A Star Above It and Other Stories

by Chad Oliver

  At the moment, he was getting annoyance.

  The cat, who had modified its habits to the extent that it slept on its belly with its eyes slitted open, eased to its feet and flowed away on silent paws.

  “Something wrong?” Paul asked her. “You understand that you’re free to leave just as you came? You understand that I’d never put you in a zoo or anything? You’re not worried about a lab, are you? Some kind of experiment? Hey, I’m on your side.”

  He thought, but was somehow ashamed to say: This is me, Old Four-Eyes. I’m not a monster. If you thought I was, what are you doing here?

  She did not get any of that. She could not read his mind.

  She just looked at him with hurt eyes. She looked through him. The claws on her somewhat humanoid hands dug into the linoleum.

  Paul had noticed those claws before. Put nails on those fingers instead, and you were maybe looking at a primate. Did that matter?

  Whatever she was, she would get the job done.

  “Are we friends or aren’t we?” Paul asked.

  She stared at him doubtfully.

  Paul Shudde moved to his desk, which was in one cleared comer of the cabin’s cluttered main room. He sat down at the worn straight-backed chair where he had always done his best thinking. He took the cover off his typewriter. He did not intend to write anything yet, but it was a part of the ritual. He stuck his pipe in his mouth but did not light it. She hated tobacco smoke.

  He reflected that it was not unusual for him to have trouble with females in this house. Ladies had moved in with him from time to time, but it had never lasted. As several of them had informed him with some asperity, Paul Shudde was a man destined to live alone.

  “No secrets, okay?” Paul said. “I’ll tell you exactly how all of this looks to me.”

  She waited.

  Paul held nothing back.

  For one thing, he told her, it was very funny. He started to say as funny as hell, but he decided that using such phrases might lead them into murky water indeed.

  Imagine! While the eager Americans spent lifetimes searching for the mythical Bigfoot in Asia, and good old Nessie in the Loch Ness of Scotland, and dinosaurs in the swamps of central Africa, they couldn’t even recognize what was in their own backyard.

  A completely unknown species.

  Oh, her kind must have been seen countless times. She could not be completely alone; there had to be enough of them to form a breeding population. But seeing is one thing. Identifying is another.

  Almost always, when she did not succeed in blending into invisibility, she would have been taken for something else. Something common, something familiar. Nothing out of the ordinary. A raccoon, a rabbit, a squirrel, a fox, a dog, a rat …

  And if someone did grasp that she was different, who would pay any attention? There never was a hunter without yarns to spin, and most of them were about unusual animals. The stories were received as tall tales; hunters were notorious liars, just like fishermen.

  There never was a child whose imagination did not kick into high gear once in a while. Who took children seriously? That was part of what it meant to be a child: you did not have to stick to the literal truth.

  Sure, there were birdwatchers and butterfly collectors and wildflower counters, but even near a large university how many people kept tabs on rabbits and squirrels—when they weren’t rabbits or squirrels?

  Her bones must have turned up now and again. Her kind was not young, Paul was certain of that. But small mammal bones were a dime a dozen. If there were no artifacts with them, or something distinctly unusual, even paleontologists would not look at them twice. They would be filed under that old standby, Miscellaneous. Paul would have wagered a tidy sum that her skeleton was as nondescript as the rest of her appeared to be. It was obvious to him that her brain was remarkable for its structure, not its size. Paul had once been involved in an ill-fated affair with a book club. He remembered it well: one handsome volume free, then two a month at one hundred dollars each for a thousand years …

  He had received a two-volume set on mammals of the world. He had thumbed through it casually. Now, he studied it at some length.

  It was his opinion that even the experts would have disagreed about what she was. A mammal, yes. But then what? Where did she belong?

  Insectivora? She ate bugs like candy.

  Carnivora? She was not averse to meat, either.

  Lagomorpha? Who could miss those rabbit ears?

  Rodentia? She had a lot in common with a squirrel.

  She was much more special than she looked, and that was a part of the puzzle. Her uniqueness was not apparent at a glance. Even after days in her company, Paul could not spell it all out.

  She couldn’t transmit polychrome pictures into a man’s mind with a twitch of her whiskers. She could not use her long ears to communicate in sign language. She wasn’t an alien from the stars, complete with a magic satchel containing cancer cures and recipes for world peace.

  She was home folks.

  “We need each other,” Paul finished. “I can give you a home where you won’t have to worry. You can give me my home. I know something about publicity. Friend, there’s even a book in this! When they find out what you are, and where you are, they won’t be able to touch this house with an order from the Supreme Court!”

  She did not look impressed.

  “Come on!” Paul said. He was getting a little impatient. “I tell you, it’s even better that you look kind of ordinary. No offense. If we do this right, people will fall in love with you. They’ll send you money. You’ll become a symbol of all the lost things, all the helpless creatures shoved aside by progress. You and I, we’ll be Big!”

  She closed her luminous brown eyes. It was as though she could not stand to look at him any longer.

  Paul Shudde took off his glasses and wiped them on the same handkerchief he had used in the PAZBO hearing room. He was disgusted. Maybe he was giving her credit for being more than she was.

  Maybe he wanted so badly for all of it to be true that he was just kidding himself.

  There had been more than a little disappointment in Paul Shudde’s life.

  “Maybe,” he said out loud, “you’re just another damned animal.”

  The words hung in the still air.

  Another.

  Damned.

  Animal.

  Why did the words seem to mock him?

  Was he blind?

  She padded across the breezeway, her claws clicking a little against the concrete. He made no attempt to hold her in his house.

  There were times when Old Four-Eyes seemed stupid. Not cruel. Not evil. Not tainted like so many of them.

  Just stupid.

  Her kind had to know the Enemy. It was essential to their survival. As they all did, she had put in a great deal of time and effort in observing and studying human beings. You cannot hide effectively if you do not know who the hunter is.

  She knew manthings rather well, both in general and in particular. She knew Paul Shudde, up to a point.

  That was what made communication between them possible, such as it was.

  With her own kind, blending between them was close enough so that they could predict what each one was thinking, or would think in a particular situation. It was not so much direct contact between several minds as it was different minds working in exactly the same way. There was no need for words, and she was incapable of vocal speech. She was not put together that way. The blending was not perfect, but she was aware that no communication system was ever perfect.

  When she interacted with a human being like Old Four-Eyes, she had to use another technique. She could utilize her blending talents slightly to nudge impressions here and there, but basically she had to show Paul Shudde what she wanted him to see. Their minds were not similar enough for deeper meshing. But most of the words he used were no mystery to her, whether she could speak them or not. Knowing languages was a part of knowing the Enemy. Her kind had done a lot o
f listening. Words had been around for a long, long time. The languages of the manthings were not as different from one another as they fondly believed; there was an underlying structure that was built into the species.

  In any case, she did not have to understand all human languages. Just most of the words of Paul Shudde.

  Knowing what she did, it was difficult for her to see why Old Four-Eyes was being so obtuse.

  Did he not understand that publicity would kill her as surely as a bullet? It would take a tougher manthing than Paul Shudde to keep out the reporters, the photographers, the scientists. She knew what tourists were, too. If she survived, which she wouldn’t, she would be a freak. Her child might as well be stillborn.

  There was more. She was not quite the last of her kind. There were others, and some of them were fairly near. The only protection they had, fragile as it was, was that the Enemy did not know they existed.

  It would be the end. They would be hunted down, one by one, until there was nothing left. Hunted down not just by the casual killers, the rare-trophy shooters, but by all the nature lovers, all the idle curiosity seekers, all the questers after knowledge …

  She herself would have no chance at all.

  Ah, would they try to mate her in a cage if they brought one of the others in alive? Would they wire her up and take notes? Would they do research?

  Would they slice her up, oh so painlessly, in a sterile white anatomy lab? Or would they perhaps catch enough to establish a hopeless colony with electric fencing? They could introduce all kinds of wonderful diseases. They would have only the purest of motives—for themselves.

  She could end her life as part of an experiment.

  Her velvet ears quivered uncontrollably. She curled up in a fluffy shaking ball against the warm earth outside the garage. She tried to wrap herself in her white-pointed tail, to disappear.

  She knew that she was nearly invisible. A human being could almost have stepped on her without seeing her. That talent was still strong. They had it even in death. Their lifeless bodies were usually ignored along with the rest of the trash.

  It wasn’t good enough. Not any longer.

  If they came after her kind, knowing that they were there, they would find them. They would know exactly what they looked like. They would know something about their habits.

  The best way to hide, and the only way to do it over a very long period of time, was to have no one looking for you. Even infants knew that.

  She smelled Paul Shudde’s pickup truck in the garage. It did not bother her as much as before. She was getting to where she could endure the scent of dirty grease and oil.

  But the truck was a machine, and it was mind-linked to Old Four-Eyes. The truck sharpened her awareness of memories she would have preferred to suppress. Her kind was not lacking in humor, but they seldom thought in terms of jokes. One running amusement that they had, a theme that recurred in their legends, was the idea of the Enemy so preoccupied with his machines that he was devoid of common sense. The standard story was the one about a manthing confronted by an elementary task such as catching a fish. Instead of doing it directly, he would invent a massively complex technology to do the job. He would develop fiberglass and graphite industries to make his rods, reels that were marvels of engineering, lines that were strong enough to snare elephants, lures that were baffling in their ingenuity. Or he would invent fleets of boats, nets that could stop whales, canning factories to preserve the fish, highway networks to distribute the fish….

  Her kind had not been successful with technology. They had experimented with it once, long ago, and they had failed. Ever since that time, they had been contemptuous of machines. They had their own ways. Size up the pattern, see the interconnections, make the right move at the right time. Simplify, simplify—

  She had believed that it took one kind of mind to live with technology, and another kind to live without it. Her kind had spurned it.

  She hated it. It was alien to her. But it was terribly strong. It was defeating her and everything like her. She was coming to a clear understanding of that.

  It was not the pickup truck itself that frightened her, not its smell or its feel or its unyielding shape. It was the mind-link between the machine and Paul Shudde. They were connected.

  Had she made a disastrous mistake with him? Was he too much like the rest of them? She did not think that he had been. He had been different. She would never have gone to him otherwise.

  But now—

  She trembled and tried to calm herself. This ceaseless panic was not good for the life within her.

  And Old Four-Eyes?

  She had developed a certain affection for him, despite his blindness. He probably meant well.

  The question was not what would become of Paul Shudde.

  No.

  Rather, the question was what Paul Shudde might become.

  Paul Shudde actually had the paper in the typewriter to write the story. He did not plan on a blockbuster. His idea was to plant just enough teasers in his column to attract the attention of a few sharp-eyed readers. There were quicker ways to do the job, but he had nearly six months. That was time to allow the story to build.

  He came that close.

  When the chips were down, he could not do it. Sanity splashed over Old Four-Eyes like a bucket of icewater. It was the curse of his life.

  “Crap,” he said. He never would amount to anything, and he knew it.

  He yanked the carbon-sandwiched sheets out of the antediluvian machine. He was horrified, as though the paper itself had become contaminated. He put in fresh paper.

  He had, he figured, come perilously close to thinking exactly like the good citizens of PAZBO. That was the way their minds worked. Get what you want at any price, convince yourself that nobody will be hurt by your actions, sleep the dreamless sleep of the innocent….

  “Partner,” he said to his guest, deliberately lapsing into the toothless old sidekick talk that television believed to be characteristic of all Texans, “we came powerful close that time to burning down the barn.”

  She looked up at him from her favorite curl-up place next to the refrigerator. She seemed puzzled but some of the bleak anxiety drained out of her soft brown eyes.

  Paul Shudde typed a blue streak. He could work fast when he had to, and he did have a living to make.

  He understood that whatever she was, she could not actually read his mind. He didn’t know whether she could read typed words or not, and he preferred not to think about it. In any case, it seemed wiser to tell her out loud what he was writing.

  “You remember how the folks at PAZBO got their bowels in an uproar about my hotplate in the room over the carport,” he said. She got some of that. She liked it better when he spoke simply and directly. “That was because the hotplate turned the room into the equivalent of an apartment with kitchen facilities, you understand?”

  She looked doubtful.

  “Well,” Paul went on, “this column I’m writing takes off from there. It doesn’t mention you at all. It’s all about how I took that old hotplate and used it to heat up some tar. Boiled that tar right in the loft over the carport! Used it to repair my tarpaper house on the elegant shores of Lakeview Oaks.” He laughed. It was a real knee-slapper of a laugh, not a civilized snicker. “That ought to make me really popular around here. PAZBO may have to go into emergency session!”

  She could not smile. She did not have the anatomy for it. She was not sure why the story struck Old Four-Eyes as so funny, but it obviously tickled him. She curled her lip a little to show her appreciation. That was as close as she could come to a visible laugh.

  As he wrote, Paul’s mind was racing. When he was finished, he tried out his thoughts on her.

  “There is a way,” he said finally. “I think there is a way. You’re going to have to trust me again. Do you think you can do that?”

  She gave him her doubtful look.

  “I did the right thing before it was too late, didn’t I? Do I
have to be elevated to sainthood?”

  She let that one alone.

  “What do you have to lose, my friend? Nothing, right?”

  She got up and paced around, her claws clicking on the linoleum. She looked profoundly uncertain.

  Paul Shudde told her what they had to do.

  Getting into the pickup truck was as hard for her as anything she had ever had to do. It was a completely alien act. Even after a solid month of practice runs, she could not tolerate being back in the camper shell. The fake nest made out of boxes and blankets was comfortable enough most of the time, but the closed-in feeling and the stench of the exhaust got to her. Twice, she threw up. She was ashamed of herself, but she could not control it.

  Her panic returned whenever she tried to ride in the camper. The little side and rear windows were too high for her to see out of, and that was part of it. The jouncing isolation was the worst. She could not signal to him in the cab. Even when she could reach him, there were things she could not communicate.

  He did not know that she was pregnant. He did not know that her time was near. He did not know that she was convinced that her child would not survive a birth in the back of the truck.

  She had to ride up front, flop ears and all.

  That was not easy either. It was not that anyone bothered them. It was the sheer horror of being trapped in a moving metal machine on a highway choked with cars and trucks.

  Death surrounded her. The sounds and stinks she had avoided all her life twisted at her guts. She was right in the middle of them.

  Old Four-Eyes kept up a running commentary. He was attempting to calm her down.

  “Cedar Park,” he said. “Practically part of Austin now, like Lakeview Oaks.”

  She had her eyes narrowed to slits. She was hurting and the pain was getting worse.

  “Leander,” Old Four-Eyes said. He knew that something was very wrong. He was not sure what it was.

  “Seward Junction,” he said. She was breathing a little easier despite her spasms. The traffic’s greasy whine was diminishing. She could almost smell green plants and living air.