by Rob Favre
“Perhaps the movie ended.”
I didn’t see how that was possible; we hadn’t been out here that long.
“I should go home, Tom. But I liked not watching a movie with you.”
My heart sank. I didn’t want her to go home yet. “Okay then. I’ll walk you home and make sure you don’t get lost.”
She laughed; we could see the door to her home in New Upper Stoor Edge from the boulder. We slipped down off the boulder and started walking back across the Lawn. Zoe and Rick and Gabby and her folks lived in a single room which really wasn’t big enough for that many people, but they didn’t complain as much as most of the Young Ones. Most of them didn’t have as much space to live in here in the colony as they had back on Heifer. Which is kind of funny if you think about it – a whole planet for just a few thousand people, but most of us spent our lives crammed into tiny little rooms.
A long shadow touched my feet. Someone was walking toward us, away from the scattering crowd heading home for the night. Against the light streaming out of Central, all I could see what a silhouette. It wasn’t until we were a few feet away that we saw who it was.
“Oh, hello Renay. What are you doing out here?” Zoe asked.
Renay shrugged. “I am only walking. I was going to sit on the rock for a while before I go home.”
“The rock is all yours. See you tomorrow.”
Renay nodded. “Tomorrow.”
Neither of them moved. I got the sense they were both waiting for something, but I couldn’t begin to guess what it was. Finally, Zoe turned and started briskly for home. I told Renay good night and followed.
“Are you okay?” I asked when I finally caught up to Zoe. She was moving pretty fast, so it took me a while to catch up.
“I am fine,” was all she said.
“Hey, pay attention!” I poked her in the arm again. “Pay att…” I stopped poking and I stopped talking. I still didn’t know what was going on, but the look she gave me told me that it was not time for jokes. We walked the rest of the way back to her place in silence.
“Good night, Zoe.”
“Good night,” she said. She somehow managed to open the door open, get herself inside, and slam the door in one fluid motion.
I had to cross the Lawn to get home. I looked over at the boulder and saw a lone figure sitting on it, hugging her knees to her chest and staring up at the stars.
The colony was quiet after nightfall, though not as dark as she remembered it being in the old days. Now there were lights everywhere. To see the stars, to really see them, you had to go up into the mountains.
Her heart felt full, heavy, as it always did after a visit. They reminded her of the movies from old Earth, where the main character would lay flowers on the grave of the important person who died. Of course, the difference was that the person in the freezer wasn’t dead. One day she’d come out, and it was going to be a little like meeting her again for the first time. The bond they’d shared, the way things had been before – that was over. But they would have a chance to build a new one. Someday.
She looked up at the sky. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A spark falling from the sky, maybe. It could happen any time now, they said.
It was comforting to believe that, but deep in her heart, she didn’t think they were coming back.
She stood at the door to her building, hesitated. She loved the boys, more than she thought it was possible, but she just needed a minute more before facing them.
She stepped back into the night.
Chapter 4
The day we found the vault, only five of us were still looking.
Weeks had gone by. Each day, the search parties came back with nothing. No more forks. No more footprints. Nothing new to report at all. Each expedition had fewer volunteers. Without the promise of discovery and adventure, the expeditions had become just another chore, one that didn’t even give you working toilets or clean dishes at the end. All you were left with were sore muscles, dusty clothes, and wasted time, and with each expedition, there were fewer colonists who wanted those things.
Kev and Fradd were among the few who still thought wandering around in the wilderness was preferable to accomplishing anything. They were always goofing off, wasting time, and generally being idiots, but they did that whether they were out exploring or back home; at least out here they weren’t getting in the way of any real work. The three of us were walking through a narrow, steep-walled valley. The floor was a tumble of jagged black rocks, which made our progress slow and sometimes painful. The guys were talking about the upcoming Exmass celebration, which somehow was only a week away now. I wondered if it would snow. I wiped the sweat off my forehead and looked toward the three sisters blazing away in the midday sky. Snow didn’t seem likely.
I hadn’t really been paying attention to what the guys were saying, but Kev said something that snapped my attention back to the conversation. “You know Zhon asked Zoe to go to the party.”
“About time. He has been watching her long enough. If he had any guts he would have asked her a long time ago.”
“There was no party to ask her to a long time ago.”
“You know what I meant, goat-rump.”
They kept going like this for a while, but their voices seemed to be drifting further and further away. Zoe was going to the party with Zhon? I mean, it made sense. Of course she was going with Zhon. I certainly hadn’t asked her to go. And she was a free person who could go to any party she wanted with anyone she wanted. I couldn’t ask her to go with me, obviously. But maybe I was kind of hoping she just wouldn’t go, or that nobody would ask her and she would just go on her own, and then I would also be there on my own, and the two of us could just kind of spend the party together, without anyone having done any asking. We could eat and joke about the Exmass socks and maybe there would be dancing, and just as a kind of joke I could start dancing by myself and she would see me and laugh and then she would come join me and…
“Tom? Tom?” Kev was waving at me. Fradd was smirking, probably also at me. “You still with us, Old One?”
“Yeah, I’m here. Sorry, was just… thinking.”
Kev and Fradd exchanged a glance. “If you are quite done thinking, Old One, perhaps we can move on?”
I was eager to think about anything other than Zoe and Zhon, so that worked for me. We made our way through the close, rocky valley. The steep walls were dark gray stone, almost black, with layers of lighter gray and pencil-thin stripes of some glittering metal. I wondered for a moment if it might be silver or something valuable, before I remembered that where we were, silver wasn’t really any good to anyone. It would be much more useful to find a layer of cheese, or gravy.
We looked for about another hour, but didn’t manage to find anything edible.
What we did find was a door.
Kev and Fradd were busy doing productive things like throwing rocks up at the valley wall to see if they could start an avalanche. I was just about to say we’d gone far enough and that it was time to turn back when I noticed something. The valley walls were mostly smooth and rounded, worn down by centuries of wind. But just around the bend, in a little pool of shadow, there was something that broke the pattern: a straight line.
When I got closer, that line became the edge of a flat panel, perfectly smooth, set about ten centimeters back in the wall of the valley.
“Fradd, Kev… You’re going to want to see this.”
Kev turned to look. Fradd had three rocks to throw at the valley wall first. Then he picked up one more for good measure, and threw that. It cracked against the rock and tumbled down, and little rippling echoes bounced around the valley. Finally satisfied that the job was done, Fradd and Kev came over.
“What is it, Old One?”
I pointed at the flat panel. “Doesn’t that look a little… strange to you?”
Fradd stared blankly. Kev just shrugged. “I suppose. Is that what you called us over here for, interrupting our important wo
rk? Our work was important, wasn’t it, Fradd?”
“Vital, Kev. Vital.”
“So, you have found yourself a section of rock that is slightly flatter than the other rock. I suppose you deserve a prize now?”
I shook my head. “No, this kind of thing doesn’t just happen. Someone put this here. Someone built this.”
“Whatever you say, Old One. We can go back and report it. ‘Big, exciting find,’ we can tell them. ‘Tom found a flat rock near some other rocks.’”
“Touch it, then.” I had been with these two all day, and they were starting to irritate me.
“What?”
“You heard me. If it’s not a big deal, put your hand on it.”
Kev snorted derisively. “Easiest dare I’ve had all day.” He stepped forward, reached out his hand, and jumped back in surprise.
“It’s… cold.”
His touch had brushed away a layer of fine dust, leaving behind a handprint of shiny, polished metal.
We cleared off the entire surface. It was definitely metal, and perfectly door sized. Human door-sized, I was disappointed to notice. Tentacled aliens were looking less likely all the time. There was no handle, no control panel, no doorbell. It didn’t budge when we pushed it. It didn’t budge when Fradd threw rocks at it. Throwing rocks at things was Fradd’s solution to a lot of different problems.
“Maybe that over there is not, in fact, a door,” Kev speculated as we sat on some nearby boulders, sipping warmish water.
“It is the exact shape and size of a door,” I pointed out. My patience for Kev’s nonsense was wearing thin.
“But it lacks one other critical feature that all doors share. It does not open.”
I could have admitted that he had a point, because he did, but we were all tired and hungry, so we just argued about it for a while. Eventually we agreed that something can be a door even if it can’t be opened, as long as it was intended and built to be opened originally but had lost its ability to be opened over time. Fradd pointed out that we should probably head back because we needed to report what we’d found, and also because he was hungry.
“I bet it’s titanium. You’re sure there wasn’t any oxidation at all?” Gravel crunched under our feet as my dad and I walked side by side through the valley the next day. We were not alone. There had been a surge of volunteers since the discovery of the door. I wondered how all of us were going to fit into the valley.
“Not that I could see, no.”
“Has to be titanium. Or some kind of aluminum alloy, maybe. And there was no latch, no handle, nothing?” This was as excited as I’d seen him in a long time. He was humming with energy.
“I didn’t see anything like that.”
“There has to be a motor, some mechanism that opens it from the inside. Maybe magnetic induction, we’ll have to try that.”
He walked me through a few other theories about what the door might be made of, or what might be powering it, or who might have built it. I sort of half listened to him as I wondered what would happen if all these people decided they needed to pee at the same time. Narrow valley. Rocky floor. No bathrooms. We were going to need a system.
Dad stopped talking. I looked up at his face, wondered when it had gotten so thin and weathered. He was starting to look like a cowboy. But he was smiling. Probably trying to calculate something. He always looked that way when he was trying to calculate something.
“What’s new with you, Tom?”
I hesitated. “Um… I don’t know. Not too much I guess. My Spanish homework has really been killing me.”
He chuckled. “No, it’s just… we don’t get to talk that much anymore. You’re always busy, I’m always busy. By the time we see each other at night we basically grunt and fall asleep.” That much was basically true, at least on his end. If I grunted at him, he grunted back. If I asked him how his day was, or what he was working on, or what the next big project for the colony was, he grunted. But today, for whatever reason, he was feeling talkative.
“Yeah, I guess,” was all I could manage to say. Crunch, crunch. Our footsteps echoed off the valley walls.
“Looking forward to Chri… uh, Exmass?”
“Oh, yeah. Mostly I’m looking forward to eating something other than rice.”
He grinned. “I could not possibly agree more. I don’t even remember what meat tastes like.”
“Me neither. I just hope goats taste better than they smell.”
“How about the party? Asked anyone yet?”
“Um… no.” I was trying to make it sound like I didn’t care, or like I just hadn’t thought about it. Of course, I had been thinking about it almost constantly, but I wasn’t about to admit that to my dad. I guess I let my pause go on a little too long, though, because he could tell something was up.
“I see,” he said. He looked thoughtful for a moment. “Tom, let me tell you a story. When I was about your age, maybe a little older, there was this girl in my math class. Actually, she was in my English class also. Anyway, I was crazy about this girl, but I didn’t know if she liked me. I spent weeks analyzing her every word, every gesture, looking for some clue that would tell me whether she had any interest in me. Finally, I worked up the courage to ask her to go to a dance with me.”
“And she turned you down?”
“No, she went with me. For a couple of weeks, I was the happiest guy on Earth.”
“What happened after a couple weeks?”
“The dance happened. We went, she spent the whole time talking with her friends, and towards the end of the night she disappeared completely. I went home alone. Later, I found out she’d been making out in the bathroom with Chris Malone.”
“Dad, I’ll be honest: I’m not really sure what life lesson I’m supposed to be taking from this.”
“I guess it’s this: people usually don’t know what they want. And when they get what they think they want, it usually doesn’t end up going the way they thought it would.”
“Thanks, Dad. Very wise and illuminating.”
“Anytime, son. That’s what I’m here for. And, son, just so you know?”
“Yeah, Dad?”
“I don’t regret asking. It didn’t turn out the way I wanted. But even that was better than doing nothing and wondering.”
Dad was lost in memory for the rest of the walk. I wondered what he was thinking about. I wondered if he ever regretted bringing us here. It had probably seemed like it would be this grand adventure, but now that we were here, he spent most of his time tightening leaky pipes and fixing Cordal panels. It probably wasn’t as exciting as he’d hoped. But here in the wilderness, walking toward a door of unknown origin, he looked pretty happy. I was glad.
When we got to the door, there were already a lot of people crowded around it with a lot of ideas. At Chief Engineer Frank’s direction, Rick and the other engineers pried it, pushed it, bashed it, pressed their hands against it in case it was touch activated or something. Others looked for hidden buttons, or other entrances, or any sign of what might be inside. A group climbed up the valley wall to see if there was anything interesting above. I was not brave enough to join them, or strong enough to climb that fast even if I’d wanted to.
Dad scraped some shavings off the door itself and put them into a portable spectrometer to learn what it was made of, though it took a lot of work and ruined the tip of his knife. Whatever this door was made of, it was quite strong.
Nothing was really making a dent in the problem though. That’s a metaphor but it was also literally true: no matter how hard we hit it, how big a rock we used, we couldn’t dent it the door.
“It has to be aliens, right? I mean, that thing is indestructible.” I was sitting in the shade a ways down the valley with Rick, trying to cool off. The dark stone and close, still air meant it felt much hotter down here than it probably did back at the colony. Most of the expedition was taking a break while Cordelia passed right overhead and the day was at its hottest. A few Young Ones were still
looking at the door, pressing it, cursing at it, laughing. Their laughter echoed through the canyon. Fradd was throwing rocks at the canyon walls and dodging them when they came back down. So far, he’d been successful.
“You think everything was done by aliens, Old One.”
“We came all the way out here, light years from home. Almost died a couple times. I think I deserve to see an alien.”
He thought for a minute. “Several weeks ago, we watched a film with aliens. They ate or vaporized every person they except the lady with the blond hair. And the dog.”
“Well, yeah, until Brock Gunnar punched them.”
“He punched well. But it makes me wonder. Why do you want to meet something that will eat or vaporize you?”
“That’s just a movie, you know? It’s made up. Real aliens wouldn’t be anything like that. Besides, I doubt very much that we would taste good to them.”
A tiny avalanche of pebbles tumbled down onto Fradd’s head. A lot of hot, tired people chuckled. Fradd brushed the dust out of his hair.
“Hey, Rick,” I said quietly. “Can I ask you something?”
“You may.”
“Do you think… are you asking anyone to go to the Exmass party?”
He smiled. “Yes, Ionia is going with me.”
“Oh, nice. That’s great.”
“Yes.”
“Yep.”
Rick looked at me for a long second. “I do not know what she would say if you asked, Tom. She enjoys your company…”
She enjoys my company! My heart stopped beating.
“…but you did hurt her very deeply.”
I had hurt her very deeply. I felt the shame of it all over again. My heart started again, pounding.
“Thanks for reminding me.”
“If I knew, my friend, I would tell you. I am afraid the only one who can answer your question is Zoe.”
I nodded. I knew he was right, of course. The problem was, she was finally talking to me now. If I asked her for more than that, and it reminded her of what I’d done, she might get hurt all over again and stop talking to me. If I didn’t ask, I would never know if maybe she really wanted me to ask and was just waiting and wondering what was taking me so long. Maybe I could ask her to go with me, but just as friends…