by Neil Clarke
When he found an old plastic pull-toy, he began to speak of toys his father had made for him. Every day he made more of these sometimes stressful but highly addictive recorded narratives.
A rhythmic crunching noise surprised him.One of his fellow assistants was jogging across the debris field toward him. “The name’s Franklin!” the man shouted. “So, how long were you under?”
Tom’s companion swiveled toward the noise, but made no attempt to discourage this meeting. Franklin looked like an old man—like Tom did, he knew, suspension being less the fountain of youth than had probably been promised. Franklin was all skin and bone, but he moved with easy, un-self-conscious energy.
“Do you know when this is?” Tom asked eagerly.
Franklin laughed. “Sorry. No, I don’t think any of us do. ‘Cannot translate,’ which is what they say if there’s something they don’t want you to know.”
“I don’t think my companion would lie—I don’t think he even can.”
“But he can leave out the details, or say nothing at all. Surely he’s like all the other flowers in this petunia patch, and you get these long, silent, brooding spells?”
“Well, yes. But there’s no way for us to know what that silence actually means, or how it functions for them. They’re not plants, by the way.”
Franklin made a dismissive gesture with his hands. Or Tom thought it was dismissive—it had been a very long time since he’d actually witnessed a non-verbal human gesture. “Oh, I know. But you have to call them something, and they certainly look like plants. They look, well, they’re identical, aren’t they?”
Tom looked around and saw that his companion was now standing with Franklin’s. They were as motionless as . . . as houseplants. Perhaps they were watching, but Tom sensed it was more complicated than that. “Mine is bluer around the base above the filaments, and slightly less symmetrical. He feels—I don’t know—older than some of the others. They’re not identical at all—you just have to study them to recognize the differences.”
“I gather you call yours ‘the companion.’”
“That’s the way I think about him—it’s better than ‘the alien.’ But I don’t call him anything, at least when I speak to him. I just pretend I’m speaking to myself out loud.”
“I call mine Audrey. It makes the conversation go more easily, to have an actual name.”
“Audrey?”
“The Little Shop of Horrors? ‘Feed me!’? That giant man-eating plant? Did you ever see it? There was a revival, very popular when I died, if you’ll excuse the expression.”
“That must have been after my time. When I—died—the refugees were just crossing into Arizona, Texas.”
“They’d made it to St. Louis by the time I passed. By that time it made no difference—if they were from California, Arizona, Mexico or Latin American—they were all refugees. Starving, desperate, disease-ridden human beings. What were the rest of us supposed to do?”
Tom had no answer, and did not want to know what Franklin might have participated in. They both stood quietly looking around at the natives, as if anything but silence would be somehow disrespectful, and it occurred to Tom that this might offer another explanation for the aliens’ long non-responsive silences. An alien drifted slowly by, several natives trailing excitedly. Franklin gazed after them, looking troubled.
“Have you tried to talk with one of them?” Tom asked. “A native?”
“Only at first. How much do you know about them?”
“Very little—they hardly ever speak, and when they do I can’t understand them. But they’re what’s left of us.”
“No, we’re what’s left of us—the ones from another time, the ones that were suspended. That’s who we are, the survivors from that time. These people, they’re from this time, and this, my friend, is a whole other world. You know they hate us, don’t you? At least the ones who understand enough.”
“No, I don’t,” Tom said firmly. “Why would they hate us?”
“Because we got to miss the worst of it. They don’t look like much, but they’re not dumb—it takes some smarts to survive this long in this environment. And we got to skip what they went through, and what their fathers and mothers went through, and who knows how many generations back, and now we’re helping their invaders.”
“They’re hardly invaders, Franklin.”
Franklin looked at Tom for a moment as if he felt sorry for him. “Then tell me, Tom. Who’s in charge here?”
During the next few months Tom became obsessed with the complexities of reconstituting a vanished world from its pieces—his world, and that world which had evolved into being while he slept. A thick but feather weight oval so transparent it might be invisible proved to be a lamp. Nearby he found a piece of rainbow—he held the iridescent fragment against the sun and it began to vibrate with colors that filled the air. Alarmed, he dropped it, and heard a nearby laugh. When his eyes readjusted he saw Franklin a few yards away, scraping busily at the ground but sparing a glimpse Tom’s way.
“Happened to me, too. It’s a piece of something they were developing for energy storage. A lot of innovation was going on during my time, desperate attempts to save us all. I doubt that thing, or that lamp you found earlier, were ever finished. Least I never saw them. We were so clever, you know? Hard to understand how we failed so catastrophically.”
Perhaps it was this, or Tom’s growing fatigue over the futility of attempting to reclaim a lost world while not really living in this one, that made the day feel endless. Tom looked at his companion with growing suspicion. The creature’s silences, his awful impenetrability. His invasion of Tom’s life. The alien was in charge of him—he set the pace and the daily priorities.
And yet Tom would have no purpose at all if they had not brought him back from the darkness. They might be occupiers, but they kept him occupied.
At the end of that long day Franklin came to Tom and dropped a battered coin into his hand. It was inscribed The Day of the Triffids. “Just scan it with the lab recorder,” he said. “It’ll start playing on the monitor. It’s a classic—and you may find it amusing.”
As Tom watched the movie back at the lab he decided it was clumsy, but when an actor told an actress, “Keep behind me. There’s no sense in getting killed by a plant,” he laughed out loud.
“This amuses you,” the companion said, behind him. Tom jumped up, alarmed.
“Some of the lines, yes, they made me laugh.” Then, “but it’s just a silly movie,” he said unnecessarily.
“Cannot translate.” Then a bit later, “You are uncomfortable.”
“Yes. Just a bit. I didn’t know you were there.”
“You may always ask questions if you are uncomfortable.”
“Yes, I know.” Tom hesitated. “I wanted to ask you if you had considered that—that we might not welcome your help here?”
Again the awkward silence. And a few “Cannot translate” statements followed by a series of untranslatable sounds before the companion began to speak. “I—apologize. You have been—influenced—so you will not harm us. There has been—debate.”
“You mean whatever you’ve done to us wouldn’t let us try.”
“Cannot translate. It would not. Cannot translate.”
It made Tom uncomfortable that he’d never known where to look when he spoke to the companion. He didn’t know where the eyes—or whatever the alien used for visual input—were located. He’d looked in numerous places for them. Today he simply looked away. “It is our world.”
“You look out at the world, the sky, and you think that you see yourselves,” the companion replied. “You do not. Cannot translate. You witness our silences, our—soft—pauses between the efforts to communicate with you, and you think that they are about you. Cannot translate. They are not.”
There was something different about the companion. He moved more slowly across the ragged ridge, pausing now and then with his filaments trembling. Sometimes he stood for half an hour
or more, fully exposed to the hot afternoon sun. The group of natives who normally followed the companion avoided him.
Tom discovered the door lying flat on the hillside under a thin layer of broken concrete. The companion paused but passed quickly. It was just a door, and they had examined many doors. Tom pried it up and verified that it was attached to nothing, like opening a door in the ground to more ground.
He lingered over it, brushing at it, touching it with his palms. The paint was worn, but still apparent. Blue. It was a sky-blue door. After a lengthy brushing, the scratches on its surface became legible:
The Collier family lived here 200 years. It sheltered & nourished us. God bless our home.
Tom loaded the door into their van to take back to the lab. He’d started back to the fields when Franklin ran up to him.
“Audrey died!”
“I—” He didn’t know what to say. “I imagined they had a very long life-span. Was there an accident?”
“No. I’d noticed some color changes, some fading, and the tips of the appendages? I’d been seeing some transparency there the past few months. Then one evening last week Audrey was silent and still for a very long time, and the next morning I found him in that same position, as if he’d just been switched off.”
Tom saw some aliens off in the distance, their filaments floating gently back and forth, pushed by the breeze, natives running between them like children playing among trees. “I’m sorry, Franklin. What did you do?”
“I couldn’t even get out of the lab—all the security was keyed to Audrey. But the next morning a group of them arrived with Audrey’s replacement. You know, I’ve been noticing the differences since I first met you. Audrey’s coloring was a little different, a little more orange. This new one acts differently, moves differently, I don’t know, I’m thinking I may not like this one as much.”
“Maybe they’re more complex than you thought.”
Franklin nodded, a bit wide-eyed, but Tom wasn’t convinced he was actually listening. “Hey, have you seen the hands?”
“The hands?”
“Well, obviously you haven’t. The natives built them, fairly recently, I think.”
Tom followed Franklin down the slope and through labyrinthine mounds of debris until they reached a small clearing on the edge of the dig. A few natives working on something scattered as the two men approached.
He couldn’t quite tell what he was looking at until he shifted angles.In the middle of the clearing it appeared the natives had built several tall, narrow mounds of refuse. But as he moved sideways the constructions became clear: eight or nine giant hands rising out of these fields of destruction.
Tom and Franklin approached as closely as they dared. It was obvious that whatever held these sculptures together was nothing more than a complex interlocking and placement of parts. They were meant to be temporary, and might dissolve at any moment into the rubble field they’d come from.
“Look at the way the palms are curved,” Tom said. “There’s no tension in them—no matter how tightly they were put together, those palms are relaxed, ready to accept whatever might fall into them. These aren’t the desperate hands of someone needing rescue, or begging. They’re just hands that have been raised, hands that are showing themselves.”
“Do they make you feel guilty?” Franklin asked nervously. “These hands make me feel guilty. Not so much for surviving—these people survived. But for missing the worst of it. I don’t know what to do about that.”
Tom nodded. “I think you just do your work, continue to piece things back together. Sometimes the best thing is just doing the only thing that’s left.”
Franklin was silent for quite some time, then said, “They told me Audrey had lived a very long time. They said that most of the ones who come here to explore what’s been left of us were at the very end of those long lives. They won’t be seeing their homes again, Tom. They’re spending their final days with us.”
The companion had not taken him out to the St. Louis fields in several weeks. Tom was glad to be able to catch up on his research, his endless cataloging, but he was worried.
The companion had been standing beside him for days, as if unable to leave his side. Had he moved at all? When he could detect even the slightest of movements he would return to his labor, satisfied. There was increased transparency in the leaves, the filaments, even the mechanical threads, even in that chandelier-looking device whose function Tom had never determined. The companion had remained silent. Even a “cannot translate” would have been welcomed.
The transparent tips of the leaves were frayed, and their ragged failure seemed like movement, but Tom doubted it really was. They looked like jewelry in the hazy bright light of the lab.
Tom propped the blue door up against the lab wall to get a good view of it. The companion would be able to see it also, if the companion was seeing anything now. Then Tom began to speak, adding to the hundreds of hours of testimony he’d already made.
“My father believed every human being deserved two things—meaningful work and a home to live in or come back to when the world felt unsafe. My mother tended to agree but her practical nature told her that not everyone got what they deserved, and when survival was at stake self-fulfillment was a luxury.
“The fact that they never managed to own their own home caused my father great shame. He was a smart man but not formally educated. He read in libraries and watched educational shows and devoured the newspaper.
“He worked a lot of jobs and some were more interesting than others but he never found one that brought him joy. Mother always said his standards were too high and there wasn’t a job invented that would make him happy.
“But he was determined that one day we would have a house of our own and toward that end he found what he thought was the perfect front door. On a demolition job he discovered this thick door with carved panels and an elaborate brass doorknob. He took it home to our little rented duplex, leaned it against the wall, and announced to the family that we were going to have a great house someday and that this would be the front door.
“The next morning he replaced the door to the duplex with this new one. It didn’t quite fit and he had to trim it and make some adjustments to the frame. He had an extra key made and gave it to the owner because, of course, it was actually his house. The owner wasn’t very happy but my dad could be pretty charming.
“From then on, wherever we moved my father carried that door. Sometimes he had to cut it to fit a smaller opening and sometimes he had to add lumber to one end to widen it or make it taller. After a few years with all those alterations it didn’t look so elegant, but it was still strong, and it was our door. I’m sure we were evicted more than once because of it, but he was stubborn. I think the uglier it became, the more he liked it.
“Dad used to tell me stories about early civilizations, about the night watch, and how people would lock themselves in at night behind a good door to protect themselves from wild animals and thieves. I think those stories are one reason I became a history teacher. He said the world wasn’t like that anymore, that you didn’t have to be so afraid. But by the time I was an adult it was obvious those times of the nightly lock-in had come again.
“My father desperately wanted to make his mark but didn’t know how. He said we should leave behind more than a few scattered bones in a field, that we all deserved better. He thought you should feel that your limited time here mattered. That you had opened doors.
“For me the worst thing about those last few years of my old life was that mattering didn’t seem possible anymore. It appeared to be too late to make a difference. Has that changed? Can you tell me that?”
For a long time Tom waited there by that beautiful, unknowable alien thing. The answer finally came, faintly, as if across some vast distance.
Cannot translate.
Robert Reed is a prolific author with a fondness for the novella. Among Reed’s recent projects is polishing his past catalog, then pub
lishing those stories on Kindle, using his daughter’s sketches for the covers. His novella, “A Billion Eves,” won the Hugo for Best Novella in 2007. His latest novel is The Dragons of Marrow.
The Ants of Flanders
ROBERT REED
INTRUDERS
The mass of a comet was pressed into a long dense needle. Dressed with carbon weaves and metametals, the needle showed nothing extraneous to the universe. The frigid black hull looked like space itself, and it carried nothing that could leak or glimmer or produce the tiniest electronic fart—a trillion tons of totipotent matter stripped of engines but charging ahead at nine percent light speed. No sun or known world would claim ownership. No analysis of its workings or past trajectory would mark any culpable builder. Great wealth and ferocious genius had been invested in a device that was nearly invisible, inert as a bullet, and flying by time, aimed at a forbidden, heavily protected region.
The yellow-white sun brightened while space grew increasingly dirty. Stray ions and every twist of dust was a hazard. The damage of the inevitable impacts could be ignored, but there would always be a flash of radiant light. A million hidden eyes lay before it, each linked to paranoid minds doing nothing but marking every unexpected event. Security networks were hunting for patterns, for random noise and vast conspiracies. This was why secrecy had to be maintained as long as possible. This was why the needle fell to thirty AU before the long stasis ended. A temporary mind was grown on the hull. Absorbed starlight powered thought and allowed a platoon of eyes to sprout. Thousands of worlds offered themselves. Most were barren, but the largest few bore atmospheres and rich climates. This was wilderness, and the wilderness was gorgeous. Several planets tempted the newborn pilot, but the primary target still had its charms—a radio-bright knob of water and oxygen, silicates and slow green life.