by Stephen King
Funny that it said nothing about the fact that only a short time ago the universe was still deciding if it wanted to go to war. I loathed the media for its sensationalism. Yesterday, the greatest catastrophe the galaxy had ever known. Today, nothing on the subject at all. We’d moved on to the Fair. The Olympics. The World Cup. What were such things? Other than human, that is. Who else would presume to sponsor a Cosmic Fair? Gaia, but we were obvious creatures. Maybe when all was said and done, I’d write the biography. The human biography. What a tale to tell.
At that thought, a knock came at the door. I wanted to tell them to go away, but something told me I shouldn’t. You’re the great listener, Arben. Hear what they have to say. Sir, may we further convenience you? Sir, you left your card at the desk. Sir, may I use your bathroom to wash the clown off my face?
I’d risen from the bed, but now hesitated as a foreboding crawled over me. Who were these people? And why exactly was I, the diplomat, caught in their game? Could I answer their questions? Was existential a term that could be applied to all, no matter their condition of being?
“Sir, are you in? I’m with the hotel, delivering a message for Mr. Vanders.”
I’m not in! I almost shouted. But what would that have accomplished except to start the whole anxious process all over again?
“Coming.” It was less a call than a confirmation to myself that I was indeed doing that. I opened the door without looking through the peephole. If they’re here and it’s decided, then they’re here and it’s decided.
Doorknob in hand, I saw that he wasn’t a she and he didn’t wear a clown suit, so maybe I was safe for a little while longer.
“It’s from a Freneto. No relation to Carolyn, I assume?” He smiled, but it did nothing to conceal the humorlessness of him.
“You assume wrong,” I said, almost snatching the message from his hand.
He puffed off without a tip as I closed the door in my towel.
Vanders, I read. You’ve been a bad boy, haven’t you? Slipping off to Ebula without a word. Just joking, friend. I’ll be expecting you downstairs in the lounge for our drink.
Paper-delivered? Like that, really? The old fool. All this revisiting the tense past months for nothing. For a trip through the cosmic museum with the person I least wanted to see right now. The endless suggester while I’d been in mediations. Ambassador not to the League of Races, as his title stated, but to some agenda unknown to all parties, himself included. Even Mirilus had remarked as such. Some humans are fools, he’d put it. And he was right. Better some humans had been left in the last stage of evolution.
Cursing, I made myself another drink and sat down on the bed, re-reading the piece of worthlessness. As I did so, the words bled into each other, forming a smeary, What in Gaia’s name am I doing here? Have they no souls, the clocktickers? Game played out and won, what more do you need? What more do you need of me, you living, breathing baboons?
But this was my own clock ticking out its response. In a deeper place I found myself not quite convinced of the message or its sender. I knew people. I knew how they themselves ticked. It was my job. It was why I’d been called to the mission in the first place. Something wasn’t quite right. Something wasn’t quite right about messages delivered to doors, regardless of source or content. It was archaic, medieval. It stank of purpose. And that never sat well on two glasses of Irrilia.
I did as bade and went to the lounge to cavort with mysteries.
. . .
There was no one there to receive me. Nor anyone who bore a second glance as I ordered another Irrilia, cupping it in my hands where I sat at the bar surveying the smallish crowd. Among the tables, there were four separate parties who were obviously there for the fair. At the bar, a male couple intimately talking and touching; and at the other end, a nondescript woman searching for something inside her drink. I considered looking around the lobby, but to what purpose? If they wanted me, they would find me.
When they didn’t within the next few minutes, I grew increasingly annoyed despite the tranquilizing properties of the Irrilia. Did I have time for this bullshit? (I was something of a word historian, and that obsolete term seemed to fit the situation all too perfectly.) Would I sit here and wait, for the satisfaction of unknown others?
“You didn’t buy it, did you?”
I started, spilling a little of my drink on my leg. I’d been looking out into the lobby, or rather the space between, when she’d stolen up on me. Observing her now, I realized there was nothing nondescript about her except the absence of paint.
“Lady, what is your game?”
“I like reactions. It’s what I do, in a way.”
“And it was for a reaction that you sent a message to my room from the ambassador?”
“Is a clown not allowed her pranks?”
I started to answer, to give her my standard objection to people wasting my time, but decided to hold my tongue in favor of taking in the unmasked clown. She was a rather small woman, not delicate by any means, but light. Appeared to be in her mid-thirties, but might as easily have been late twenties or early forties. Her face was mildly attractive, in a plain sort of way, with features neither soft nor stern, though her mouth, her smile, was warm as she measured me up at the same time. Her blondish hair fell around her face loosely, naturally, appearing absent of any of the treatments so common among the fairer sex these days. Nor did she wear any makeup except for the suggestion of shadow. But it was her eyes I was interested in. That’s where the person resided—in the eyes. Previously, I’d known only crinkles. Little spiderwebbing cracks in the mask she’d chosen for herself. Viewing her in her stripped-down state was a much less frustrating experience.
If that’s what you could call it. When it came down to searching her otherwise average brown eyes for intent, purpose, identity, I found that their depths could not be penetrated. Or rather that the person lived too deep in there to be disturbed. Yet it was somewhat intoxicating looking. Like bathing in another form of the drink I held in my hand. Like she knew something, maybe, that I had forgotten to consider. I’d have used the word secret if it wasn’t such a cliché. Though that wasn’t quite right either—
“Are you going to continue to sit there and stare at me or will you offer to buy me a drink?”
“Yes, of course.” Then: “No—wait. I’ll not be mesmerized by you.”
She laughed, a less than musical, more than routine thing.
“That’s what I’m doing? Mesmerizing you? Why, that’s almost romantic, Arben Vanders.”
I lifted my drink, intending to sip but finishing it all in a gulp. “Would you do me the service of providing your name before we go any further?”
“I believe I’ve told you already, silly person.”
“You mean you are Ia?”
She smiled. “How very flattering that you remember.”
“How very,” I echoed, feeling slightly disoriented.
No don’t be, I felt in my skin, my body, my brain.
I stared at her, probed her fathomless eyes. “Is that …”
Me talking? Of course, Arben Vanders. It was me talking from the beginning, wasn’t it?
I felt my head moving from left to right, right to left. A habit. A human trait. “Then you are a non-human.”
“I wouldn’t say that exactly,” came the spoken word to my ear. “I don’t exactly fit the description of an alien, do I?” She smiled. Adding, “Perish the term.”
I took in a long, deep breath, turned to get the bartender’s attention. “Another please.”
“He means two,” Ia corrected.
“Yes, sorry. Make it two.”
But not too much, Arben. There are things to see, wonders to behold.
“Who are you?” I said. Words sounding like they’d come straight out of a holoplay script. “I mean … why toy with me? Be forward. Tell me what it is you want and let’s be on with it. Is this to do with the Axena Pact? With those negotiations? Are you a thing of Mirilus?”
Again, her not-quite-routine laughter. I am a thing of Ia, Arben Vanders. I am a thing of Ia.
I stroked my forehead. “I need to go to my room after this drink, Ia. Will you be here later?”
“An excellent idea. Let’s go to your room to continue our conversation.”
“I said I need to go—”
“Don’t be that way, Arben. Either we’re in this together or we’re not.”
“I don’t like feeling controlled.”
“Hush! I have never done that.”
My turn to laugh—and it, too, seeming not-quite-regular. “Oh? That’s not what you’ve been doing from the beginning?”
She waved dismissively. “Beginnings? Phff. They’re overrated if you ask me.”
I’d nothing to say to that so didn’t as I watched the bartender finish preparing our drinks.
“Last one,” Ia said as she took the glass. “Okay? At least until we get to the room …?”
I paid the bartender before turning back to her. “If your intent is to do me in, you’re too late. The pact has been signed. The war has been …” I let it taper away, knowing it must sound like so much whimpering to a being such as her.
‘Yea, one such as I, by the road that leads thence.’
“That is my favorite poem,” I said, startled.
‘A man as from war in the profoundest sense.’
“Please stop,” I said, drinking deeply of the Irrilia.
‘The rages of winter, and winter’s allies …’
“‘All traded away for the soldier grown wise.’ Yeah, so what’s the point, Ia? How does this relate to anything?”
“It doesn’t. That’s what makes it, and humankind as a whole, so fascinating!” She partook of her own drink. “It’s all so bloody random, isn’t it? But then again, it isn’t!”
“Riddles. You’ve been speaking in riddles—”
“Hence the clown costume,” she smiled.
“—from the start.”
“And?”
“And I’ve asked you to speak straight.”
She pursed her lips, nodding. “I understand your need for answers. I do. But I must let the exhibit speak for itself.”
I drank. Then drank again. “You have an exhibit at the fair?”
“That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”
“Gaia save us all.”
This time her laughter was all too genuine. “Gaia! When did we replace the word God with Earth’s own name? It’s like the humans to behave so, isn’t it? First we worship the moon and the sun and the stars, then some superhuman breed, then some abstract concept, then one of the universe’s spherical bodies again. What choice stuff!”
“You laugh at us as though we’re nothing to you.”
“But you’re everything, don’t you see? Why does your flame burn brightest, my struggling little man? Because you are what you are! I’d give a thousand of my kind for one of yours in a heartbeat.”
So now we were coming to it, finally. Our kind and their kind. She had to be an agent of Mirilus. I’d known it from the start—
You are so far off track it hurts, Arben Vanders. Literally hurts my old worn-out heart.
“Let’s go to the room,” I said. “I feel naked here, in front of God and everybody.”
“There you go,” she said, winking. “Let’s give God his diligent due.”
If I’ve said I don’t like being controlled, it’s because I indeed do not like being controlled. Yet here I was, her thing. A sad sort of footnote to what I’d thought I had accomplished in my interracial mediations. That she was Mirilus now was certain to me. But I could not resist her. I must know more about her, about inhuman species who were fascinated by the human concept. My job in mediations had been to mediate, if not to represent my kind. Sure, the military commanders, the government officials, had been present. But I had spoken for humankind. I had been allowed to take such liberties when it became apparent that the other sides responded to me. What I had not been allowed to do, what it had never occurred to me to do because of the gravity of the matter, was to explore this fascination on the part of our would-be enemies.
Thus I took the time now, as we sat about the room, drinks in hand, to attempt to get something out of my circumstances, my clear disadvantage. She was waiting for it, for whatever I had, but in the most amiable way. How small I seemed to myself, as she fielded my hasty, inane questions.
“Why such … I don’t know … slyness?” I was saying now. “Why not just come out and ask the questions? At times during the Axena negotiations I felt as though I was being not just probed, but manipulated. Conned even. And in a way that suggested they were playing me for the fool they knew assuredly I was not. It was a strange game, to say the least.”
“But that’s it, isn’t it?” she said, leaning back on her hand on the bed. “You’ve answered your own question. They wanted you to know what they were up to. Why? That’s a question you would have to ask them, but it seems to me that perhaps they were gauging you, feeling out their enemy for the way he might respond in the situation of war.”
I leaned forward in my chair, which I’d turned to face out from the desk. “And yet they seemed to know in advance how I would respond. Though, admittedly, I surprised them at times.”
“An example?”
“Well, at one point Mirilus asked me if being human meant being at war. It was an oversimplified way of looking at things, but I think that was intended too. I gave it some thought before answering. When I did the words just came of their own. My thinking process had nothing to do with them. ‘Being human,’ I said, ‘means preparing for the worst even when the best seems far more likely. Being human is hanging on to a rope that is going to break, again and again, regardless. It is in our nature to create situations, circumstances, that we must then struggle to find a way out of.’ He then asked if my words might be interpreted to say the problems we were at the table to resolve were of human making. I said, ‘Beyond any doubt. If there is no knot to untangle, then we will surely make one.’
“The table was silent for several seconds then the third party, Ogoen, spoke up. ‘I like your answer,’ he said. ‘But what it says for humankind is bleak.’ ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘We humans are the great resister of tides, be they calm or rough. It is our way of dealing with the weathers of the universe. It’s my belief that if this were not our innate attitude, we would long ago have become extinct.’ As I sat back, showing my hands, I saw Mirilus’s eyes light up, maybe for the second or third time during the exchange. He’d zeroed in on something, and that something was to do with the both of us, if you understand me.”
“Let’s say I don’t,” Ia said.
I smiled. “Don’t you?”
“You are mistaken, my child. I am not Mirilus. Mirilus once knew my kind, and I his, but that was long ago. When I had a kind.”
I swallowed the last of my—fourth?—drink. “How do I know you’re not coming at me from an angle, like he did in mediations?”
“You don’t, do you? Make me one too please. But let’s do cut it off then. If your nerves are dead, then my exhibit will be dead to you.”
Perhaps a little inebriated, I said. “I would like to have known you under other circumstances.”
“Other circumstances. That’s funny coming from a human who’s just stated that he creates his own circumstances.”
I winked at her and refreshed our drinks.
When we’d both visited the bathroom before returning to our seats, I said, with very deliberate words, “What is so fascinating about us, Ia? Why not just wipe us off the face of the universe? It is within the power of both Mirilus and Ogdoen. Maybe yourself as well, for all I know. Be done with us. Take what you want from our remnants. Our record of deeds and misdeeds. I understand we’re specimens, but we’re also dangerous specimens. Catch us off guard. Do what must be done while the doing’s doable. Otherwise you’ve a beast on your hands that literally cannot be tamed or tempered. Already, we’
ve spread ourselves across a third of the galaxy. Will you live with beings like us? But to know what we’re made of? Seems to me there’s an extensive enough record without needing the physical specimen.”
She was shaking her head, looking as befuddled as a face like hers could achieve. “Arben, that’s one of the strangest trains of thought I’ve ever listened to. A mouse doesn’t’ think like that when it’s being experimented on. A monkey doesn’t think like that. You’re putting yourself in the mind of your potential adversary. Yes, I understand generals do that in war. But with you it’s different … it’s as if you’re embarrassed to be human—”
“That’s entirely not so.”
“Wait. I’m not finished. It’s as if you’re embarrassed to be human while at the same time tempting the fates. Now’s who’s going about it slyly? Or is this the way humans protect themselves? By putting yourselves in position to fail so that you might have something to overcome? You’re beyond me, child. Little did the universe know when those protein molecules danced their dance, that this particular brand of life would be so … outstanding! Bravo, you. Do your thing!”
I chuckled. “So what is it then? You seem to know us pretty well. What is it that sets us apart?”
“It’s your energy, man! Your crazy, mystical energy!”
This time I laughed out loud. “You sound like a twentieth-century hippie.” Another lost word awakened.
“Wouldn’t happen to have some of that Earth weed on you?”
“No, ma’am. Sorry,” I said, smile still dominating. “But seriously, what about us, Ia? I don’t know what your motivations or intentions are, but I suspect you could weigh in on the subject.”
“My motivations and intentions, Arben, are to see you safe. Believe what you will, but that’s the truth. Do I do this to learn from you? To acquire something from you? Hardly. As my exhibit will show, our relationship is far more complicated than that. And yet so simple, really. But to your question.” She paused to sip her drink. To watch me as she found her words. “You did very well in explaining it yourself in your mediations. For me, I would put it like this: As we evolve as species, we lose certain things, among them our individuality. For humans, it is no different, except that the process is slower, there are greater hurdles to climb. I know the reason why but cannot articulate it to you in words, or even in thought. What I can communicate to you, is that you were, as a species, born in a less natural way. In a faster, more chaotic way. If you took those protein molecules I was talking about, added to them some natural order, some Darwinian spices, and then shook the whole bit up in a shaker, you’d come up with something that just might, if the stars were aligned right, survive one era of history on a world like Earth. But if there were one other small ingredient, a gift say, from someone who loved you, you might have enough to get through it. Through the great changes that swept your world. You were given such a gift, Arben Vanders, by someone who dearly wanted his experiment to succeed. Who—”