Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  “The baby...?” Danny asked.

  “They took her.”

  “Took her?”

  “I heard her cry. She was alive, she was crying, and they took her away.” Autumn lay down and went to sleep. Danny stretched out beside her and it seemed he’d just closed his eyes when Autumn’s screams woke him.

  The aliens came for her and they wouldn’t let Danny go with them. He sat on the edge of the bed until Fremount brought his food.

  “What have you done with her?”

  “She is sick,” Fremount said.

  “And the baby?”

  Fremount turned away.

  “The baby!” Danny shouted. “What about our little girl?”

  The door closed in his face.

  They’re going to keep the baby, he realized. If they had been humans, they would at least have had the decency to lie, to tell him she was dead. But they were aliens and they didn’t care. For the first time since the ship he hated them, blindly, savagely, and the hate kept him going until they brought Autumn back.

  She was completely empty. She refused to eat, sitting all day in her room with her arms wrapped around her legs, staring into space. If he tried to comfort her she jerked away at his touch, startled by it. She slept badly, moaning and thrashing herself awake. The only thing Danny could do for her was stay away.

  Eventually she began to eat again. Her sleep became quieter. She slept most of the time. When she was awake she managed an occasional smile. She even let him make love to her, but only when she was bleeding. “No more babies,” she whispered to him afterwards. “Not ever again. They won’t take anything from me again.”

  8. In Autumn’s room was a shelf of physics books. After Danny had read everything else, he started on them. They were tough going at first, but he needed the challenge.

  One day the alien called Howland Owl came for him again. He brought Danny into a long, narrow white room. Nine of the aliens sat along one side of it, like a jury.

  “What do you see,” one of them asked, “when you perform sex?”

  “See?” Danny asked.

  “Do you see God?” asked another one.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Last night,” said yet another one, “you performed sex and the woman said, ‘Oh God.’ What did she mean?”

  “You were listening?” Danny said. He was not very surprised, really.

  “Answer the question,” Howland said.

  “You’re crazy. God doesn’t have anything to do with it. It’s just something people say.”

  “Then when do you see your God?” another asked.

  Danny hesitated, then said, “I don’t have a God.” He waited for lightening to strike. When it didn’t he was almost disappointed. “If there was a God I wouldn’t be here. If there was a God it wouldn’t have let you take my daughter from me. God is just something they tell kids. It’s supposed to make them think that things make sense. Just another fairy tale.”

  “Do many of you feel this way?”

  “Many people? I don’t know. Maybe they all do.”

  After a silence, Howland said, “Come. I will take you back to your room.”

  “Just a minute,” Danny said. He picked one of the aliens to stare at. “I want to see my daughter.”

  The alien returned his stare. “The child does not belong to you.”

  “Like hell,” Danny said. “What are you afraid of? Why won’t you let me see her? For God’s sake, she’s my child!”

  “Why,” the alien said, “do you ask a favor in the name of a God you do not believe in?”

  Danny charged the alien and woke up on the bed in his room.

  He told Autumn about the interview. “I know,” she said. “I went through most of that on the ship; That’s what they do.”

  “Snoop? Steal babies?”

  “Haven’t they ever told you? They look for God. I don’t think they mean it the way we do. I mean, they’re not looking for a big old man with white hair. But that’s their job.”

  “Their job?” Danny started to laugh. “All of them? All of those ships, those other planets, those other aliens? Their job?” Tears rolled down his face. “That’s why they kidnapped us? To look for God?” He cried until his whole body felt dried out, then he slept, longer and deeper than he had for a long time.

  A while after that he tried to talk to Fremount about their ships. “It says here,” he said, pointing to the physics book, “that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. What about your ships? How do they do it?”

  “I will ask,” Fremount said.

  Later an alien that Danny had never seen before came to the room. “I will help you with your questions,” it said.

  Danny named the alien PT. Bridgeport. “Is it true your ships go faster than light?” he asked.

  “Faster?” the alien said. “How do you mean faster?”

  Danny had the same sinking feeling he’d gotten talking to the hairy dwarf. Very carefully he explained the speed of light, using Astronomical Units since the aliens would have to know the distance from the Earth to the Sun.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Bridgeport said at last, “that light is either a particle or a wave?”

  “Yes.”

  “But it isn’t. Light is a state of the aether.”

  Danny went back to the book and showed the alien the Michelson-Morely experiment that disproved the existence of the aether. Bridgeport picked up the book and read several pages, its bulbous eyes flicking back and forth across the lines. “It says here that FitzGerald could explain those same results as compression of the aether.”

  A few meals later Danny asked to see Bridgeport again. He showed it something called the Double Slit Experiment, where, under certain conditions, a stream of photons would create an interference pattern. The results seems to vary depending on what the experimenters tried to prove.

  “I don’t understand,” Danny said.

  “Nor do I,” Bridgeport said. “I have performed an experiment similar to this, and these are not the results I obtained. May I borrow this?”

  Danny pointed to the duplicate copies on the shelf.

  “Be my guest. But haven’t you read it already?”

  “Why?” Bridgeport asked him. “What could we possibly learn from your primitive science?”

  When Bridgeport returned, it seemed tired, or older. Danny had been around the aliens long enough to realize something had gone wrong with its body.

  “Well?” Danny asked.

  Bridgeport was quiet a long time before answering. “Now, when I run the experiment, I get an interference pattern, just like in your book. When I leave the room and my assistant runs the experiment ... there is no pattern.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?”

  “In your book. The man Heisenberg. He says the outcome of an experiment is determined by the desired results. That is more or less what he says. It seems this is even more true than he realized.”

  “But ... which is the real answer?”

  “Both. Either. Any answer you like.”

  “My God.”

  “No. There is no God in this. If there is today, maybe not tomorrow.” Bridgeport started for the door.

  “Wait,” Danny said. “Come back. I want to ask you...”

  The alien was gone.

  Next mealtime, Danny asked Fremount for Bridgeport. “That one is dead,” Fremount said.

  Danny was stunned. “Dead? But how?”

  “I am no longer allowed to talk to you,” Fremount said.

  Danny went to Autumn’s room. They spent so little time together that their schedules had become out of synch. This time Danny found her awake.

  “I think I killed one of them,” he told her.

  “How?”

  “Physics,” Danny said. “Or maybe religion. I’m not sure I know the difference anymore.”

  “Good,” Autumn said, going back to her book. “Kill them all. All of them.”
<
br />   9. A few meals later they came for him. They led him out a new doorway into another maze of halls. The first he realized he was on a ship was when a wall near him turned dark and he saw the stars again. They hadn’t warned him to pack anything or even let him say goodbye to Autumn.

  After that first surge of anger, his heart pounded with new hope. He searched the ship, finally found an alien, and poured out his questions. Were they taking him home? Was Autumn on board? Was his daughter? How long would it take?

  The alien ignored him.

  He exercised and meditated and slept. He thought about Autumn more than he wanted to. He kept count of the number of times he slept, into the hundreds, then lost count. He started again, got into the hundreds again, then gave up for good.

  He hung on.

  When he finally saw a blue world in the viewscreen he was afraid to hope. He sat cross legged on the floor, searching for a landmark, remembering the last blue world. And then the clouds broke and he saw the telltale shape of the Mediterranean and the long curve of Africa dropping away and he cried for the last time in his life.

  The saucer let him off in Texas, dressed in his loose white robes. They gave him a few hundred dollars in cash and some small disks of pure gold. He’d read about time dilation and the twin paradox and hoped the money would still be good.

  “Aren’t you going to say goodbye?” he asked one of the aliens as he stood in the open port of the ship.

  “Goodbye,” the alien said.

  Danny walked over a hill and saw a ribbon of asphalt that led off into the distance. He sat in the hot sand at the top of the hill and smelled the sunlight.

  He had spent long hours thinking about what he would do if he ever got home, how he would lie low, spend his time in the closest thing to a library he could find, learn enough to blend in. The one thing he was not prepared for was to find that the world had not changed.

  He stood in a Greyhound station in Temple, Texas, looking at a newspaper dated June 6, 1958. He thought about Bridgeport’s experiments. He wondered if it was 1958 only because Danny’s imagination hadn’t been strong enough to take him farther into the future.

  He used some of the cash for a Salvation Army suit and a bus ticket to Arizona. He kept the gold in his boots and barricaded the door of the motel room where he spent his first night back on Earth.

  He couldn’t get over the richness of the smells in the air.

  By Albuquerque he had the flu. He spent a week in a motel, convinced he was dying. In the delirium of his fever, objects lost their focus. Everything turned into random patterns of energy, mere conditions of the aether, and he felt himself sink into the bed. He was terrified. It had become a question of faith, not in God, but in something more basic, and his faith was slipping. Suddenly he knew how Bridgeport must have felt.

  I am going to believe, he told himself. I believe in furniture and in floors. I believe in clothes and food and bodies with skins that keep them from sinking into mattresses. Whether they are real or not, I believe in them. My belief will make them real.

  A few hours later his fever broke and he slept.

  Back in Mesa, he watched his parents for several weeks. They were now much younger than he was. Finally, unable to resist, he tried to talk to his father. His father seemed frightened by him, so Danny left him alone.

  He bought several books and magazines that promised to explain UFOs to him. He managed to read half of one of them before throwing them all away.

  He took a job working for a landscape company in San Diego where he could work outdoors, within the sound and smell of the ocean. He was liked but never befriended by his fellow employees. The owners respected his good physical condition and his love for growing things and tolerated his occasional periods of dreaminess.

  He spent his last years in a rest home in Scottsdale, Arizona, finally marrying another patient there. Until the week of his death he paid for an ad in the personal columns of newspapers in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. The ad read: “Autumn, please call me, Danny,” followed by his address and phone number. None of the replies was genuine.

  His funeral, in December of 1975, was small. His wife, and some of the other rest home patients, attended. After the service a strange light was seen in the sky. It hovered, then disappeared at a tremendous rate of speed. The Air Force declined to investigate.

  White City

  Tesla lifts the piece of sirloin to his lips. Its volume is approximately .25 cubic inches, or .02777 of the entire steak. As he chews, he notices a water spot on the back of his fork. He takes a fresh napkin from the stack at his left elbow and scrubs the fork vigorously.

  He is sitting at a private table in the refreshment stand at the West end of the Court of Honor. He looks out onto the Chicago World’s Fair and Columbian Exposition. It is October of 1893. The sun is long gone and the reflections of Tesla’s electric lights sparkle on the surface of the Main Basin, turning the spray from the fountain into glittering jewels. At the far end of the Basin stands the olive-wreathed Statue of the Republic in his flowing robes. On all sides the White City lies in pristine elegance, testimony to the glorious architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Its chilly streets are populated by mustached men in topcoats and sturdy women in woolen shawls.

  The time is 9:45. At midnight Nikola Tesla will produce his greatest miracle. The number twelve seems auspicious. It is important to him, for reasons he cannot understand, that it is divisible by three.

  Anne Morgan, daughter of financier J. Pierpoint Morgan, stands at a little distance from his table. Though still in finishing school she is tall, self-possessed, strikingly attractive. She is reluctant to disturb Tesla, knowing he prefers to dine alone. Still she is drawn to him irresistibly. He is rake thin and handsome as the devil himself, with steel gray eyes that pierce through to her soul.

  “Mr. Tesla,” she says, “I pray I am not disturbing you.”

  Tesla looks up, smiles gently. “Miss Morgan.” He begins to rise.

  “Please, do not get up. I was merely afraid I would miss you. I had hoped we might walk together after you finished here.”

  “I would be delighted.”

  “I shall await you there, by the Basin.”

  She withdraws. Trailing a gloved hand along the balustrade, she tries to avoid the drunken crowds which swarm the Exposition Grounds. Tomorrow the Fair will close and pass into history. Already there are arguments as to what is to become of these splendid buildings. There is neither money to maintain them nor desire to demolish them. Chicago’s mayor, Carter Harrison, worries that they will end up filthy and vandalized, providing shelter for the hundreds of poor who will no longer have jobs when the Fair ends.

  Her thoughts turn back to Tesla. She finds herself inordinately taken with him. At least part of the attraction is the mystery of his personal life. At age 37 he has never married nor been engaged. She has heard rumors that his tastes might be, to put it delicately, Greek in nature. There is no evidence to support this gossip and she does not credit it. Rather it seems likely that no one has yet been willing to indulge the inventor’s many idiosyncrasies.

  She absently touches her bare left ear lobe. She no longer wears the pearl earrings that so offended him on their first meeting. She flushes at the memory, and at that point Tesla appears.

  “Shall we walk?” he asks.

  She nods and matches his stride, careful not to take his arm. Tesla is not comfortable with personal contact.

  To their left is the Hall of Agriculture. She has heard that its most popular attraction is an 11-ton cheese from Ontario. Like so many other visitors to the Fair, she has not actually visited any of the exhibits. They seem dull and pedestrian compared to the purity and classical lines of the buildings which house them. The fragrance of fresh roses drifts out through the open doors, and for a moment she is lost in a reverie of New York in the spring.

  As they pass the end of the hall they are in darkness for a few moments. Tesla seems to shudder. He has been silent
and intent, as if compulsively counting his steps. It would not surprise her if this were actually the case.

  “Is anything wrong?” she asks.

  “No,” Tesla says. “It’s nothing.”

  In fact the darkness is full of lurking nightmares for Tesla. Just now he was five years old again, watching his older brother Daniel fall to his death. Years of guilty self-examination have not made the scene clearer. They stood together at the top of the cellar stairs, and then Daniel fell into the darkness. Did he fall? Did Nikola, in a moment of childish rage, push him?

  All his life he has feared the dark. His father took his candles away, so little Nikola made his own. Now the full-grown Tesla has brought electric light to the White City, carried by safe, inexpensive alternating current. It is only the beginning.

  They round the East end of the Court of Honor. At the Music Hall, the Imperial Band of Austria plays melodies from Wagner. Anne Morgan shivers in the evening chill. “Look at the moon,” she says. “Isn’t it romantic?”

  Tesla’s smile seems condescending. “I have never understood the romantic impulse. We humans are meat machines, and nothing more.”

  “That is hardly a pleasant image.”

  “I do not mean to be offensive, only accurate. That is the aim of science, after all.”

  “Yes, of course,” Anne Morgan says. “Science.” There seems no way to reach him, no chink in his cool exterior. This is where the others gave up, she thinks. I will prove stronger than all of them. In her short, privileged existence, she has always obtained what she wants. “I wish I knew more about it.”

  “Science is a pure, white light,” Tesla says. “It shines evenly on all things, and reveals their particular truths. It banishes uncertainty, and opinion, and contradiction. Through it we master the world.”

  They have circled back to the West, and to their right is the Liberal Arts Building. She has heard that it contains so much painting and sculpture that one can only wander helplessly among it. To attempt to seek out a single artist, or to look for the French Impressionists, of whom she has been hearing so much, would be sheer futility.