‘Sirens,’ said Connie. ‘Sirens. They’re called sirens. Didn’t you know that?’
Luke shrugged.
‘I… I don’t always know the names for things.’
‘And why not?’ said Connie.
Her heart was pounding in her chest; he was making her very anxious all of a sudden. Why had he known about the message? Why? Her brain was telling her one thing, deep inside like a tolling bell: her eyes, her consciousness, her experience were refusing to accept it for an instant.
‘I don’t know,’ said Luke.
He looked up at her, perched on the grass.
‘So. Do they know? Do they know what you know?’
Connie nodded.
‘What you knew already,’ she said softly.
There was a long silence. He did not deny it.
‘And the professor?’ Connie said eventually when she couldn’t wait any more.
‘Who?’
‘Professor Hirati?’
Luke looked puzzled.
‘Who?’
‘The man, the man who leads the programme. With the yellow hair? The man who comes in every day and asks us if we’ve found anything? Ben Hirati? Professor Hirati? The guy who runs the programme who comes in every day?’
‘Tall,’ said Luke. ‘The tall… sorry. I find it… I find it hard to tell people apart sometimes. Everyone is kind of the same colour.’
Connie was gesticulating with exasperation.
‘The man who came in every day! Luke, he’s dead. He died.’
Luke sat bolt upright.
‘He’s dead?’
His face was genuinely and totally surprised. Connie had watched it very closely. Luke was difficult to understand, but he was not hard to read, and she could not see him as an actor. He was shocked to the core.
‘How?’ said Luke, agitated. ‘How is he dead? How was he killed?’
‘They don’t know for certain he was killed,’ said Connie. ‘But he was found… in the lab…’
She felt her voice wobble.
‘And he didn’t have any…’
She stopped, suddenly frightened. Above them, the faint trail of a plane’s lights fell in the slipstream over the flat east of a darkened, quiet England, where everyone, it felt, slept the last peaceful gentle sleep of their lives; the last night they could ever believe themselves alone in the universe, apart from, perhaps, a god who didn’t truly concern himself in their daily affairs nearly as much as they would like him to.
Connie and Luke looked at one another.
‘Colour,’ said Luke slowly. ‘He didn’t have any colour.’
Connie could barely speak, couldn’t swallow at all. Her heart was banging in her chest. She nodded.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He didn’t have any colour.’
She looked at him.
‘And… you knew that. Were you there?’
‘What? No, of course not. Of course…’
Luke was looking very puzzled suddenly, stopped and touched his fingers to his eyes.
‘What?’ he was saying. ‘What is this?’
He pulled his fingers away. They were wet. He took an exploratory lick of his fingers.
‘What’s happening?’ he said to Connie, fear in his voice. She looked at his face.
‘You’re… you’re crying’ she said, completely confused. Luke looked at his fingers, then touched them to his eyes again.
‘That’s crying?’ said Luke in a quiet voice. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’
‘Have you never done it before?’
There was a long silence.
‘Yes,’ said Luke, suddenly very weary. ‘I have done it before.’
Connie’s hands were trembling.
‘Luke,’ she said, ‘you have to tell me. Whatever it is. Can you… can you tell me – please – who you are?’
Luke took a large, old-fashioned handkerchief from the top pocket of his jacket, and gently wiped the moisture from his long fingers.
‘There was no colour left in him,’ he said again.
‘No,’ said Connie. ‘They think someone might have done that to him.’
Luke nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid somebody did.’
‘Do you know who?’
They were now standing, facing each other, under the clear night sky.
‘They’re here,’ Luke said.
Connie swallowed. The way he said it – calmly, matter of fact – set a bolt of fear through her.
‘Who’s here? Who’s here, Luke?’
Luke tilted his head as if distracted.
‘Hair.’
‘Connie.’
‘Names are hard for me,’ he said. ‘What does Connie mean?’
‘It’s short for Constance,’ said Connie. ‘I’ve always hated it.’
‘Constance?’
‘Like constant. You know. Do make the hilarious maths joke; I’ve only heard it nine thousand times.’
‘You are a constant.’
‘Well, that’s what the name says. I change my lipstick sometimes.’
‘You are always the same.’
‘People are never the same, Luke.’
There was a long pause.
‘Luke?’
He ran his hands through his thick, dark hair, making it flop shaggily on top of his head. It made him look very young suddenly. She held his gaze.
‘Luke,’ she said again. ‘Are you people?’
He took a deep breath, and then another. Then he exhaled very slowly, as if laying down a burden that he had been carrying for a long, long time.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that really rather depends.’
Connie looked at him, holding her breath.
She couldn’t believe that yesterday she had been just a normal girl, like everyone else. Her job was a little unusual, but no biggie in the scheme of things. And today everything had changed so fiercely and dramatically she had absolutely no idea what her place was in the universe, nor who else was in it. She had no scheme of things.
‘On what?’
‘Well, do I consider myself a person: of course. Am I a human person?’ He looked up. ‘Not exactly.’
‘Ha!’ Connie couldn’t help it: it just burst out. She suddenly found herself holding back an unexpected desire to laugh. ‘Ha!’
She swallowed the urge before she collapsed in utter hysterics.
‘Because… because you’re from…’ She choked again, pointing at him. ‘You’re from… the place that sent us the picture.’
He nodded slowly.
‘Kepler-186f.’
‘That’s not what we call it.’
Connie laughed again. She couldn’t help herself.
‘No. It wouldn’t be. What do you call it?’
He didn’t answer. She moved closer.
‘But… But I mean, look at you,’ she said. ‘I mean, the real you… is this what you look like? Do you look human?’
She felt an urge to put out a hand, touch his face, and an equal, opposing urge to take off screaming for the nearest airport and buy a ticket to New Zealand.
‘Because to me you look really, really human.’
Luke nodded.
‘I know.’
He glanced down at his body.
‘No,’ he said simply. ‘No. I don’t. No. It takes a lot of effort to live like this. I can’t… I can’t quite get used to it.’
Connie flinched backwards. She remembered again the terrible empty visage; the clear, drained corpse.
‘Where…?’ she said. ‘Where did you get…?’
She swallowed, rubbed her eyes very hard with her hands, as if this would help.
‘The body you are in,’ she said, ‘is it yours? Did you take it?’
Luke shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It was given. And the body is mine; please don’t worry. The pigment was given.’
He looked at her. ‘You think you were the first,’ he said, ‘but you weren’t. A young
boy… a brilliant… he was brilliant. Very sick. Not well at all. But he found me first, the first of all your species. In Belarus, in a bed, with a tiny computer.’ He shook his head. ‘Brilliant.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was sick,’ said Luke. ‘There was nothing I could do, nothing anyone could do. But he helped me. He was… He was very excited to meet an alien.’
He looked at Connie, who had managed to regain control of herself although she was still trembling. ‘Well, put it this way, he didn’t fall about laughing.’
‘I’m only doing that because I don’t believe you yet,’ said Connie. ‘Also I need to work out whether you’re going to suck out all my juice so I’m half listening and half wondering who’s the fastest runner.’
Luke blinked.
‘But I would never… I would never do that to anyone.’ He hit his fist with his other hand. ‘Práklon! GOD, who is it? Who found me? So quickly…’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘6.49,’ said Luke. ‘Four years. His – sorry. He had a name. And I do know it. It was Artem. And it was his last… gift to me. So I could live… so I could pass…’
His voice turned harder, but Connie didn’t notice.
‘Somewhere far away from the sea.’
Connie was reaching for her smartphone then cursed when she remembered they had been confiscated.
‘You’re saying a kid died?’
Luke nodded. ‘Nothing to do with me. He was born in a radioactive wasteland. He started to die from the second he was two cells in the belly of his mother.’
He glanced down at the handkerchief.
‘Why now?’ he said. ‘Why could they not just let me be?’
She looked at him.
‘What do you actually look like?’
He shrugged.
‘Well… we don’t… we have no colour, so…’
‘Yes, I get that,’ said Connie. ‘But are you a biped… I mean, do you walk on two legs and stuff? Or are you like a jellyfish?’
Luke didn’t smile. He looked straight at her.
‘A jellyfish is a good… it’s not a bad way of thinking about us. Yes, we are bipeds, but…’ He extended his arms. ‘We have more practical arms that can get places. I mean, seriously, how do you manage with these?’ He waggled his hands. ‘Oh, these things are useless. And these ridiculous bones. These bones! How on earth do you get about with great, big, breakable – and I will tell you, I have broken a lot of them finding this out – bits of stick inside you? How do you get through doors and around things and climb things without these stupid, big, heavy, internal logs?’
He looked crossly at his long legs.
‘And short legs. It takes so long to get anywhere. All this bloody gravity. So much stupid bloody gravity. Which is why you need sticks in your arms. Because everything, everything is so, so heavy, and you don’t even know and you need to be heavy too to deal with it. And people walk around with great sorrowful expressions and such sadness and worry inside and they think it’s because of weird things like handbags and whether they’ll go to a noisy party and whether they should have more stick leg things only smaller.’
‘You mean children?’ said Connie.
‘Uh-huh, yes, them. But it’s not that. It’s because they’re being push-push-pushed down to the earth all the time; oppressed by very weight of the air that you breathe.’
‘Why, what, do you live underwater like Ranjit thinks?’
‘Sometimes,’ said Luke. ‘Some do.’
He looked up.
‘That’s… that’s our problem. The tides… the tide groups. There is… Our planet has problems.’
Connie stood up, shaking her head, and started to back away.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, this is ridiculous. No. No, no, no. You’re as real as I am.’
‘Of course I am,’ said Luke in some surprise.
‘You were born in the former Yugoslavia…’
‘That was Artem’s idea. So I wouldn’t need documents. Although I had to pretend to be quite young.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Four hundred and seventy-nine. Earth years, about three hundred. It is quite young.’
Connie looked away, swore and wished she had a cigarette even though she didn’t smoke and had no intention of ever doing so.
‘Prove it,’ she said suddenly.
Luke turned his dark eyes on her.
‘No!’ he said straightaway. ‘I don’t want it. I don’t want to prove it, and I don’t want it to happen. I’m just a guy who was born in an orphanage and has stupid ideas about things. That’s all. Just another eccentric academic. Possibly insane. Forget we had this conversation.’
‘And who’s wanted by the police.’
Luke’s face grew wary again.
‘They think… they think I did that to the tall man?’
‘They think somebody did, and let me say you’re the only one who vanished for the entire day.’
‘Because you’ve just got in touch with my home, which, I will tell you now, is not good news for anyone. But it is very particularly very, very not good news for me.’
He turned the whole depth of his black eyes on her. Suddenly, in the moonlight, Connie found herself staring into them. She found them fathomless: a different world, a bottomless sense of something other than what he appeared to be.
‘Can I touch you?’ she found herself asking.
Luke nodded.
‘I can’t remember which bits are the naughty bits though,’ he said. ‘Artem told me, but I can never remember. Also he was only ten – I’m not sure he was totally clear himself.’
‘Which bits are the naughty bits in your other shape?’
‘Oh, all of them I think,’ said Luke carelessly.
‘That must make commuting very difficult,’ said Connie. Nervously she took a step towards him. They were standing very close now. She remembered his inability to respect personal space, the lack of normal physical cues she often caught from him. But his little oddities, his strangeness, they couldn’t possibly add up to…
But they were in a new world now. A new existence; a new something she knew to be true, however difficult it was to countenance, to believe.
‘Bloody hell,’ she said suddenly. ‘I can’t believe David Icke was right all along’
The stars blazed overhead as she very gently stretched out her left hand (it was an old – and a bad, she admitted – habit to tend to think of right-handed mathematicians as not quite the real deal, but it persisted). Luke, she noticed, lifted his own left arm in response. Carefully, terrified, she extended her hand…
She touched his forearm, between his hand and the faded olive check of the cotton shirt he was wearing. His skin was soft, dry, warm. It felt like… just… just skin. Not sweaty, not clammy; nor, as she had slightly expected, dry and powdery as a dead leaf.
She smelled the scent again she had smelled before: a faint whiff of the sea, of shells and salted wind.
‘Is there the real you underneath this?’ she whispered.
He lifted his other hand and gently touched her hair.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘in this particular spectrum galaxy, this is almost the only colour I can see.’
He laced it between his fingers thoughtfully; moving slowly, unhurriedly, interweaving his fingers patiently in and out; drinking it in; feasting on it with his eyes; holding it up, closer, to his face, as if he’d forgotten everything else that was going on. Yet oddly, Connie felt her pulse slow at last; after everything, after all the tension and horrors of the day gone by, she found herself now more relaxed; was somehow happy to let him touch it with his strange, long fingers.
‘Is there a real you?’ he said. ‘Underneath this?’
The sudden noise of the sirens cracked the skies.
‘Oh God,’ said Connie, glancing down the rolling hillside. ‘They know. They’re looking for us.’
‘Music,’ said Luke.
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