by Neil Clarke
Final course corrections demanded to be made, and the terrific momentum had to be surrendered. To achieve both, the needle’s tail was quickly reconfigured, micron wires reaching out for thousands of miles before weaving an obedient smoke that took its first long bite of a solar wind.
That wind tasted very much like sugar.
The penguins were coming. With their looks and comical ways, Humboldt penguins meant lots of money for the Children’s Zoo, and that’s why a fancy exhibit had been built for them. People loved to stand in flocks, watching the comical nervous birds that looked like little people. But of course penguins were nothing like people, and while Simon Bloch figured he would like the birds well enough, he certainly wasn’t part of anybody’s flock.
Bloch was a stubborn, self-contained sixteen-year-old. Six foot five, thicklimbed and stronger than most grown men, he was a big slab of a boy with a slow unconcerned walk and a perpetually half-asleep face that despite appearances noticed quite a lot. Maybe he wasn’t genius-smart, but he was bright and studious enough to gain admission to the honors science program at the Zoo School. Teachers found him capable. His stubborn indifference made him seem mature. But there was a distinct, even unique quality: because of a quirk deep in the boy’s nature, he had never known fear.
Even as a baby, Bloch proved immune to loud noises and bad dreams. His older and decidedly normal brother later hammered him with stories about nocturnal demons and giant snakes that ate nothing but kindergarteners, yet those torments only fed a burning curiosity. As a seven-year-old, Bloch slipped out of the house at night, wandering alleys and wooded lots, hoping to come across the world’s last T. rex. At nine, he got on a bus and rode halfway to Seattle, wanting to chase down Bigfoot. He wasn’t testing his bravery. Bravery was what other people summoned when their mouths went dry and hearts pounded. What he wanted was to stare into the eyes of a monster, admiring its malicious, intoxicating power, and if possible, steal a little of that magic for himself.
Bloch wasn’t thinking about monsters. The first penguins would arrive tomorrow morning, and he was thinking how they were going to be greeted with a press conference and party for the zoo’s sugar daddies. Mr. Rightly had asked Bloch to stay late and help move furniture, and that’s why the boy was walking home later than usual. It was a warm November afternoon, bright despite the sun hanging low. Three hundred pounds of casual, unhurried muscle was headed east. Bloch was imagining penguins swimming in their new pool, and then a car horn intruded, screaming in the distance. And in the next second a father down the street began yelling at his kid, telling him to get the hell inside now. Neither noise seemed remarkable, but they shook Bloch out of his daydream.
Then a pair of cars shot past on Pender. Pender Boulevard was a block north, and the cars started fast and accelerated all the way down the long hill. They had to be doing seventy if not a flat-out eighty, and under the roar of wasted gas he heard the distinct double-tone announcing a text from Matt.
It was perfectly normal for Bloch’s soldier-brother to drop a few words on “the kid” before going to bed.
“So what the hell is it,” Bloch read.
“whats what,” he wrote back. But before he could send, a second cryptic message arrived from the world’s night side.
“that big and moving that fast shit glad it’s probably missing us aren’t you”
Bloch snorted and sent his two words.
The racing cars had disappeared down the road. The distant horn had stopped blaring and nobody was shouting at his kids. Yet nothing seemed normal now. Bloch felt it. Pender was hidden behind the houses, but as if on a signal, the traffic suddenly turned heavy. Drivers were doing fifty or sixty where forty was the limit, and the street sounded jammed. Bloch tried phoning a couple friends, except there was no getting through. So he tried his mother at work, but just when it seemed as if he had a connection, the line went dead.
Then the Matt-tones returned.
“a big-ass spaceship dropping toward us catching sun like a sail are you the hell watching?????”
Bloch tried pulling up the BBC science page. Nothing came fast and his phone’s battery was pretty much drained. He stood on a sidewalk only four blocks from home, but he still had to cross Pender. And it sounded like NASCAR out there. Cars were braking, tires squealing. Suddenly a Mini came charging around the corner. Bloch saw spiked orange hair and a cigarette in one hand. The woman drove past him and turned into the next driveway, hitting the pavement hard enough to make sparks. Then she was parked and running up her porch steps, fighting with her keys to find the one that fit her lock.
“What’s happening?” Bloch called out.
She turned toward the voice and dropped the key ring, and stuffing the cigarette into her mouth, she kneeled and got lucky. Finding the key that she needed, she stood up and puffed, saying, “Aliens are coming. Big as the earth, their ship is, and it’s going to fucking hit us.”
“Hit us?”
“Hit the earth, yeah. In five minutes.”
On that note, the woman dove into her house, vanishing.
Perched on a nearby locust tree, a squirrel held its head cocked, one brown eye watching the very big boy.
“A starship,” Bloch said, laughing. “That’s news.”
Chirping in agreement, the squirrel climbed to its home of leaves.
An image had loaded on the phone’s little screen—black space surrounding a meaningless blur painted an arbitrary pink by the software. The tiny scroll at the bottom was running an update of events that only started half an hour ago. The starship was huge but quick, and astronomers only just noticed it. The ship seemed to weigh nothing. Sunlight and the solar wind had slowed it down to a thousand miles every second, which was a thousand times faster than a rifle slug, and a clock in the right corner was counting down to the impact. A little more than four minutes remained. Bloch held the phone steady. Nothing about the boy was genuinely scared. Racing toward the sun, the starship was shifting its trajectory. Odds were that it would hit the earth’s night side. But it was only a solar sail, thin and weak, and there was no way to measure the hazard. Mostly what the boy felt was a rare joyous thrill. If he got lucky with the stop lights, he could run across the intersection at the bottom of the hill, reaching home just in time to watch the impact on television.
But he didn’t take a step. Thunder or a low-flying jet suddenly struck from behind. The world shook, and then the roar ended with a wrenching explosion that bled into a screeching tangle of lesser noises. Brakes screamed and tires slid across asphalt, and Bloch felt something big hammering furiously at the ground. A giant truck must have lost control, tumbling down the middle of Pender. What else could it be? Fast-moving traffic struggled to brake and steer sideways. Bloch heard cars colliding, and the runaway truck or city bus kept rolling downhill. Turning toward the racket, toward the west, he couldn’t see Pender or the traffic behind the little houses, but the mayhem, the catastrophe, rolled past him, and then a final crash made one tall oak shake, the massive trunk wobbling and the weakest brown leaves falling, followed by a few more collisions of little vehicles ending with an abrupt wealth of silence.
The side street bent into Pender. Bloch sprinted to the corner. Westbound traffic was barely rolling up the long gentle hill, and nobody was moving east. The sidewalk and one lane were blocked by a house-sized ball of what looked like black metal. Some piece of Bloch’s brain expected a truck and he was thinking this was a damn peculiar truck. He had to laugh. An old man stood on the adjacent lawn, eyes big and busy. Bloch approached, and the man heard the laughter and saw the big boy. The man was trembling. He needed a good breath before he could say, “I saw it.” Then he lifted a shaking arm, adding, “I saw it fall,” as he slapped the air with a flattened hand, mimicking the intruder’s bounce as it rolled down the long hill, smacking into the oak tree with the last of its momentum.
Bloch said, “Wow.”
“This is my yard,” the old man whispered, as if nothing were mo
re important. Then the arm dropped and his hands grabbed one another. “What is it, you think? A spaceship?”
“An ugly spaceship,” Bloch said. He walked quickly around the object, looking for wires or portholes. But nothing showed in the lumpy black hull. Back uphill were strings of cars crushed by the impacts and from colliding with each other. A Buick pointed east, its roof missing. Now the old man was staring at the wreckage, shaking even worse than before. When he saw Bloch returning, he said, “I wouldn’t look. Get away.”
Bloch didn’t stop. An old woman had been driving the Buick when the spaceship came bouncing up behind her. One elegant hand was resting neatly in her lap, a big diamond shining on the ring finger, and her head was missing, and Bloch studied the ripped-apart neck, surprised by the blood and sorry for her but always curious, watchful and impressed.
People were emerging from houses and the wrecked cars and from cars pulling over to help. There was a lot of yelling and quick talking. One woman screamed, “Oh God, someone’s alive here.” Between a flipped pickup and the Buick was an old Odyssey, squashed and shredded. The van’s driver was clothes mixed with meat. Every seat had its kid strapped in, but only one of them was conscious. The little girl in back looked out at Bloch, smiled and said something, and he smiled back. The late-day air stank of gasoline. Bloch swung his left arm, shattering the rear window with the elbow, and then he reached in and undid the girl’s belt and brought her out. What looked like a brother was taking what looked like a big nap beside her. The side of his face was bloody. Bloch undid that belt and pulled him out too and carried both to the curb while other adults stood around the van, talking about the three older kids still trapped.
Then the screaming woman noticed gasoline running in the street, flowing toward the hot spaceship. Louder than ever, she told the world, “Oh God, it’s going to blow up.”
People started to run away, holding their heads down, and still other people came forward, fighting with the wreckage, fighting with jammed doors and their own panic, trying to reach the unconscious and dead children.
One man looked at Bloch, eyes shining when he said, “Come on and help us.”
But there was a lot of gasoline. The pickup must have had a reserve tank, and it had gotten past the van and the Buick. Bloch was thinking about the spaceship, how it was probably full of electricity and alien fires. That was the immediate danger, he realized. Trotting up ahead, he peeled off his coat and both shirts, and after wadding them up into one tight knot, he threw them into the stinking little river, temporarily stopping the flow.
The screaming woman stood in the old man’s yard. She was kind of pretty and kind of old. Staring at his bare chest, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“Helping,” he said.
She had never heard anything so odd. That’s what she said with her wrinkled, doubtful face.
Once more, Bloch’s phone made the Matt noise. His brother’s final message had arrived. “Everythings quiet here everybodys outside and I bet you wish you could see this big bastard filling the sky, B, its weird no stars but the this glow, and pretty you know???you would love this”
And then some final words:
“Good luck and love Matt.”
Tar and nanofibers had been worn as camouflage, and an impoverished stream of comet detritus served as cover. A machine grown for one great purpose had spent forty million years doing nothing. But the inevitable will find ways to happen, and the vagaries of orbital dynamics gave this machine extraordinary importance. Every gram of fuel was expended, nothing left to make course corrections. The goal was a small lake that would make quite a lot possible, but the trajectory was sloppy, and it missed the target by miles, rolling to a halt on a tilted strip of solid hydrocarbons littered with mindless machinery and liquid hydrocarbons and cellulose and sacks of living water.
Eyes were spawned, gazing in every direction.
Several strategies were fashioned and one was selected, and only then did the machine begin growing a body and the perfect face.
Brandishing a garden hose, the old man warned Bloch to get away from the damn gas. But an even older man mentioned that the spaceship was probably hot and maybe it wasn’t a good idea throwing cold water near it. The hose was grudgingly put away. But the gasoline pond was spilling past the cotton and polyester dam. Bloch considered asking people for their shirts. He imagined sitting in the street, using his butt to slow things down. Then a third fellow arrived, armed with a big yellow bucket of cat litter, and that hero used litter to build a second defensive barrier.
All the while, the intruder was changing. Its rounded shape held steady but the hull was a shinier, prettier black. Putting his face close, Bloch felt the heat left over from slamming into the atmosphere; nevertheless, he could hold his face close and peer inside the glassy crust, watching tiny dark shapes scurry here to there and back again.
“Neat,” he said.
Bystanders started to shout at the shirtless boy, telling him to be careful and not burn himself. They said that he should find clothes before he caught a cold. But Bloch was comfortable, except where his elbow was sore from busting out the van window. He held the arm up to the radiant heat and watched the ship’s hull reworking itself. Car radios were blaring, competing voices reporting the same news: a giant interstellar craft was striking the earth’s night side. Reports of power outages and minor impacts were coming in. Europe and Russia might be getting the worst of it, though there wasn’t any news from the Middle East. Then suddenly most of the stations shifted to the same feed, and one man was talking. He sounded like a scientist lecturing to a class. The “extraordinary probe” had been spread across millions of square miles, and except for little knots and knobs, it was more delicate than any spiderweb, and just as harmless. “The big world should be fine,” he said.
On Pender Boulevard, cars were jammed up for blocks and sirens were descending. Fire trucks and paramedics found too much to do. The dead and living children had been pulled out of the van, and the screaming woman stood in the middle of the carnage, steering the first helpers to them. Meanwhile the cat litter man and hose man were staring at the spaceship.
“It came a long ways,” said the litter man.
“Probably,” said the hose man.
Bloch joined them.
“Aren’t you cold?” the hose man asked.
The boy shrugged and said nothing.
And that topic was dropped. “Yeah, this ship came a long ways,” the litter man reported. “I sure hope they didn’t mean to do this.”
“Do what?” asked his friend.
“Hurt people.”
Something here was wrong. Bloch looked back at the Buick and the sun, waiting to figure out what was bothering him. But it didn’t happen. Then he looked at the spaceship again. The shininess had vanished, the crust dull and opaque except where little lines caught the last of the day’s light.
Once again, Bloch started forward.
The two men told him to be careful, but then both of them walked beside the sixteen-year-old.
“Something’s happening,” the hose man said.
“It is,” his buddy agreed.
As if to prove them right, a chunk of the crust fell away, hitting the ground with a light ringing sound.
Bloch was suddenly alone.
Radio newscasters were talking about blackouts on the East Coast and citizens not panicking, and some crackly voice said that it was a beautiful night in Moscow, no lights working but ten centimeters of new snow shining under a cold crescent moon. Then a government voice interrupted the poetry. U.S. military units were on heightened alert, he said. Bloch thought of his brother as he knelt, gingerly touching the warm, glassy and almost weightless shard of blackened crust. Another two pieces fell free, one jagged fissure running between the holes. Probe or cannon ball or whatever, the object was beginning to shatter.
People retreated to where they felt safe, calling to the big boy who insisted on standing beside the visitor.
>
Bloch pushed his face inside the nearest gap.
A bright green eye looked out at him.
Swinging the sore elbow, Bloch shattered a very big piece of the featherweight egg case.
Beautiful,” bystanders said. “Lovely.”
The screaming woman found a quieter voice. “Isn’t she sweet?” she asked. “What a darling.”
“She?” the hose man said doubtfully.
“Look at her,” the woman said. “Isn’t that a she?”
“Looks girlish to me,” the litter man agreed.
The alien body was dark gray and long and streamlined, slick to the eye like a finely grained stone polished to where it shone in the reflected light. It seemed to be lying on its back. Complex appendages looked like meaty fins, but with fingers that managed to move, four hands clasping at the air and then at one another. The fluked tail could have been found on a dolphin, and the face would have been happy on a seal—a whiskerless round-faced seal with a huge mouth pulled into a magnificent grin. But half of the face and most of the animal’s character was focused on those two enormous eyes, round with iridescent green irises and perfect black pupils bright enough to reflect Bloch’s curious face.
The egg’s interior was lined with cables and odd machines and masses of golden fibers, and the alien was near the bottom, lying inside a ceramic bowl filled with a desiccated blood-colored gelatin. The body was too big for the bowl, and it moved slowly and stiffly, pressing against the bone-white sides.
“Stay back,” bystanders implored.
But as soon as people backed away, others pushed close, wrestling for the best view.
The screaming woman touched Bloch. “Did she say something?”
“I didn’t hear anything.”
“She wants to talk,” the woman insisted.
That seemed like a silly idea, and the boy nearly laughed. But that’s when the seal’s mouth opened and one plaintive word carried over the astonished crowd.