A Voice in the Night

by Jack McDevitt

  “Here, here,” he said.

  She smiled at him across the rim of her glass. “You’re wondering why I came to Fort Moxie to teach.”

  “Yes. I am curious. If you don’t mind.”

  “No.” Nonetheless, she seemed hesitant. “Not at all. The Jefferson school gives me a lot of freedom to do what I want. I like to read to the kids, and I like to be able to choose what I read.”

  “You couldn’t do that in Fargo?”

  “Within limits.” A shadow, a momentary regret, passed over her face. She had left something behind.

  She asked questions about his life, about the history of the tiny border town, and about his interest in Dickens. How had that happened? Something in her features suggested that his game lay exposed. That she knew, and that she thought no less of him for it. She seemed, in fact, amused.

  The evening flowed. They ordered T-bones and a second round of chablis. Candles glittered in her eyes and in the wine. She had fine white teeth, and the shifting light created shadows at her jawline and at the base of her throat.

  “I grew up in Bismarck,” she said.

  “How did you get to Fargo?”

  “I wanted to change my zip code.” She sounded quite serious.

  “Get away from the family?”

  “That too.”

  Outside, it was almost dark. The plains rolled undisturbed to the horizon. There were a few other patrons in the Depot, scattered among its wooden tables, whispering in the flickering light. Everyone used hushed tones here.

  “How do you like Fort Moxie so far?”

  “It’s very nice,” she said. “Not many distractions.” And her gaze bent inward. “It almost forces you to ask yourself what really counts.”

  He buttered a role, tried his coffee. “And what does really count?”

  Her eyes met his. “Aside from my students? I don’t know. I’m still working on that.” A smile played at the corners of her lips. “I know what doesn’t. Piling up credit hours. Or worrying about the future. Or giving way to regrets.” Her fingers curved exquisitely around the glass.

  Arnold watched her through the flickering light. “What counts to me,” he said, gallantly, “is an evening like this.” Breathless with his newfound courage, he reached across and covered her hand with his own. It was the first time he had felt her flesh against his. His internal tides rolled. “In the end, it’s all that matters.”

  Their eyes locked, and Arnold realized that, no matter how things fell out, his life would never be the same.

  But the Traveler lay ahead. His incorporeal rival. How impressed would she be with Arnold when she met him?

  “Do you run?” he asked.

  “Only when I’m being chased.”

  She laughed, sliced a strip off her steak, and slid it between her lips. “But you do, of course?”

  “Yes. There’s a jogging path through the wind screen. It goes past the river. On a night like this, it’s lovely.” And a little unusual.

  Her eyes filled with amusement. “You want to walk out there? Is that what you’re suggesting?”

  He could not escape the Traveler. If it was indeed interested in Linda, best confront it now. “You would enjoy it,” he said.

  She reached across the table and covered his hand with her own.

  A brisk wind blew off the river. The treetops masked a three-quarter moon. He was supremely conscious of Linda’s physical presence as they walked.

  The night was bright and clear, a magnificent evening to stroll with a beautiful woman at the edge of the Red River. But the Traveler was nearby. He felt its presence. When it speaks, it could not help but frighten her. And, whatever else happens, she will eventually learn that Arnold was part of the plot. What was he doing up here anyway?

  He glanced over at her.

  “An evening full of starlight,” she said. “This was a good idea.”

  The wind moved.

  “Maybe we should get back to the car,” he said.

  “Are you cold?”

  The river gurgled, and something nearby splashed. Beyond the trees, toward town, a dog barked. Music from a distant stereo penetrated the stillness. “No,” he said. And could think of nothing to explain his remark.

  He felt the wind creature advance through the night, felt the wind rise, watched the moon dance on the river. Linda walked beside him, warm and luminous. Her hips brushed his, her fingers clung to his hand. “It is so dark out here,” she said, letting go and opening her arms to the night. She turned to face him. Her lips were wet in the moonlight, and she caught him in that emerald gaze.

  Years from now, when the Traveler would be gone, Arnold wanted desperately that there would be someone with whom he could remember the passion of this night. And maybe the loss.

  She was in his arms. Her acquiescence, the pliability of her shoulders, electrified him. And she kissed him. Hit and run: he felt the brief press of her lips, and she was gone before he knew it had happened.

  “You’re probably right, Arnold. Why don’t we call it a night?”

  He nodded.

  The moonlight changed. Darkened.

  The trees stirred.

  “Here he is,” he said.

  Linda looked curiously at him. “Here who is?” She looked around, shrugged, and delivered a mischievous smile, suggesting that she knew her kiss had been dynamite, and that if he was a little unsettled by it, she understood.

  “The Traveler. He’s here.”

  “Arnold, you’re scaring me.”

  The trees grew still. “Just kidding,” he said. “Maybe we should start back.”

  He took the lead. Pebbles crunched underfoot, and he made small talk, how he had been jogging here for years, how good the fishing used to be.

  But the darkness along the edge of the river was complete. And in his haste, he lost his footing, got tangled in something. He never saw what it was, a bramble, a rock, a root. But he went sprawling, and heard a sharp crack like breaking wood. A stab of pure agony raced up one leg.

  Linda was beside him immediately. “Lie still,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Ankle.” He was mortified. And frightened.

  Carefully, she untied his shoe and took it off. It hurt. “I think it’s broken.” She made a sympathetic sound and smiled down at him. “I’ll need the car keys.”

  “Why?”

  She was removing her jacket, placing it over him. “So we can get you out of here. I’m going to need some help.”

  He fished in his pocket, held them up for her. “That was dumb,” he said.

  She took them, bent over, raised his head, and kissed him. This time, she went long and deep, her hair brushed his cheek, and her hand grasped the nape of his neck. “Stay put, Scout,” she said, with a wink. “I’ll be back as quick as I can”

  “Wait,” he said.

  But she was gone. And the wind sighed in the trees.

  He made one effort to get up, thought better of it, and lay back. Damn.

  “Arnold.”

  He closed his eyes. “Hello, Traveler.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “I had no idea you were so clumsy.”

  “This is your fault.”

  “Possibly.”

  “My ankle’s broken, damn it.”

  “You sound annoyed.”

  “You’d sound annoyed too. I got her up here and where were you?”

  “Arnold, I’m fond of you.” The voice came out of the trees and off the river. It was softening. Changing. “You earned your wings tonight.”

  “Earned my wings? Where did you hear that?”

  “Down at the Air Force base. In Grand Forks.” The trees sighed. “I’ll miss you.”

  Arnold propped himself on his elbows. “You’re not leaving, are you?”

  “Yes. Time to go.”

  “Have they come for you? Your friends?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then why are you leaving?”

&
nbsp; “Because I am becoming too attached to you.”

  Arnold heard a car start. And drive off. “To me? I thought you were interested in Linda.”

  “We both know she’ll need a good man, Arnold.” The voice seemed very close.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever have a chance with her.”

  “Keep talking like that and you won’t.” The canopy swayed and creaked. Something flew past, squawking. “I’ve enjoyed our time together.”

  “When are you leaving?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Don’t.” Arnold thought how empty the wind screen would be without its eerie inhabitant. “Stay a while longer. There’s no hurry.”

  It rubbed against the bushes. And the river. “It’s not as if you’re going to be able to come back up here for a while.”

  Arnold glanced down at his ankle. “Where will you go?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.”

  It fell silent. Air currents flowed, grew cooler. It withdrew from him. Something long, and lithe, rose into the night. The moon, visible through a break in the trees, seemed to lose some of its clarity. It was as if a mist drifted in front of it. The mist drifted out over the river. It was graceful and sinuous, and, as Arnold watched, it rose into a living fountain. It swirled away across the dark water and reformed on the opposite shore.

  “Traveler,” he called. “Don’t leave.” He tried to get up, but the pain in his ankle pierced him again and he cried out. The lights eddied around him, and closed in an ethereal embrace. In that moment, on the shoreline, among the narrow screen of box elders and bushes, its sweet warm breath played over him, and it clung to him.

  She clung to him. Arnold assigned it a new gender.

  “I will not forget you,” he said.

  “Nor I you.”

  “Will you come back?”

  The wind moved around him. “It’s unlikely, Arnold.”

  “Ships in the night.”

  “Please explain.”

  “Linda could probably handle it better. People who meet, become emotionally entangled, and pass on. Nothing happens.”

  “I would like to think we have done better.”

  Cars were coming. Brakes screeched and doors slammed. He heard a siren.

  “Traveler—”

  “Yes?”

  “Thanks.”

  “You, too.” The air pressure began to lessen. “One other thing you should know. You succeeded with Linda on your own. I did not intervene.” He felt her withdraw, felt the warm currents turn cool. Felt the pain return to his ankle.

  “Traveler?” He did not know whether she could hear him any longer. “I love you.”

  The trees swayed. Along the path, he could see the lights of the rescue party.

  By the end of the week, a wind chime had appeared outside Arnold’s bedroom window. It was a magnificent wind chime, whose flight of pewter eagles collided musically with each other and with an ivy-encrusted pewter arch. Late-evening strollers along Bannister Avenue often paused to listen to the exquisite notes blown across the rooftops.

  Years later, when Arnold and Linda and their family moved from Fort Moxie to open a hardware discount house in Fargo, he took the wind chime with him.

  THE PEGASUS PROJECT

  I was sitting on the porch of the End Times Hotel with Abe Willis when the message from Harlow came in: Ronda, we might have aliens. Seriously. We picked up a radio transmission yesterday from the Sigmund Cluster. It tracks to ISKR221/722. A yellow dwarf, 7,000 light-years out. We haven’t been able to break it down, but it’s clearly artificial. You’re closer to the Cluster than anybody else by a considerable distance. Please take a look. If it turns out to be what we’re hoping, try not to let them know you’re there. Good luck. And by the way, keep this to yourself.

  “What is it?” asked Abe.

  “Aliens.”

  He laughed. “Okay. I understand you don’t want to tell me.” The black hole was setting behind the mountains. “People are going to love this place. How long can you give me?”

  We were munching pizza. The sun was on the other side of the sky, floating serenely above the ocean. “Eleven years,” I said.

  Abe was one of those guys who never got a response he liked. Eleven years had to be better than anything he’d expected. Nevertheless he scratched his cheek and looked into his beer as if I’d surprised him with news that would shut down his project. “Last week you were saying fifteen.”

  “Last week I was saying how much time you’d have before this place gets swallowed. But you don’t want to be here during the last few years. There’ll be quakes and incoming rocks and God knows what else. You should be safe for eleven. If you want to argue with me, I can cut it back to ten.”

  “No. Please, Ronda. I wasn’t trying to create a problem.”

  “We don’t want anybody getting killed, Abe. I can’t certify you beyond that point.”

  “Of course. I understand.” He showed me a sad smile. Poor guy never got a break. “We can live with it.” Somehow the limits imposed by the black hole had become my fault.

  I stared at him. “When are you going to install the other hotels?”

  “By Friday. Reservation requests are already an avalanche.” He gives me another smile and suddenly we were living in a happy world again. Abe was a planner for Interstellar Odysseys, which provided deep space vacations for people who were seriously interested in getting away from routine visits to sea shores, gambling casinos, and planetary ring systems. The planet, which had been named Harmony by someone with a serious sense of humor, had vast mountain ranges, wide sweeping plains, and broad oceans. It looked beautiful. “I wish,” Abe continued, “that the sun wasn’t going to come apart so quickly. I’m glad we’ll get to see it, but it would have been helpful if we’d been able to keep the cheerful skies a bit longer.”

  The K-class sun had three years left.

  The black hole was KR-61, the only one within reasonable range that was currently doing some damage.

  I’d been assigned to certify the project as safe. That had meant spending several weeks in the area, measuring orbits and trajectories of thousands of objects to determine whether a vacation site on Harmony would be in any immediate danger. The fact that the planet itself was doomed, Abe had explained, increased the interest. They’d already begun the commercial pitch. ‘Everybody wants to come to Harmony.’

  We finished the pizza and the beer, signed the documents, and shook hands. “Thanks, Ronda,” he said. “Have a pleasant trip home. And say hello to Aiko for me.” Aiko was my pilot. “If you’d like to come back for a few days, we’d love to have you. No charge. Just give me a call.”

  I told him I wasn’t much of a black hole person, and retreated to the launch area. Aiko was waiting beside the lander. “You read the message?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “We going to follow up?”

  I climbed inside. “He doesn’t give us much choice.”

  “It’s a waste of time.” Aiko got in behind me. She was only on her second mission but no one would ever accuse her of being reticent. Technically, on board, she was in charge, and her tone tended to change as she closed the hatch. “There’s nothing out there.” She was attractive, with black hair, blue eyes and animated features, with better things to do than charge around the galaxy on bogus missions.

  “Hello, Ronda,” said Bryan. He was our ship’s AI.

  “Hi, Bryan. How you doing?”

  “To be honest, I’ll be happy to get away from here. I don’t like black holes.”

  “I assume,” said Aiko, “that Abe’s happy with the results.”

  “He’s fine. He’s complaining, but it couldn’t have worked out better.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Having the catastrophe more or less imminent increases the sales value. If the end of the world is too far away, people lose interest. He’s pretending to be unhappy that he didn’t have more time, but actually he’s fine with it.”

  T
he overhead opened. Aiko sat down in the cockpit and we lifted off. A light breeze was blowing in across the ocean. Take the black hole out of the equation and add some native life and some engineering and Harmony could be converted into a garden world.

  We rose through a clear sky. Below, the dome enclosing the hotel gleamed in the sunlight. The other units would be installed in the same general area, one on a mountaintop, the other on the edge of the ocean.

  I waited for Aiko to turn things over to Bryan and come back into the cabin. When she did, she sat down across from me and smiled. She knew exactly what I was thinking. “We’ll need about six weeks to get there,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  She leaned forward and sighed. “Does this kind of thing happen regularly, Ronda?”

  I laughed. “Aliens? Sure. Every few thousand years.”

  “I’m serious. Is this normal? To get sent out on an idiot mission?”

  Everybody knew there were no aliens. “It happens sometimes,” I said.

  “Harlow said it was a radio transmission.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So if they’ve got the source right, the signal was sent seven thousand years ago.” The smile widened. “I hope they’re not still waiting for us to show up.”

  We were on our way minutes after we got back to the Brinkmann. Aiko was as happy as I was to get clear of Harmony. It was a beautiful world, but it looked a lot like Marikim, except, of course, that there was no life, other than Abe and his crew. And sometimes I wondered about them. Despite the sterility, neither of us liked to think about its being sucked into the black hole. I’ll never understand why anyone would pay to go see that.

  Aiko decided it was time to change the subject. “You know, I’ve never understood why we’re so hung up on looking for aliens. We’ve been at it now for what? About fifteen thousand years? They just ain’t out there, baby.”

  No, they weren’t. We’d been through this experience before, the artificial transmission that turned out to have originated in a long forgotten space station somewhere or a local signal that had simply been bouncing around. There’d been a couple for which there’d been no explanation, but which had never repeated. Missions sent to track them down had found nothing. “I guess we don’t like being alone,” I said. “It can be depressing.”