullet holes pocked its stone facade. Were they bullet holes? No.

  The Tarsalans didn’t use bullets. How did the translating device put it? Vibration modules? VMs for short? Was that it? A weapon that did its damage by shaking materials beyond the point of their molecular-cohesion tolerances? Yes. It was coming back to him. Those long talks he had had with Kafis by the pool. He glanced toward his pool, the deep end visible behind the west wing of his house, but could barely make out the diving board in the glow coming from the helicopter. Then the helicopter shut down, the lights went out, and another airman, Sinclair, came from behind one of the stone pillars of the drive-through portico with a flashlight and waved them in.

  “So?” said Lenny when they reached the portico.

  “Nothing,” said Sinclair.

  “We need food,” said Louise.

  Sinclair gave her a look, and it wasn’t a nice look; it was a look that said, why are you here, what good are you—you’re nothing but extra baggage.

  Lenny, on the other hand, was polite, and it was, Mrs. Thorndike, if you could please step inside, and yes, Mrs. Thorndike, that is coffee you’re smelling, and yes, we have coffee, real coffee, and we’d be glad to get you a cup, and I hope you know how to make good coffee, because we buried Nabozniak yesterday, and it’s too bad because Nabozniak was a whiz in the kitchen. Not only that, he knew how to crunch his own rounds—we’ve got a round-making kit, and maybe we can teach Morgan to make rounds, turn her into a real combat asset, because what we’ve got here, Mrs. Thorndike, is a bona fide alien invasion—they started coming down last night, and they sent some bugs in, and gosh we’re glad you brought the spray because we really need it, we should have thought of spray in the initial planning stages, but it’s too late, and they know we have food in here, yes, that’s right, they eat human food, they’re like us in a lot of ways …and it was as if Louise was hypnotized by everything Lenny was telling her. Yet it all sounded familiar to Neil, as if he had dreamed about this alien invasion long ago, and this was nothing but a peculiarly frightening summation of the whole thing.

  And… disconnect again… because it was late, it was early, but it was neither late nor early because these two qualifiers didn’t apply anymore. It was dark—the only qualifier. As a result of his two miserable failures, it was dark all the time now. They sat in the second-floor games room—five remaining airmen, his three daughters, himself, and his wife; and they had the gas generator hooked up so that they could have some electrical lights, and he heard the generator humming at the back of the house. Lenny was giving them all a lecture on how to use the airman weapon of choice, the Montclair Repeater, a nasty little submachine gun about the size of an umbrella.

  “The rounds are more like darts, but they explode on impact. The thing you have to remember about Tarsalans is that they don’t kill as easy as we do. Rib cage like a rhino. That’s why an exploding round is an advantage.”

  He disassembled the weapon, reassembled it, snapped the banana clip in place, then said, “Four hundred rounds a clip. Ingenious.”

  He passed it around. Neil could hardly believe his girls were handling one of the most vicious military weapons ever devised, that it had actually come to t
his; his precocious, bright, pampered, pretty, and innocent daughters being forced to protect themselves from alien invaders with military-style firearms.

  When it came his turn to try, he smiled his idiotic smile, and briefly—ever so briefly—broke into tears.

  He caught Fernandes and Rostov looking at him. Neil handed the weapon to Morgan. A bloody Montclair Repeater in Morgan’s hands when she couldn’t even read.

  “When you’re not engaged, hold the barrel pointed toward the ceiling, hon,” Lenny reminded Morgan.

  The gun went to Ashley, then Melissa. Neil remembered this from the Air Force. Standard weapons training. But what he didn’t remember was little girls with guns.

  Melissa went first, walking to the window with a strange fire in her eyes, pointing the Montclair out the casement, and shooting out into the grounds. Melissa, the oldest, was like him, ready to try new things, embracing this harsh new world as the status quo, accepting it readily.

  Then it was Ashley’s turn, and Ashley was petulant about it, rolling her eyes a time or two as she took the weapon and walked to the window. She fired the Montclair without even looking. An involuntary squeal escaped from her lips as the weapon jumped in her hands.

  “You’ve got to grip it, kitten, if you want to stop that recoil,” was all Lenny had to say.

  And finally it was Morgan’s turn. Neil was hard-pressed not to intervene, because this was just a ten-year-old girl after all, but what if it came down to just Morgan at the end of it all—just her, and a handful of aliens trying to harvest the countryside without due regard for human life? So he gave her a chance. And she did okay with it, seeming to understand with a profundity that apparently escaped the other two just why Lenny was asking her to shoot the weapon in the first place.

  And then… another horrible disconnect. Where he just sat there with Rostov on guard duty, with headsets on, listening through the various microphone plants in the forest beyond the perimeter, hearing crunches and cracks, and the trees settling bit by bit into decrepitude. Hearing the wind blow through the once magnificent Chattahoochee National Forest. Occasionally going to the back to check on Louise and Melissa, who scanned the grounds to the rear through light-gathering goggles. Bits and pieces of the long, perpetual night of the shroud gluing themselves together out of one disconnect after another, until finally Lenny told him how the senior airmen on their little staff, Harmon, Earl, and Scott—Neil’s old friends, Greg’s old friends—had fought brilliantly, but had finally succumbed to the Vibration Modules, the VMs, those insidious Tarsalan weapons they had all grown to fear so much.

  “Buried them out by the pool. I hope you don’t mind.”

  And in Lenny’s voice he heard a letting go of hope.

  Later, near the end of his shift with Rostov, Lenny came to the front and asked, “What went wrong?”

  So Neil became Dr. Thorndike again, and tried to explain some of it to Lenny, how with the hydrogen sulfide, the xenophyta had gone into a state of suspended animation; and how, with the virus, the carapace had surprised everyone by jailing the virus during its lytic phase. Lenny stared but said nothing.

  And in that stare, Neil saw doubt and, aggravatingly, some Monday-morning quarterbacking, as if Lenny thought Neil should have figured out the pitfalls ahead of time.

  After that, he slept for a while—at least as much as he ever slept in this perpetual night—a light doze that never released him into the sweet oblivion he craved so much.

  Fernandes came for him three hours later. “We’ve got a full alert, sir.”

  Neil took up a position with Louise and Morgan in his study on the second floor. The only light came from the control panel of the communications equipment, but it was enough so that he could see their faces—and their faces were tired and thin and, most of all, fearful.

  He lifted the light-gathering goggles and strapped them to his eyes, then raised himself to the windowsill and looked out at the grounds.

  He could see them. Yes. Sketched in the ghostly green of the goggles’s light-gathering properties.

  Aliens.

  Inoculated and biologically adapted to live here, the first Tarsalan immigrants, maybe surprised that they were now soldiers, perhaps baffled by human intransigence, and certainly distressed, the way they all were. The goggles magnified. He saw them clearly, five altogether, their huge, bicephalic heads covered with shaggy black hair that reminded him of a bison’s pelt, visible among the dead yew trees.

  He saw a small burst of light from the right, out beyond the six-car garage, like sparks from a welder’s torch. The sparks rose toward the mansion, and as they got closer to Marblehill they drew apart, and pulsated, like the flickering radiance of a pulsar. Chatter drifted up from the radio on the floor. Lenny’s voice, the voice of command, but also the voice of desperation. Through the goggles Neil watched the Tarsalans shift to the left, where they took cover behind the stone wall. Then the tattoo of Montclair Repeater fire erupted from the house, with every fifth round a tracer. Louise and Morgan looked at him.

  He gave them a nod, and they tentatively rose to the window and, with shaking hands, pulled their triggers.

  He did the same.

  The whole thing seemed surreal. Especially watching Louise shoot her Montclair. She was a housewife, for God’s sake, not a combat soldier. And Morgan was a ten-year-old grade-five student with Attention Deficit Disorder who had to take medicine just so she could concentrate. And he was a fifty-two-year-old physicist and biologist, a university professor with a spreading paunch and a taste for fine wines. Yet now he was blasting away, praying that the VMs wouldn’t get anywhere near him. Their light shifted against the ceiling, making green and blue squares, like geometrical ghosts. As they got closer, they began to whine and shriek. They floated with a not particularly urgent velocity toward his study on the second floor, and he shot at them, and they were easy to blast out of the air, but there were just so many of them, as if the Tarsalans believed that the basis for all successful technology was redundancy to the Nth degree.

  How it happened he wasn’t sure, because he was too busy shooting out the window, too much in the grip of his own frantic combat mania, shooting but not even looking where he was shooting. Yet…yet the next disconnect was framed in the context of Morgan screaming at him, tugging at his sleeve, pointing at Louise, who was lying on her back on the handwoven Moroccan rug, quivering in the oddest way. At first he thought she was having a seizure, but she was quivering so fast she actually looked blurred around the edges. When he placed his hand against her chest it was like placing his hand on the hood of a car, because his hand vibrated the same way. He saw a tiny, bloodless hole on her neck. Her eyes were half closed, and she didn’t seem to be in any particular pain.

  But then she got a nosebleed.

  And shortly after her nose bled, she died.

  He didn’t immediately feel the overwhelming grief he knew he would later feel. He just felt…disappointed. Disappointed that all the plans they had made for their sunset years were coming to nothing.

  “Is she all right?” Morgan kept asking.

  “No, sweetie,” he said. “She’s not all right. She’s dead.”

  He said the words slowly because he felt he always had to say things slowly for Morgan, just to make sure she understood.

  Morgan was not, as Lenny might have said, a combat asset after that, because she simply clung to her mother, crying and crying, occasionally trying to wake her mother up as if she still didn’t understand that Louise was dead.

  His initial disappointment faded, and was replaced by a…a knowledge and certainty that he had nothing left to live for, except…except as Louise’s avenger.

  He lifted Louise’s Montclair from the floor and checked the little electronic monitor on the side. Two hundred seventy-two rounds left. His own weapon had 234 left. Armed with two weapons, one in each hand, their butts pressed against his biceps, he stood up like a thriller-action hero, heedless of whether any more VMs were coming,
and fired away. Through his light-gathering goggles, he saw the alien bastards moving through the dead forest and, in the nanoseconds it took him to squeeze both triggers, he had a memory of Louise out there in the woods picking wildflowers; because that’s what she did when she came here, picked wildflowers, put them in a vase, and tried, with varying degrees of success, to paint them with watercolors.

  Every fifth round was a tracer, and the ammo arced over the grounds like hot little hornets in the light-gathering lenses of his goggles. He killed one of the alien bastards, and then another, and finally a third, and saw the remaining two scatter into the woods, their bodies like human bodies, but the proportions different so that the arms were too long and the legs too short; yes, alien bodies, human parodies, and they all deserved to die now that they had taken away his sweet Louise.

  He fired until he stopped feeling the kick from his weapons. And shortly after that he realized it was extremely quiet. He looked down at Louise. Morgan wasn’t there anymore. He took a deep breath.

  What was he going to do now? We’re going to be all right. People with money are going to weather this thing just fine. His words came back to haunt him. Was it a character flaw, the hubris he had felt all his life? So that he had even believed he was immune to the Apocalypse?

  He dropped the Montclairs to the floor. Their barrels smoked. He was hot. Drenched in sweat. He collapsed to his knees. His eyes moistened, yet the guttural howl that tried to escape from his throat simply wouldn’t come, especially not now, not when Morgan came back into the room with the other girls. He knew he had to keep it in, make his girls understand in a calm, reasonable way that things like this happened in the Apocalypse; children lost parents and parents lost children.

  Ashley came to him. Melissa came to him. And Melissa was still clutching her Montclair, as if she had forgotten she had it in her hand. They cried, but they didn’t wail—the Thorndike family wasn’t given to excessive displays of emotion—but in their quiet sobs he felt an especially keen agony, something that seemed to grab all his internal organs and drag them downward. Here was the family, what was left of it, the two older girls clinging to him while Morgan fussed around Louise like the strange child she was, trying to wake Louise up.