Annie looked back. The army soldiers had all stopped moving. Dougie was shouting something at her, but she couldn’t understand what he was saying. It didn’t matter, anyway. There was only one direction to go.
She walked toward the light, and climbed inside the spaceship.
22
Annie’s Idea of Aliens
The best way to describe what happened—upon the discovery that Annie had run off—was coordinated panic.
Sam had to be restrained, which was a challenge as there was nobody there physically capable of really restraining him. Ed estimated a half an hour passed from when Annie left the kitchen to when he discovered her absence, which was easily enough time to collect her bike, loop around the camper, and pedal down the road to a point beyond where it was safe to be without an adequate zombie defense, such as a large RV. Sam wanted to chase her down on foot, if need be.
Meanwhile, Dobbs had a million questions for Violet, but he was asking them so rapidly she didn’t have time to answer, and didn’t appear to have much of an inclination to either. She was too busy blaming herself for Annie having run off, which in Ed’s opinion was probably a bit justified. Oona, who was struggling with the question of whether or not shooting Violet constituted an intelligent choice, may have also been a distraction.
They were a team of capable individuals, one of whom was an apparently immortal alien being wearing the body of a young girl. They needed to decide what the matter at hand was, and come up with a plan to fix it.
“Violet,” Ed said, “can the technology keeping this house invisible travel?”
She looked at him without speaking, as she ran through the implications of the question. In their conversation, he’d become used to the sense of wrongness she gave off when not actively trying to behave like a sixteen year old. There was maturity in there that was not unlike the sort of imitative adultness Annie exhibited, except in Violet it was more extreme, and decidedly unnatural. It was what Ed felt meeting a vampire would be like.
Provided vampires were real, of course.
“It can,” she said. “But it also can’t. The act of travel would make it visible, like a bubble in water. We would be detected by the absence we would create.”
“My GPS puts me in another spot,” Dobbs said, “so why wouldn’t that keep working if we move?”
“The reason it works is this place hasn’t existed in any physical or electronic survey of the land since the country was born. You’d have driven past if Ed wasn’t navigating, and Ed would never have found it if Annie hadn’t showed him. But everything south of us has existed for some time.” She looked at Ed. “He would notice.”
“He who?” Oona asked. She was going between helping Laura keep Sam from bolting down the road and fingering the handle of a revolver tucked into her waistband.
“We can explain later,” Ed said. “Violet, what happens if a zombie wanders down the road?”
“Nothing, because that’s impossible.”
“Fine, pretend it isn’t impossible, what would happen?”
“The commands from the host would stop making sense. It would be similar to receiving driving directions from a GPS that thought you were in a different place, only a zombie wouldn’t have the presence of mind to recognize incorrect instructions. But it would only be temporary. The host would recognize the anomaly and we’d be detected.”
“Good enough. Dobbs, if we get near the ship, can you pick the signal up again?”
“I dunno, probably. I think their equipment can. Oona would know… it’s her stuff.”
“We can do it, but why?” she asked.
“Later. Violet? If it’s mobile, we need it. Oona, Laura does this thing have enough gas left to get us across town?”
“Yeah, barely,” Oona said.
Laura pointed to Violet’s family car. “We can drain that tank, maybe. It’s not a diesel rig.”
“Good idea.”
“So we’re going to get Annie now?” Sam asked.
“We’re going to the ship,” Ed said. “That’s where she’s going.”
“Why they hell would she be going there?”
“There’s no place else to go.”
“And if she’s not there?”
“One thing at a time, Sam.”
* * *
The light faded to a soft blue that was just sufficient to allow Annie to differentiate between when her eyes were open and when they were closed. It came from no particular location and illuminated no details on the ship’s interior. There was something that could be construed as a video screen in front of her, except it wasn’t made of glass and had a depth to it that was absent in a standard television set. That she even thought of it as a screen suggested this information was coming from a font of experience that didn’t belong to her.
It felt a little like being on the inside of a chicken egg. And, like a chicken egg, it was fully enclosed.
“Hello?” Her voice came back with a metallic echo. “I’m going to need air.”
There was nothing in the way of a response… and then there was.
Images: vibrant, colorful, frightening images of collapsing stars and nebulae and black hole event horizons. There was light viewed from the perspective of a point in space, and a point in space from the perspective of a beam of light; a thing that looked like an amoeba pulsing in a sea of heavy gas; a hailstorm of aluminum riddling a carbon-dense planet; a civilization of squat humanoids developing tools on a huge planet with tremendous gravitational force; another civilization of light-limbed hermaphrodites dying in a conflagration on a planet that had previously never known fire.
“I don’t understand any of this,” Annie said.
A centipede-like creature the size of a commuter train roared expletives from a circular mouth full of needle-sharp teeth, at an airborne slug with gossamer wings. Annie could smell the ammonia-rich air and feel the rage of the giant centipede, and understand its anger. But she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with this understanding.
“Air. I’m going to suffocate.”
She was already running out, but whoever was operating this picture show couldn’t understand what she was saying. So instead, she started thinking about suffocation.
The centipede and the airborne slug began to choke, and then the picture changed to the humanoids on the gravitationally intense planet grabbing their throat areas and gasping. Then a human man appeared. He was a white human with light brown hair and a shiny white smile, in a blue polo shirt. The most generic rendition of the species imaginable—provided television was the source—this man appeared to have emerged directly from a toothpaste commercial, as perhaps he had.
Annie hoped he was a construct and not a real person who existed out in the world somewhere, because as she focused on him, he began to choke as well. He gasped and pawed at the generic room he stood inside of, clutching the back of the generic chair and stumbling over a generic cat to the generic floor. He twitched and screamed silently, and continued to do so until he stopped breathing.
“This shell… requires.”
The voice came from all around her, in the same way the faint blue light did. It wasn’t so much that there was no specific source; it was that whatever the source was, she was on the inside of it.
“Air,” she said.
“This shell requires atmosphere.”
“Yes.”
A new hiss sounded, an indication of a valve or pipe opening or unlatching or releasing, and then she could breathe again.
“Intake atmosphere exhaust waste.”
“Thank you, yes.”
Annie realized she’d arrived at this point with a certain number of preset expectations about this experience. The first was that there would be a presence in the spaceship, and the second was that this presence was Violet’s father. (Or, more exactly, “father”.) Given all she’d been told regarding how terrifying he was supposed to be, that she was not at that moment afraid meant either she had become very brave recen
tly, or she was just too exhausted to be frightened.
Another assumption was that the alien she would be speaking to would have a deep, ominous-sounding voice. That expectation was colored by the movies, which were no doubt themselves influenced by humankind’s historic depiction of both authority figures in general and deities more specifically. Zeus on high, making sonorous declarations to cowering mortals at the foot of Mount Olympus, was always expected to speak in a voice as deep as thunder, and so on.
The voice she heard inside the ship was a man’s voice, certainly, but it wasn’t the kind of voice that commanded awe. It was the kind that was trying to sell her something. It was what she would expect the suffocated white man from the toothpaste commercial to sound like if he’d managed to get a word out.
At least he has a voice now, she thought.
The picture show was interesting, except that it wasn’t really a picture show so much as an immersive experience. The longer it went on the more her other senses kicked in and she began experiencing what was happening instead of looking at it through a camera lens. These were memories, and they were being added to her mind. It was a peculiar way to communicate. It was faster, perhaps, than words, but had none of the nuance.
“You are not her,” the alien said, in his peppy sales voice. If it weren’t quite so life-or-death, she might find it funny. But if you buy this detergent you can be her.
“I am her,” she said. “I am the one you were looking for.”
“You are the one and you are not her. She is of you, you are not her.”
“What’s the difference?”
“You have… her smell.”
“Her smell? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Your words are so small. Her scent is in your mind.”
“You can read my mind?”
“I can taste your… yes. Your ideas. I can taste your ideas.”
“I understand. She is not me, but the idea of her is a part of me.”
“Yes.”
She was trying to pinpoint a source of the voice, so she knew which direction to face when talking.
“How are you speaking? Like, do you have a mouth?”
“I do not eat.”
“Mouths in humans are also for speaking. If you have a visual… I mean if you can see me, look, my mouth is moving.”
There was a terrible moment, just after she said this, when the thought came that perhaps her mouth wasn’t moving at all. She could feel it moving, but this was uncharted experiential territory, and she couldn’t discount the notion that everything happening to her was internal. She could be projecting a version of herself in her own mind that was speaking and looking, just like the way she thought she could smell the atmospheric ammonia of an alien landscape. Her senses weren’t necessarily trustworthy.
“I see, yes,” the alien said. “The sound of my voice is rendered from the archives collected in this… outpost. Mouth is an inefficient speech requirement. I would not mimic an inefficiency.”
“But so, you can’t read my mind. I’m really here, in the ship, talking out loud right now, and this isn’t just happening in my head.”
“Your ideas leak into this ship, but thoughts are… thoughts are… The words are crude. Thoughts are pieces. Fragments of unconnected… What is this?”
The picture show kicked in again. The alien had plucked an image of a cloth hanging from Annie’s own memory.
“That’s a tapestry. It’s from a medieval castle. I saw it when I was eight, when we went on a field trip to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.”
She remembered liking the tapestry for reasons she still couldn’t explain. She spent a half an hour looking closely at it, until Mrs. Parris dragged her away.
The image zoomed in on a corner of the tapestry that was eye-level to an eight year old. It was a frayed edge. The indirect lighting of the room reflected off the glass case protecting the ancient cloth.
“These parts.”
“Threads. Those are threads.”
“Thoughts are this.”
The image jumped back to the full picture. It showed men on horseback in a tournament in the foreground with a castle in the background. Annie remembered liking the horses in particular.
“Ideas are this. Ideas are full things, contained. Endless but bounded, as a sphere. Ideas can be. Thoughts cannot. Even simple thoughts in a crude mind are threads.”
“So, no, then.”
“I cannot read your mind. I can exist in your mind but not read it. Only you can know your own mind.”
“But you can exist in my mind,” she repeated. “As an idea. I don’t like how that sounds.”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“Maybe to you.”
“I can exist as an idea in your mind, but not in my entirety, no more than this device in which you sit holds my entirety. I can be shared, and I can exist independently elsewhere. I am endless but bounded. Now you will tell me now where the one I seek is.”
“I don’t know. Who are you looking for?”
“You are attempting evasion. You have her scent.”
He began pulling images from her mind and displaying them, as if to show exactly how easy it was.
“She travels,” he observed. “Tell me where.”
“Please stop pulling those images out of my head.”
“You are a crude life form, you should accept your limitations.”
“Well it’s rude.”
The images continued to play, possibly more so Annie could understand how much the alien was extracting of her idea of Violet. He wasn’t showing her anything she didn’t already know, certainly.
“I have examined the records and cannot find this place,” he said. “It is on no maps.”
Annie laughed.
“Yes, it’s a funny little place.”
“She travels with strange beings… I do not understand. You.”
“Annie. People call me Annie.”
“Annie, I will call you. You will help me find her.”
“I don’t really think I have any incentive to do that.”
“I do not understand.”
“Sure you do. She’s my friend, and I don’t think she wants to go anywhere with you, so I don’t know why I would lead you to her.”
“This warship can eliminate the planet if I choose.”
“Well, that’s a good incentive. Can it really?”
A series of images flooded her mind. It was a much more aggressive sharing of information than before, possibly because she was seeing into the idea of another idea. It was something like a schematic of the spacecraft, but despite using scientific principles nobody on the planet had ever been exposed to, she felt like she understood. This either meant the alien was getting better at communicating with her, or she was getting better at receiving this style of communication. When it was finished, she understood the ship’s workings alarmingly well, as if the schematics had been saved off in her head. It made her want to ask the alien if he could also put Spanish in there so she didn’t have to take it next year.
“Well, you definitely can destroy the planet with this,” she said.
“You understand.”
“Sure. But if you do that… I mean, wouldn’t she die with it?”
“Ideas can never die.”
“Fine. Weird, but fine.”
“You will tell me how to find her.”
“Okay, but I have some questions for you first.”
There was a long pause. She imagined him in another part of the spaceship (although it had no other parts) pacing furiously and cursing her in some alien language.
“I will answer questions.”
“Great!”
“And when I am done answering questions, you will tell me where the place called Oz is located, and why my daughter wishes to see this man named wizard.”
“I promise.”
* * *
It was another hour after the failed bombing of Sorrow Falls before someone developed suffici
ent nerve to raise the nuclear question.
This followed a great deal of analysis of the kind that only happens in emergencies: quick, contingent, back-of-envelope calculations made by very smart people in many rooms around the world. These were the same scientists charged by their governments and the science community at large with understanding the spaceship as well as they could with whatever tools they had. There were solid reasons to think these men and women would have, if not complete answers, some agreement on approximate answers.
What was apparent to anyone who listened to them argue for more than a few minutes was that this wasn’t the case, and likely never would be. In three years, this team had measured everything they could, but the ship was so good at keeping its secrets they were as surprised as anyone by its capabilities.
As an example, everyone knew perfectly well what happened if one attempted an open assault of the ship. Small objects like rocks were repelled gently. Small rapid objects, like bullets, were vaporized, and their kinetic energy absorbed via some unexplained physics.
(Vaporized was not a truly accurate observation, as the bullets weren’t turned into vapor. Nor did they cease to exist, nor were they converted into energy—this would release a truly enormous amount of energy if they had been—or any of the other descriptions readily available to anyone with Internet access and about thirty seconds. What happened was that the protective barrier around the ship absorbed the impact of the bullet and then turned the small projectile into several million extremely small projectiles. The metallic dust remnants of the first bullets fired at the ship remained in the field three years after the Sorrow Falls sheriff fired them.)
Larger objects were dealt with in a range of ways that were similar only in that they each seemed to represent the least complicated solution. Flying drones had their altimeters confused and ground-based robots lost their understanding of left-right and back-forth. People lost the will to continue.
What had not been tried was a more overt assault.
The Spaceship Next Door Page 32