Another smile. “Not unattended, Wally. Just unpeopled.”
“Oh. Right.”
I lay back and looked at the sky again, staring at blue hyperspace, wondering what would become of me. What if we find Earth? What then? Just go home? I tried picturing that, imagined myself appearing, bareass, back in Dorvo Valley, with a naked little blonde girl holding my hand: Hi, Mom! Sorry I’m late! Hey, look what I found!
Tracy said, “You have an erection again, Wally.”
I rolled away from her, curling up around myself, facing down slope, toward the trees and little creek. “Sorry.”
She said, “Look, I know we can’t do the thing you’ve been dreaming about, not without risking damage to some components of this immature body, but I can still help with those other things.”
I thought, What about damage to me?
After a long moment, she reached out and touched my back softly, making me flinch. Then she said, “I will grow up, you know. This body is as real as your genome could make it.”
I said, “You’re eleven, Tracy. It’ll be a while before you’re all grown up.”
She said, “I’ll be physically mature enough for successful intercourse in no more than twelve to eighteen months, if you really want to wait.”
I looked over my shoulder at her, baffled. “I can’t believe I’m talking about this stuff with a little girl.”
Softly, she said, “I’m not a little girl, Wally. I’m a robot, remember?”
I looked away again, remembering she’d wanted to be called Tracy, rather than Robot.
Another girlish sigh. “It’s so hard for me to know what’s right, Wally. Your memories of your real cultural surround are all mixed up with what was in those stories you loved. As if your culture itself were somehow confused. As if it couldn’t distinguish between dream and reality.”
That made me laugh. Really laugh.
To Tracy’s disappointment, what she called the Master Planet seemed to lie in ruins. And what ruins!
Ruins, real ruins, are thin on the ground for an American boy in the 1960s. I remember Murray and I used to argue about that, as we tried to write stories about our imaginary Venus, Murray wanting ruins to be like Pompeii, like the Coliseum, seen in books, in movies, on TV. Like one of Burroughs’s African lost cities, or like Koraad on Barsoom. Murray’d never seen a real ruin, having traveled so little, having lived only in New York City and the suburbs of Washington, DC. I’d lived in the Southwest, and my parents had taken me to see Mesa Verde, to visit Chaco Canyon.
Real ruins, of real abandoned cities, sitting out in the weather for hundreds of years, are different from maintained ruins, like the Coliseum, or cities preserved under volcanic ash for thousands of years. Burroughs was in the Army in the 1890s and served in the Southwest. Why didn’t he know that?
The cityscapes of the Master Planet were like that. Stumps of buildings with their foundations exposed. Crumbled, fallen walls. A sense of haze and dust everywhere.
We stood by our flying saucer, and Tracy said, “Whatever happened, happened here. And there was nothing left behind to keep things up.”
Keep things up, I thought, awaiting the owners’ return.
In the end, a few days later, we wound up on something Tracy referred to as a “substation,” some adjunct of the Master Planet, one of many apparently scattered round the Lost Empire. From space, seen out the saucer window, it looked like a little blue moon, hardly a planet at all, a little blue moon surrounded by ghostly white radiance, and, though I looked and looked, nothing else nearby. No sun. Not even an especially bright star. No gas giant for it to orbit. No nothing.
On the ground . . . well, no. Not ground. The place was like a cityscape, but the buildings were made of something like sheet metal, tin, copper, zinc, varicolored anodized aluminum, streets paved with sheets of rolled gold, nothing but metal everywhere but the sky.
From under the saucer’s rim, I just stood there, looking up, at a pitch black sky flooded with so many stars it lit up the landscape, making a million little shadows in every dark corner.
“Man. . . .”
Every now and again, there’d be the quick yellow streak of a meteor.
“Where the hell are we?” Up in the sky, it was as if there were some shapes hiding behind the stars, faint washes of light that disappeared when I looked at them.
Tracy put one cool hand on the small of my back, making my neck hair tingle. “We’re in an irregular galaxy. There’s a lot of dust. Nebulae. Lots of really young stars.”
Like a Magellanic Cloud. I, uh . . . “Was this galaxy even here a hundred million years ago?”
“Yes. These galaxies evolve fast, and they don’t last as long as the spirals, but they’re not ephemeral. They also don’t have much in the way of naturally habitable planets. We used them as resource centers. Industrial complexes.”
We. My little Tracy, the Space Alien.
She said, “I’ve got a lot of work to do, Wally. Why don’t you go sightseeing? I’ll find you later.”
“Uh. . . .” I felt a sudden chill, turning to look up at our saucer.
She smiled. “I won’t let it go anywhere, Wally.” She patted me on the arm, then turned and quickly walked away into the shadows.
Sightseeing. Was there anything here to see? I started walking, but there wasn’t much. Metal buildings. No, not even that. This kind of looked like the stuff inside a machine of some kind. Maybe an old TV. Except no vacuum tubes or anything. Like lifting the hood of a car, and not knowing what you’re looking at.
I remembered I always resented those boys who knew what cars were about. Resented that I couldn’t learn, that Dad wouldn’t let me help with our car. Goof, he’d say. You’ll either break something or hurt yourself. When I was missing Dad, I wouldn’t remember stuff like that.
Everybody was always mad at me about something.
There was something kind of like a lake. No, more like a pool. Round, but full of cool, fresh water, surrounded by a soft area. I wished for grass, but this stuff was more like a satin comforter stapled to a slanting floor. Nice to sit on naked, though.
A little too cool to sit here naked.
I went back to the saucer and got one of the picnic blankets we’d taken from the spome, came back to the little pool and sat again, all wrapped up, looking out over ersatz cityscape, remembering that where my dad had taken German in college, Murray’s dad had taken French, so Murray would say faux, where I said ersatz.
What if I could pick and choose my companions? Who would I bring here now?
Murray? Would I want Murray here with me now? My best friend since second grade, my best friend ever, maybe my only friend? I remember the day before I left, running into Murray in the high school corridor. Larry was standing with him, the two of them talking about something. They shut up when they saw me, Larry smiling, Murray’s eyes full of that now-familiar contempt.
What the hell did I do to make this happen, Murray?
The longer I stared at the sky, the easier it was to see those shapes embedded in the deeper dark. All I had to do was not quite look at them, pretend to be looking at something else, but pay attention to the corners of my eyes, and shapes of wan light would pop out of nowhere.
If Murray was here, I guess I’d get some lecture about “averted vision,” his eyes full of amusement as he showed me, once again, how really cool he was, how smart, how much better than me at everything and anything.
I felt my eyes start to burn, and had to put away all those questions. Except: there’s no one I want with me. No one at all to go back to. Why is that?
Three meteor trails burned overhead, dazzling yellow, side by side in the sky, like a long, hot cat-scratch. Maybe I dozed after that.
Came back from wherever, not knowing if I’d slept or not, for the sky was unchanged. Darkness, stars, and the faint shapes beyond. Jumped slightly at the shadow standing by the rim of the pool’s little arena, girl-shape looking down at me.
“Trac
y?”
She walked down across the satin groundcover, until she was close enough to see by starlight, eyes vast, face so soft and lovely. What would’ve happened, if you hadn’t moved away, five years ago? Nothing. Your mom would’ve found out about us, would’ve talked to my mom, and we’d’ve been ordered apart, “just to be safe.” Boys and girls that age aren’t allowed to like each other.
Something wrong though, here and now.
I said, “Are you all right? You look sick.”
She kneeled down beside me, and I could see there was a shine of sweat on her.
“What’s wrong?”
She said, “I’ll be all right. I had to have a little more work done on myself, while I was at it. They have much better equipment here than back on the Green Planet.” She seemed to shiver.
“Oh, Tracy. . . .” I gathered her in and wrapped the blanket about us both. She was hot and clammy, not that dry heat like when you have a fever; more like something inside was heating her up, making her sweat, making the night feel cold.
When I was about five, my grandpa, who died drunk, got me to drink a glass of whiskey, laughing when he saw I could get it down without gagging. It made me sweat like that, once it was inside. I remember my mom went apeshit over it, cussing Grandpa like I’d never heard before, but there was nothing to be done. All I did was go to sleep, and wake up the next day feeling like I was full of helium and ready to float away.
She snuggled in close, arms around the barrel of my chest, her sweat getting on me, starting to run down in my lap, making me shiver too. “I’ll be all right. Really.” Hardly more than a whisper.
Well, then.
She said, “I found the Earth.”
Smarmy pang of fear. “Um. . . .”
She said, “Really not that far. No more than two hundred million parsecs. On the far side of the next supercluster from here.”
“How long?”
I could feel her face change shape against my chest. A smile? She said, “Well, that depends.”
“On?”
She squeezed me a little bit, shivering a little harder. “Well, it only took you a few weeks to reach the Green Planet, so that’s all it’ll take to get back. . . .”
Damn. Mom. School. Murray.
And no way I can explain where I’ve been, much less who this little girl might be. Sudden cold horror. When I get off the saucer in Dorvo Valley, Tracy, my Tracy now for sure, will get back aboard and go away?
There was a brief clicking sound, then she said, “But the hyperdrives are not immune to Relativity, Wally.”
I thought about my homecoming, in those stiff old clothes waiting for me in the saucer, turning up at Mom’s house on Staggs Court, in, what? Maybe March 1967? By now, Apollo 1 will have flown. And I’ll have to repeat the eleventh grade.
Yep, that’ll make Murray jealous, all right.
Then I said, “Huh?”
More clicking. “You left Earth twenty-three years ago, Wally.” More clicking. “Some of that was lost in local travel.” Clicking. “If I take you straight home from here, it’s only another twenty.” Clicking. “But only three weeks, starship time.”
She started to shudder really hard against me, and I realized the clicking sound was the chatter of her teeth. “God, you are really sick!”
Sweat was pouring off her now, running down between my legs and pooling on the satin. She said, “Just hold me, Wally. I’ll be all right in the morning. I promise.”
I wrapped the blanket tight around us both, feeling the heat increase, and just sat there, staring at the sky, while Tracy shivered and chattered, murmuring to herself, sometimes real words, sometimes things that sounded like foreign languages, nothing that made any sense.
Twenty-three years, I thought. 1989? And then another twenty?
Up in the sky, the stars marched slowly overhead, old ones setting, new ones rising, showing me the orientation of the blue moon’s axis. Meteors would burn by ones and twos and threes, until I paid attention and found the swarm’s radiant. That, I thought, must be the direction of our travel through interstellar space.
Once, something like a pink Bonestell moon appeared out of nowhere, just a dot in the sky at first, then swelling to a huge, pockmarked balloon, before shrinking away to nothing again.
After a long, long while, Tracy’s shivering started to die down, her skin to cool. Maybe, I thought, the worst is over? After another long while, despite my determination to stay awake, to hold her, guard her, protect her, I fell asleep.
It was, of course, still dark when I awoke.
I was lying on my side under a sky full of stars, arms wrapped around Tracy, her back pressed to my chest, my face buried in the tickle of her hair, which had come loose from her braids. It wasn’t wet with sweat any more, but seemed greasy, with a funny smell to it, not much like the dry wispy hair she’d had since she so magically appeared.
I had my usual erection, pressed up against her, painfully hard, harder than usual, in fact.
No more fever.
Her skin, rather cool, was no longer drenched with sweat either, and not dry. Kind of oily. Or greasy, like her hair.
Very cool. So very cool that . . .
I felt my heart start to thud in my chest.
Oh, Christ.
Something wrong with the way she feels, too, as if she’s suddenly gotten fat. Or, loose. No more muscle tone, I . . .
I started to reach for her heart, holding my breath, terrorized, suppressing my thoughts, not wanting to know until I knew. What the hell will I do?
She stirred in my arms, taking a deep breath, making me freeze. Took a deep breath, stiffened, seemed to stretch, then curled up a little tighter, flabby chest skin settling across one of my arms, the one that’d been reaching to feel for her heartbeat.
I whispered, “Tracy. . . .”
Her voice was hoarse, and foggy, as if she were very, very tired. “Here, Wally.”
I cupped part of her chest in my hand, and thought, wait just a second here . . .
She twisted then, twisted over onto her back so she could turn toward me, eyes shining in starlight, teeth a flash of white in the shadows of her face. And then she said, “Accelerated maturation. Oh, I know I’m still a little small. I can’t add mass overnight, but the machinery did figure out how to get me to endstage pretty quickly.”
She took me by the wrist, pulled my hand off her breast and dragged it down between her legs, down into the hot and wet of her, and said, “No more excuses, Wally.”
To my amazement, I knew exactly what to do.
We stayed down by the lake, tangled together under the stars, until I got so hungry I started to get dizzy, even lying down. It was hard walking back to the saucer, not just leaving the magic shore, but because Tracy tried walking so close to me, I kept tripping over her.
Finally, we settled for holding hands as we walked, and I couldn’t stop smiling, feeling like I was flying through the air. Different. Different. This was . . .
I said, “I feel like a grown-up now! How can just one fuck make me feel so different?”
Tracy laughed, stopping and turning to face me, looking up, holding both of my hands in hers. “Well, more than one. . . .”
Technically speaking, I guessed that was right.
“Do you want to go home now?”
My smile must have gone out like a light.
“Wally?”
I said, “Unless you’ve got time travel, my home’s gone. I can’t imagine what Earth must be like in 2009. Maybe there’s been an atomic war by now.”
I remember I’d tried to write a story when I was in the eighth grade, a story I called “Bomblast,” set in the far future year of 1981. I’d known roughly how many nuclear weapons America had in 1963, then tried to extrapolate forward a couple of decades, and come up with something like thirty thousand warheads. Okay. So give the same to the Russians. Then I’d tried to imagine a war in which sixty thousand hydrogen bombs went off all on the same day.
Tracy said, “All those stories, and you still can’t imagine 2009? What good were they?”
“I don’t know.”
She said, “If we don’t take you home, then what do you want to do?”
I ran my hand down her bare back, and discovered she wasn’t tall enough, or my arms long enough, to grab her by the ass.
She giggled. “If you don’t think of anything else, that’s all there is for us to do.”
“Suits me.”
She gave me a squeeze. “You’ll get sick of it, sooner or later, Wally.”
“Impossible.”
“Well, let’s go. We’ll think of something, some day.”
As we walked the rest of the way back to the saucer, I thought of something else. “Tracy?” She looked up. “Did you ever find out what happened to your people?”
She looked away for a second, putting her face in shadow. “I wasn’t really people, Wally.”
I felt bad for making her think like that. “You are now.”
She smiled then, just the way I’d always wanted the original Tracy to smile. “Yes. Thanks to you.”
Me?
She said, “But I found something, Wally. You know how I told you the hyperdrives experience time dilation?”
I nodded.
“Well, the citizens of the Empire lived a long time, compared to humans, largely from perfected medical treatment, but they were hardly immortal. The universe was, in a sense, closed to them, just the same way the stars are closed to Earth.”
Right. Apollo/Saturn would get us to the Moon by the end of the decade, to Mars by 1984 or thereabouts, maybe even to the moons of Jupiter by the end of the century. But the stars? Never.
There was that alternative vision of 2009. The good one. Rather than an Earth blasted away to slag by tens of thousands of nuclear explosions, maybe Murray did get to be the first man on Mars, the way he said he would be, Murray on Mars in his mid-thirties. Maybe I’d go home and there he’d be, commanding the first expedition to Saturn.
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