Stories: All-New Tales

by Neil Gaiman; Al Sarrantonio

  But he’s surprised when the front-door buzzer buzzes. He had expected helicopters and floodlights and grappling hooks and special-ops troopers in black visors and haz-mat suits bursting through the doors and windows with automatic weapons and gas canisters, and had even practiced dropping to the floor and putting his hands over his head. The Obamas’ Hyde Park house is ten minutes from his apartment, which he’d figured would make the brouhaha all the more spectacular. As he stands at the intercom speaker, he looks out the window down at Kimbark Avenue: cars driving past, people strolling by and hanging out as on any summer afternoon, no evacuation of the block, no emergency vehicles, no perimeter secured.

  The doorbell buzzes again. He wonders if it’s the UPS guy.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello?” A woman, sounding tentative.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for someone who, um, also lives at 86 degrees, 19 minutes, 27 seconds north?”

  He grins, and buzzes her in.

  Opening the apartment door, he’s surprised all over again: she’s alone, apparently unarmed, and very young. She extends her right hand.

  “I’m Nancy Zuckerman.”

  “Hello. I’m Nicholas Walker.”

  “I’m a scientific researcher,” she says. “From the Arctic.”

  “Really?” He smiles, and motions her inside. “So am I! How very fortunate. For the both of us.”

  THEY SIT. SHE SETS aside the cardigan he’d handed her, and explains herself in a nervous rush. Why she had been in the Arctic, how she happened to drift over the station and accidentally jimmy the entry system with her oar. How she’d figured, at first, that it must be some military facility, American or Russian or Chinese, but then, as she spent hours exploring the interior—the peculiar materials and shapes and technology interfaces, the very peculiar quality of artificial light, the unrecognizable written language, the images displayed—how she had developed a new hypothesis. How she had photographed everything, including the mapping console with its one, tiny blinking light in the middle of North America, and then, on her computer back in Longyearbyen, had transposed a longitude and latitude grid over her image to find the precise location of the blinking light—41 degrees, 47 minutes, 54.1475 seconds north and 87 degrees, 35 minutes, 41.7095 seconds west, South Kimbark Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets, Chicago. How she had taken a few things from the station—including a small plastic picture of him, which she had just shown to a lady downstairs in order to find his apartment. She hands him the picture.

  “My goodness,” he says, “I was young. So young!” He puts the picture down and turns to look at her. They’ve talked for ten minutes, yet she hasn’t asked where he’s from or what he’s doing here. Which is fine by him. He’s in no particular hurry.

  She’s a little flummoxed. “I have to tell you I am incredibly excited. This is beyond surreal. It’s like I’m having a stroke, or been drugged, or gone to heaven. It’s—it’s a new category of excitement.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m also scared.”

  “Scared? Of me? Oh, don’t be. No, no, no.”

  “No, scared that I haven’t told anyone about any of this—not my colleagues, not my bosses, not any government people, not my mom, no one. I don’t know what the rules are, but I sure as shit haven’t followed them.”

  How interesting. “Why have you kept it secret?” He knows about keeping secrets.

  “Well, I guess possibly I worried that…no, I’ll tell you why. Because I want to be the one who gets to reveal it, to tell the whole story. To be, you know, ‘the discoverer.’ Like Columbus or Magellan or Galileo or Einstein. I’m sorry—do you know who they are?”

  He smiles. “Yes.”

  “Before the rest of the world finds out and rushes in and pushes me out of the way, I want to learn as much as I can. I want to be the expert.”

  He likes this girl. He will give her the gift she wants.

  “Oh, Jesus.” She reaches into a bag, searching for her two tape recorders. “May I record our conversation?”

  “Of course.” He spots something in the bag. “You found the gold? At the station?”

  She blushes, and pulls out a half-pound golden cylinder the size of a lipstick. “You can have it back. I took one, as a research sample.”

  He strokes the ingot with one finger. “And you said you saw images at the station?”

  “Projected on those big spherical monitors in the, like, office.”

  “To the left and straight back as you entered?”

  “Hundreds of pictures on those monitors, 3-D photographs, in color, of huts and houses and towns and farm animals and pots and carts and soldiers and children and temples, it looked like from all over the world, Europe, Asia, Africa—”

  He hates to seem smug, which he’s afraid is about to become his default affect, but he can’t suppress a knowing smile, and interrupts her. “I know. I took them.”

  “Shot from overhead, mostly, I guess with a very long lens?”

  “Intelligence gathering is supposed to be clandestine. And I tried to minimize the Hawthorne elect—people behaving differently when they know they’re being watched.”

  “A lot of the images look extremely old. Unbelievably old. Not the pictures, I mean, but the people and buildings and so on.”

  “They are.”

  She hesitates before asking the next question. “So, you were taking photographs all over the world before…before photography was invented?” This is precisely what she’d hypothesized, that he must be at least two hundred years old. Incredible.

  “And moving pictures as well—videos, more or less. From when I arrived until the day the camera was destroyed. By the time the technology existed…indigenously, it seemed pointless for me to start up again.”

  “May I ask your age?”

  This time it’s he who pauses, anticipating her reaction. “The station was established in 429, CE.”

  She stares, saying nothing. Her skepticism races to catch up with her astonishment.

  He restates his answer, trying to help her register the fact. “I arrived fifteen hundred and eighty-one years ago.”

  “You’re sixteen hundred years old?”

  “Eighteen hundred and seven. Which is fairly ancient even on my planet.”

  Finally, she thinks, yes: “on my planet.” It had seemed impossible, but it also seemed like the only plausible explanation. She tries not to hyperventilate. “Where—what planet are you from?”

  “We call it”—for an instant his voice slips into an inhuman half hiss, half buzz—“Vrizhongil”—and then back to English with no trace of an accent: “It’s a moon, really, which orbits a large planet. Which orbits our sun, of course. About sixty-two light-years away. Very close by, in the scheme of things. But far enough, it turns out, that it made me expendable.”

  Nancy says nothing, and continues to stare. Can this be happening? Can all of this possibly be real?

  He had imagined this encounter hundreds of times, thousands, even rehearsed it. “You’re wondering if I’m insane, I expect. Well, there have been moments over the years when I’ve begun wondering that very thing: Am I mad? Is this story—spy from another planet stationed on Earth and abandoned by his superiors, almost two thousand years old, undersea polar base—is this all delusion, some sorry old man’s schizophrenic gibberish? And when I’ve reached those moments of existential crisis, this is one of the things I do, to prove to myself that I’m sane, that I am who I believe I am.”

  He picks up a pair of nail scissors from the coffee table and jabs hard into the palm of his right hand. His blood is a kind of Day-Glo orange, and as it drips from his hand onto the table it sizzles and burns the wood like acid.

  “Of course,” he says, grabbing a tissue to wipe his hand and the wood, “a skeptic would think this is a trick, some theatrical special elect. But you, Ms. Zuckerman, you have seen the Arctic station. And you found my picture there.”

  “Yes.”

  “So given the ev
idence, perhaps I don’t need to perform any further mortifications to establish my bona fides.” He’s smiling. He really does not want to remove his eyes from their sockets, or show her that he has a bifurcated phosphorescent penis and no anus at all.

  “I believe you,” she tells him.

  He explains that his government established a system to monitor civilizations on planets feasible for Vrizhongilians to reach, and that Earth was one of those 116 designated planets when he embarked on his 83-year-long flight here. The big ship carried four other intelligence agents headed for four other planets in the vicinity, along with their terrestrial stations in prefabricated pieces and individual expeditionary aircraft. A reconnaissance probe was sent to the surface to photograph humans, so that the necessary reconstructive surgery—remodeling ears, removing external neck cartilage, giving his skin a convincingly soft texture and pinkish tint, and so on—could be performed by doctors aboard the mother ship. His station was installed beneath the polar ice. And, voilà, he was on his own.

  Sending a message between Earth and Vrizhongil took sixty-two years, so communication was impractical. He spent six weeks each year doing the field work—flying around the world, observing human settlements, taking pictures, making videos, scribbling notes—and the rest of his time organizing and distilling his material.

  “Huh,” she says.

  “What?”

  “That’s so much time for assembling and editing.”

  “Well, yes. Our productivity problem. You see, we sleep twenty or twenty-one hours a day. It’s the single thing I envy most about you. About people here, I mean.” Eating and digestion, he did not add, were what he found monstrous about humans. No doubt all intelligent species have their horrific and pathetic outliers, the psychopaths and murderers, the self-mutilators and televangelists. But on Earth, every single person chews food and swallows and shits, and it still disgusts him.

  Once each century, he says, a mother ship would visit to resupply him and take back home a copy of his meticulous multimedia chronicle of another Earth century. And by the way—every one of his first six chronicles received the highest possible rating from headquarters.

  “So your people, back on your planet, were only seeing your reports of life on Earth a hundred years after the fact.”

  “Or longer.”

  “And you wouldn’t hear back from them for another hundred years after that.”

  He shrugs. “The speed of light is the speed of light.”

  At the end of his standard eight hundredth tour of duty, which fell in the thirteenth century, he was to have been replaced by a young agent, and return to Vrizhongil for a headquarters job for another five hundred years before retiring. But no mother ship arrived in 1229. No mother ship ever showed up again. He’s been waiting ever since. And he never retired. The chronicle, he tells her, “is rather absurdly up to date.”

  He explains that his people possess, by human standards, an uncanny ability to learn languages, so that during his biannual field expeditions, the northern hemisphere in December and the southern in June, he could move among people incognito. When he was threatened with harm or capture, he protected himself with a weapon, a long wand, which temporarily paralyzed every creature (“except, oddly, marsupials”) within 200 feet. He used the weapon, according to his records, 373 times in 1,442 years.

  Quite often, however, when his aircraft hovered for long periods at very low altitudes, people saw it and became alarmed. To demonstrate his peaceful intentions, he would give away tokens, beads and bits of gold.

  “The way that poll takers,” he says, a little defensively, “offer small cash payments in exchange for participating in a survey. It was one of our standard protocols.”

  “And the station was established in the Arctic,” she asks, “for secrecy’s sake?”

  He nods. “Yes, and for my personal comfort as well. Vrizhongil is a cold planet. During these hellish months,” he says, nodding toward the windows, “I give thanks every day for the invention of air-conditioning.” Outside it was almost ninety degrees, but Nancy had put on his sweater. “The region of my birth is considered warm, and temperatures there are the equivalent of Fairbanks. Or were, anyway.”

  “But so—why are you here now, in Chicago? Why aren’t you in the Arctic?”

  “Because it’s my kind of town?”

  She doesn’t get the joke.

  “An accident,” he says. He was wrapping up one of his annual northern field surveys, having just revisited and filmed the large Indian city of Cahokia, at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. Flying north, back toward the station, he suddenly lost power, and crash-landed in Lake Michigan. He managed to get gold, as well as the paralyzer, video equipment, and portable beacon—he touched the blinking device on the table—into the emergency raft. His aircraft sank.

  “Our orders were unequivocal—remain as close as possible to one’s last position and wait for…rescue. Besides, back then I had no means of returning to the Arctic. So I built a home in the woods and coexisted with the natives. Every so often I brandished the paralyzer to reestablish my bona fides.” He smiles. “And I’m afraid I never disabused them of their ‘White God from the Heavens’ idea.”

  “But what about, you know, the Europeans, the settlers?”

  “They came later. Much later.” He pauses, possibly for dramatic effect. “Three hundred and fifty-six years later. I crashed in February 1317. When the French arrived, fortunately, they ignored the stories the Indians told about me. I was just another supernatural character in one of the savages’ supernatural myths. Fiction.”

  “So for food, you hunted and gathered?”

  “I don’t eat. As such. My body absorbs nutrients from the air.” This tangent makes him dread that she will ask to use his bathroom. He has no toilet paper.

  He tells her about moving into Chicago not long after it was founded, about buying what he needed with pieces of his gold, about working at odd jobs in order to conserve the gold, about losing his video camera and paralyzer in the great fire of 1871, about the difficulty of employment in this era of income taxes and Social Security and government IDs. He has, of course, never sought medical care from a physician, and has kept changing residences so that neighbors don’t get too curious about why he doesn’t seem to age, or die. This is his fourteenth apartment. But except for the years he spent up in Winnetka, from the 1940s through the 1960s, in order to experience suburban life firsthand—“Once an anthropologist, always an anthropologist”—he has lived in Chicago since 1837.

  They had talked for more than three hours, and Nicholas had awoken three hours before she arrived. He’s getting drowsy.

  “You’ve told me almost nothing about your planet,” she says. “Your people, your history. We have so much to talk about. So much.”

  “We do indeed. But if you don’t mind, perhaps we can finish for the day and continue our conversation tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yes, of course, yes, absolutely.” But what if he runs away? What if he dies overnight? Then she reassures herself. She had today’s recordings. She’d taken pictures of him. She’d photographed the station, and knows its location exactly. Everything would be okay. She reaches over and touches his shoulder.

  “Thank you. This is so extraordinary, I can’t…words really don’t…thank you.”

  “I’m pleased, too. Extraordinarily pleased that it was you who made the discovery. I’m very, very lucky.”

  “You’re lucky? Well, this is—I mean, I’ve won the lottery to end all lotteries, right? It’s Christmas in July!”

  He chuckles, and the chuckle becomes, as he sits back, a full-throttle guffaw.

  She’s horrified. Is he about to tell her that this has all been a practical joke, a hoax? That he’s an actor in some incredibly elaborate reality show?

  “I’m sorry,” he says finally, still chuckling. “My fatigue has ruined my manners. I’m so sorry.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a
nother part of the story you need to know. I was going to save it for tomorrow. But now that I’ve upset you, that won’t do.”

  He begins by describing his aircraft in more detail than he had before: small, just twenty-six feet long, a large transparent canopy, landing rails instead of wheels, and a thicket of navigational probes extending from the front of the fuselage.

  “When the people of the north, the Nordics and the Lapps and the rest, saw me flying, cruising at low altitudes through their midwinter skies nine hundred years ago, eleven hundred years ago, what do you suppose they thought they were seeing?”

  Nancy shakes her head. She has no idea what he’s getting at.

  “A flying sleigh, driven by a large bearded man who had given them gifts.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “And a flying sleigh pulled by what? By nothing? Literally unimaginable, so the array of antennae on the nose of the aircraft appeared to them as—what?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Antlers, on a team of flying reindeer.”

  “Oh my God.” She’s had three weeks to get used to the idea that she’d discovered an extraterrestrial base, and that she might actually find a creature from another planet. But this—meeting Santa Claus—is almost too shocking to process.

  “When people would ask my name, I gave the one I’d always used, adapted to the local language—Nikolaos, Nikola, Nicholas. And when they asked where I lived, I saw no reason to conceal the truth—‘beyond the mountains of Korvatunturi,’ I told them, ‘near the top of the world.’ Although I don’t believe I ever said, ‘At the North Pole.’”

  WHEN SHE ARRIVES THE next afternoon, he doesn’t answer the buzzer. Oh, Christ, no. She presses again. As she’s about to press a third time she hears his voice over the speaker.

  “Nancy? Very sorry! Come right up.”

  Has she ever been so thrilled? He’s still here, still friendly, his windows still improbably frosty. And she sees he has been scanning through his documentary videos. He invites her to sit next to him on the sofa and watch on a small, black spherical device that reminds her of Magic 8-Ball.