by Neil Clarke
“Oh. Lionel,” he answered.
“Pleased to meet you.”
He said nothing, so she got up and went into the bathroom. When she came out, he was still staring fixedly out the window. She started making coffee. “Want some?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“Coffee.”
“I ought to try it,” he said reluctantly.
“Well, don’t let me force you,” she said.
“Why would you do that?” He was studying her, apprehensive. “I wouldn’t. I was being sarcastic. Like a joke. Never mind.”
“Oh.”
He got up restlessly and started opening the cupboards. Frank had stocked them with all the necessities, even a few luxuries. But Lionel didn’t seem to find what he was looking for.
“Are you hungry?” Avery guessed.
“What do you mean?”
Avery searched for another way to word the question. “Would you like me to fix you some breakfast?”
He looked utterly stumped.
“Never mind. Just sit down and I’ll make you something.”
He sat down, gripping the edge of the table tensely. “That’s a tree,” he said, looking out the window.
“Right. It’s a whole lot of trees.”
“I ought to go out.”
She didn’t make the mistake of joking again. It was like talking to a person raised by wolves. Or aliens.
When she set a plate of eggs and bacon down in front of him, he sniffed it suspiciously. “That’s food?”
“Yes, it’s good. Try it.”
He watched her eat for a few moments, then gingerly tried a bite of scrambled eggs. His expression showed distaste, but he resolutely forced himself to swallow. But when he tried the bacon, he couldn’t bear it. “It bit my mouth,” he said.
“You’re probably not used to the salt. What do you normally eat?”
He reached in a pocket and took out some brown pellets that looked like dog kibble. Avery made a face of disgust. “What is that, people chow?”
“It’s perfectly adapted to our nutritional needs,” Lionel said. “Try it.”
She was about to say “no thanks,” but he was clearly making an effort to try new things, so she took a pellet and popped it in her mouth. It wasn’t terrible—chewy rather than crunchy—but tasteless. “I think I’ll stick to our food,” she said.
He looked gloomy. “I need to learn to eat yours.”
“Why? Research?”
He nodded. “I have to find out how the feral humans live.”
So, Avery reflected, she was dealing with someone raised as a pet, who was now being released into the wild. For whatever reason.
“So where do you want to go today?” Avery said, sipping coffee.
He gave an indifferent gesture.
“You’re heading for St. Louis?”
“Oh, I just picked that name off a map. It seemed to be in the center.”
“That it is.” She had lived there once; it was so incorrigibly in the center there was no edge to it. “Do you want to go by any particular route?”
He shrugged.
“How much time do you have?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Okay. The scenic route, then.”
She got up to clean the dishes, telling Lionel that this was a good time for him to go out, if he wanted to. It took him a while to summon his resolve. She watched out the kitchen window as he approached a tree as if to have a conversation with it. He felt its bark, smelled its leaves, and returned unhappy and distracted.
Avery followed the same random-choice method of navigation as the previous night, but always trending west. Soon they came to the first ridge of mountains. People from western states talked as if the Appalachians weren’t real mountains, but they were—rugged and impenetrable ridges like walls erected to bar people from the land of milk and honey. In the mountains, all the roads ran northeast and southwest through the valleys between the crumpled land, with only the brave roads daring to climb up and pierce the ranges. The autumn leaves were at their height, russet and gold against the brilliant sky. All day long Lionel sat staring out the window.
That night she found a half-deserted campground outside a small town. She refilled the water tanks, hooked up the electricity, then came back in. “You’re all set,” she told Lionel. “If it’s all right with you, I’m heading into town.”
“Okay,” he said.
It felt good to stretch her legs walking along the highway shoulder. The air was chill but bracing. The town was a tired, half abandoned place, but she found a bar and settled down with a beer and a burger. She couldn’t help watching the patrons around her—worn-down, elderly people just managing to hang on. What would an alien think of America if she brought him here?
Remembering that she was away from the interference field, she thumbed on her phone—and immediately realized that the ping would give away her location to the spooks. But since she’d already done it, she dialed her brother’s number and left a voicemail congratulating him on the concert she was missing. “Everything’s fine with me,” she said, then added mischievously, “I met a nice young man named Henry. I think he’s sweet on me. Bye.”
Heading back through the night, she became aware that someone was following her. The highway was too dark to see who it was, but when she stopped, the footsteps behind her stopped, too. At last a car passed, and she wheeled around to see what the headlights showed.
“Lionel!” she shouted. He didn’t answer, just stood there, so she walked back toward him. “Did you follow me?”
He was standing with hands in pockets, hunched against the cold. Defensively, he said, “I wanted to see what you would do when I wasn’t around.”
“It’s none of your business what I do off duty. Listen, respecting privacy goes both ways. If you want me to respect yours, you’ve got to respect mine, okay?”
He looked cold and miserable, so she said, “Come on, let’s get back before you freeze solid.”
They walked side by side in silence, gravel crunching underfoot. At last he said stiffly, “I’d like to re-negotiate our contract.”
“Oh, yeah? What part of the contract?”
“The part about privacy. I …” He searched for words. “We should have asked for more than a driver. We need a translator.”
At least he’d realized it. He might speak perfect English, but he was not fluent in Human.
“My contract is with your . . . employer. Is this what he wants?”
“Who?”
“The other passenger. I don’t know what to call him. ‘The alien’ isn’t polite. What’s his name?”
“They don’t have names. They don’t have a language.”
Astonished, Avery said, “Then how do you communicate?”
He glowered at her. She held up her hands. “Sorry. No offense intended. I’m just trying to find out what he wants.”
“They don’t want things,” he muttered, gazing fixedly at the moonlit road. “At least, not like you do. They’re not . . . awake. Aware. Not like people are.”
This made so little sense to Avery, she wondered if he were having trouble with the language. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean they’re not . . . sentient?”
“They’re not conscious,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
“But they have technology. They built those domes, or brought them here, or whatever the hell they did. They have an advanced civilization.”
“I didn’t say they aren’t smart. They’re smarter than people are. They’re just not conscious.”
Avery shook her head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine it.”
“Yes, you can,” Lionel said impatiently. “People function unconsciously all the time. You’re not aware that you’re keeping your balance right now—you just do it automatically. You don’t have to be aware to walk, or breathe. In fact, the more skillful you are at something, the less aware you are. Being aware would just degrade t
heir skill.”
They had come to the campground entrance. Behind the dark pine trees, Avery could see the bus, holding its unknowable passenger. For a moment the bus seemed to stare back with blank eyes. She made herself focus on the practical. “So how can I know what he wants?”
“I’m telling you.”
She refrained from asking, “And how do you know?” because he’d already refused to answer that. The new privacy rules were to be selective, then. But she already knew more about the aliens than anyone else on Earth, except the translators. Not that she understood.
“I’m sorry, I can’t keep calling him ‘him,’ or ‘the alien,’” Avery said the next morning over breakfast. “I have to give him a name. I’m going to call him ‘Mr. Burbage.’ If he doesn’t know, he won’t mind.”
Lionel didn’t look any more disturbed than usual. She took that as consent.
“So where are we going today?” she asked.
He pressed his lips together in concentration. “I need to go to a place where I can acquire knowledge.”
Since this could encompass anything from a brothel to a university, Avery said, “You’ve got to be more specific. What kind of knowledge?”
“Knowledge about you.”
“Me?”
“No, you humans. How you work.”
Humans. For that, she would have to find a bigger town.
As she cruised down a county road, Avery thought about Blake. Once, he had told her that to play an instrument truly well, you had to lose all awareness of what you were doing, and rely entirely on the muscle memory in your fingers. “You are so in the present, there is no room for self,” Blake said. “No ego, no doubt, no introspection.”
She envied him the ability to achieve such a state. She had tried to play the saxophone, but had never gotten good enough to experience what Blake described. Only playing video games could she concentrate intensely enough to lose self-awareness. It was strange, how addictive it was to escape the prison of her skull and forget she had a self. Mystics and meditators strove to achieve such a state.
A motion in the corner of her eye made her slam on the brakes and swerve. A startled deer pirouetted, flipped its tail, and leaped away. She continued on more slowly, searching for a sign to see where she was. She could not remember having driven the last miles, or whether she had passed any turns. Smiling grimly, she realized that driving was her skill, something she knew so well that she could do it unconsciously. She had even reacted to a threat before knowing what it was. Her reflexes were faster than her conscious mind.
Were the aliens like that all the time? In a perpetual state of flow, like virtuoso musicians or Zen monks in samadhi? What would be the point of achieving such supreme skill, if the price was never knowing it was you doing it?
Around noon, they came to a town nestled in a steep valley on a rushing river. Driving down the main street, she spied a quaint, cupolaed building with a “Municipal Library” sign out front. Farther on, at the edge of town, an abandoned car lot offered a grass-pocked parking lot, so she turned in. “Come on, Lionel,” she called out. “I’ve found a place for you to acquire knowledge.”
They walked back into town together. The library was quiet and empty except for an old man reading a magazine. The selection of books was sparse, but there was a row of computers. “You know how to use these?” Avery said in a low voice.
“Not this kind,” Lionel said. “They’re very . . . primitive.”
They sat down together, and Avery explained how to work the mouse and get on the Internet, how to search and scroll. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You can go now.”
Shrugging, she left him to his research. She strolled down the main street, stopped in a drugstore, then found a café that offered fried egg sandwiches on Wonder Bread, a luxury from her childhood. With lunch and a cup of coffee, she settled down to wait, sorting email on her phone.
Some time later, she became aware of the television behind the counter. It was tuned to one of those daytime exposé shows hosted by a shrill woman who spoke in a tone of breathless indignation. “Coming up,” she said, “Slaves or traitors? Who are these alien translators?”
Avery realized that some part of her brain must have been listening and alerted her conscious mind to pay attention, just as it had reacted to the deer. She had a threat detection system she was not even aware of.
In the story that followed, a correspondent revealed that she had been unable to match any of the translators with missing children recorded in the past twenty years. The host treated this as suspicious information that someone ought to be looking into. Then came a panel of experts to discuss what they knew of the translators, which was nothing.
“Turncoats,” commented one of the men at the counter watching the show. “Why would anyone betray his own race?”
“They’re not even human,” said another, “just made to look that way. They’re clones or robots or something.”
“The government won’t do anything. They’re just letting those aliens sit there.”
Avery got up to pay her bill. The woman at the cash register said, “You connected with that big tour bus parked out at Fenniman’s?”
She had forgotten that in a town like this, everyone knew instantly what was out of the ordinary.
“Yeah,” Avery said. “Me and my . . . boyfriend are delivering it to a new owner.”
She glanced up at the television just as a collage of faces appeared. Lionel’s was in the top row. “Look closely,” the show’s host said. “If you recognize any of these faces, call us at 1-800- …” Avery didn’t wait to hear the number. The door shut behind her.
It was hard not to walk quickly enough to attract attention. Why had she left him alone, as if it were safe? Briefly, she thought of bringing the bus in to pick him up at the library, but it would only attract more attention. The sensible thing was to slip inconspicuously out of town.
Lionel was engrossed in a website about the brain when she came in. She sat down next to him and said quietly, “We’ve got to leave.”
“I’m not …”
“Lionel. We have to leave. Right now.”
He frowned, but got the message. As he rose to put on his coat, she quickly erased his browser history and cache. Then she led the way out and around the building to a back street where there were fewer eyes. “Hold my hand,” she said.
“Why?”
“I told them you were my boyfriend. We’ve got to act friendly.”
He didn’t object or ask what was going on. The aliens had trained him well, she thought.
The street they were on came to an end, and they were forced back onto the main thoroughfare, right past the café. In Avery’s mind every window was a pair of eyes staring at the strangers. As they left the business section of town and the buildings thinned out, she became aware of someone walking a block behind them. Glancing back, she saw a man in hunter’s camouflage and billed cap, carrying a gun case on a strap over one shoulder.
She sped up, but the man trailing them sped up as well. When they were in sight of the bus, Avery pressed the keys into Lionel’s hand and said, “Go on ahead. I’ll stall this guy. Get inside and don’t open the door to anyone but me.” Then she turned back to confront their pursuer.
Familiarity tickled as he drew closer. When she was sure, she called out, “Afternoon, Henry! What a coincidence to see you here.”
“Hello, Avery,” he said. He didn’t look quite right in the hunter costume: he was too urban and fit. “That was pretty careless of you. I followed to make sure you got back safe.”
“I didn’t know his picture was all over the TV,” she said. “I’ve been out of touch.”
“I know, we lost track of you for a while there. Please don’t do that again.”
As threats went, Henry now seemed like the lesser evil. She hesitated, then said, “I didn’t see any need to get in touch.” That meant the country was not in peril.
“Thanks,” he said. “Listen, if y
ou turn left on Highway 19 ahead, you’ll come to a national park with a campground. It’ll be safe.”
As she walked back to the bus, she was composing a lie about who she had been talking to. But Lionel never asked. As soon as she was on board he started eagerly telling her about what he had learned in the library. She had never seen him so animated, so she gestured him to sit in the passenger seat beside her while she got the bus moving again.
“The reason you’re conscious is because of the cerebral cortex,” he said. “It’s an add-on, the last part of the brain to evolve. Its only purpose is to monitor what the rest of the brain is doing. All the sensory input goes to the inner brain first, and gets processed, so the cortex never gets the raw data. It only sees the effect on the rest of the brain, not what’s really out there. That’s why you’re aware of yourself. In fact, it’s all you’re aware of.”
“Why are you saying ‘you’?” Avery asked. “You’ve got a cerebral cortex, too.”
Defensively, he said, “I’m not like you.”
Avery shrugged. “Okay.” But she wanted to keep the conversation going. “So Mr. Burbage doesn’t have a cortex? Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s right,” Lionel said. “For him, life is a skill of the autonomic nervous system, not something he had to consciously learn. That’s why he can think and react faster than we can, and requires less energy. The messages don’t have to travel on a useless detour through the cortex.”
“Useless?” Avery objected. “I kind of like being conscious.”
Lionel fell silent, suddenly grave and troubled.
She glanced over at him. “What’s the matter?”
In a low tone he said, “He likes being conscious, too. It’s what they want from us.”
Avery gripped the wheel and tried not to react. Up to now, the translators had denied that the aliens wanted anything at all from humans. But then it occurred to her that Lionel might not mean humans when he said “us.”
“You mean, you translators?” she ventured.
He nodded, looking grim.
“Is that a bad thing?” she asked, reacting to his expression.
“Not for us,” he said. “It’s bad for them. It’s killing him.”