Not One of Us

by Neil Clarke

  “I’ll wait with you,” he says. He doesn’t add, “Because you’re way too drunk.”

  Minutes pass. Karen asks, “Why’d you run away?”

  Aaron’s voice is so soft that she almost can’t hear him over the music and the sound of rain. “The frogs,” he says. “I want to go away with them. Me and Tristan are going away with them.”

  Karen laughs. “Oh my god,” she says. “Are you serious?”

  He lifts a glitter frog off his left shoulder. This one is dark blue, and it glistens in the streetlight. She can’t tell if that’s from the metallic flecks in its skin, or from rainwater. Aaron holds it out to her. “Haven’t you ever felt like you didn’t belong here?”

  Karen takes the glitter frog, holds it in the palm of her hand.

  Aaron says, “Neither do they.”

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  AVERY

  She’s sitting on a bench outside the bus station in Baker City, feeling the dust and the heat seep through her skin. Regrets are crawling around her veins like one hit too many of a cheap upper. It’s already late afternoon, but the next bus won’t be leaving for hours. She watches the cars pass on the interstate to the east. The rolling foothills to the west bake golden in the hundred-and-ten-degree air.

  It’s probably too hot for the glitter frogs and she’s glad. She doesn’t think she could handle their disappointment on top of her own.

  “Should’ve just stayed in the car,” she tells herself, but when she thinks about Aaron’s wide eyes and mumbling, of wandering the western states without a single fucking clue where they’re going, feeling less and less connected to the world . . . she doesn’t really regret leaving them.

  There’s no shame in getting scared and buying a ticket back to Centralia, she tells herself. Her mom cried on the phone when she said she was coming home. It’s been more than a year.

  A car pulls into the parking lot, kicking up a plume of orange dust that obscures the semis behind it. It’s red, an old, kinda boxy car, probably one from the ’90s or something. The windows are up, so it’s got air conditioning.

  The man who gets out of the car is tall, and he’s got long brown hair that he hasn’t bothered to tie back. He’s wearing tight jeans and a green Dartmouth T-shirt. His sneakers look new, even from halfway across the lot. He leans on the driver’s side door, looking at the building, at her. He’s frowning like he’s looking for someone. He checks his iPhone before slipping it into the pocket of his jeans.

  The only sounds are the thud of the car door shutting, the interstate beside them, and the scuff of his feet on the faded asphalt. Avery puts a hand on her ratty old backpack, but she doesn’t move it off the bench. He comes so close that she can see her wind-burnt, sun-scorched face reflected in his shades. Strands of his hair drift in the breeze like spider silk.

  “Hey,” he says. “You wouldn’t have happened to see a car or a van or something here recently? Maybe an older one. There’s probably be a couple people in it about our age.”

  “You got a cigarette?” Avery asks. There’s this sick feeling in the pit of her stomach, because she already knows who he’s asking about. And she doesn’t know if she should play stupid or what.

  He glances over his shoulder at the car and then shakes his head. “I don’t have any tobacco, sorry.”

  “Weed’s fine,” she says, but she already knows he’s not going to give her any.

  He puts his sunglasses on his forehead and digs his phone back out of his pocket. He swipes past some screens and then holds it out to her. Avery has a brief impulse to grab the phone and run, but there’s really nowhere to go from here and it’s too fucking hot for that kind of shit.

  “I’m looking for this guy,” he says. “I was supposed to meet him here, but my flight home from school was late and I couldn’t get here any earlier.”

  Of course it’s a picture of Aaron. It’s Aaron and the boy standing in front of her. They’re sitting on the edge of a fountain, holding hands, heads bent, foreheads touching.

  Avery feels something rising inside. Fear, anger, self-loathing. She’d be down that road already, in a car full of frogs, going to meet the aliens, finally, if she hadn’t been so fucking afraid. Because what if they turn us inside out, and what if they get tired of us and shove us out the airlock, and what if it means leaving everyone we know behind, coming back in four hundred years. She wants to scream at this guy to fuck off and leave her alone, and she almost does.

  But there’s such a sad look on his face. She pulls her backpack off the bench to the ground next to her feet. “You just missed them,” she says.

  “You know him? Oh, god, how long ago did they leave?”

  Avery shrugs, “Like an hour ago.”

  “Do you have his number? I mean, to whatever phone he’s got now? I tried to call him back but the number didn’t work. Maybe if I can call him . . .”

  Avery hates him a little bit for his assumption that he can show up at the last minute in all his Ivy League glory and be welcomed. “He’s not going to come back, you know,” she says. She flips the phone to his address book and puts the newest number in under Aaron’s name. There are four old numbers there, all defunct.

  “Thanks,” he says, and he dials immediately, pacing in the dust, in and out of the shade. When he says, “Fuck,” Avery knows that the phone has gone to voice mail. If this surprises him, it makes Avery think that he must not have known Aaron all that well.

  “Aaron,” he says, and then there’s a pause before he continues. “It’s Christian. I made it to Baker City and there’s a guy here who says I just missed you, but I meant to be here, really. I want to see you. Your parents have been crazy for the past year and a half, absolutely batshit. I’ll be waiting here. Call me back.”

  Then he sends a text, and another, and finally slumps on the bench beside her.

  “He’s not coming back,” she says. “And I’m not a dude.”

  “Oh, oh, I’m so—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says, waving his apology away like a cloud of gnats.

  They sit together on that bench while the sun crosses the sky and slips behind the hills, barely talking. Christian’s got questions, of course. He wants to know where they’ve been, where they were going, how Aaron’s been doing. Avery shuts him down. She’s marking time until she can get on the bus and head back to the real world. It kills her that he doesn’t seem to have figured out that they’ve both missed their chance. Some people you can’t explain this shit to. They’ve got to figure it out on their own.

  When the bus comes, she flips her hair out of her face and says goodbye to Christian, who’s checking his phone again. She slides into a stained fabric bus seat that smells a lot like spilled coffee and a little like piss. He’s sitting alone when the bus drives off, waiting in the night for a phone call that’s never going to come.

  ALIEN BABIES

  The car is full of four teenagers and too many glitter frogs, sitting on laps, on feet, on the floor, in the back window. The car rattles down a dirt road somewhere in Utah, a ranch exit fifty or eighty or a hundred miles from civilization.

  They’re driving with no lights, leaving the freeway far behind. It’s a full moon so they can see the road anyway, their eyes adjusted to night. Tristan is driving. Aaron is drumming his hands on the dashboard, making up for the radio that he turned off once I-84 turned south, way back in Idaho.

  In the back seat, J is staring out the window at nothing. Karen’s sitting on the driver’s side, head pressed against the back of Tristan’s seat. She keeps thinking that she should have stayed in Baker City with Avery
, but she doesn’t say a single word.

  The car hits a bump so hard that their asses all leave the seats. Aaron stops drumming. “Here,” he says. “STOP HERE.”

  Tristan stomps the brakes, and there’s an exhalation of breath from slamming into the chest straps of their seatbelts, and then Tristan kills the motor. Silence.

  Aaron climbs out of the car first, the dust of the road under his boots soft and dry. The air has gone cold, but he imagines he can still feel the warmth of the rocks underfoot. The others, human and glitter frog, follow him out of the car.

  “Now what?” Tristan asks, the words strange in a place so quiet. Behind them is the buzzing rattle of someone’s phone left in the car.

  Aaron skids down the embankment, dislodging dirt and gravel in a rush, and he starts walking away from the road. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen so many stars.

  At first he thinks that the glitter frogs are catching up with him as he walks, but then he realizes that these are new frogs. More frogs. He can’t see where they’re coming from, but there are more, and more, until the ground is a shifting mass of glittering sparks.

  He stops, waits for the others to catch up with him, waits for Tristan to be close so he can grip the other boy’s hand tight in his. They are barely breathing for the anticipation. Karen takes Aaron’s other hand, and J takes Tristan’s. Together, they wonder what the ship will be like, the stars, the swiftly receding earth.

  All around them, spread out for miles as dense as carpet, the glitter frogs begin to sing.

  Gregory Benford is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University, and in 1995 received the Lord Prize for contributions to science. In 2007 he won the Asimov Award for science writing. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel Timescape. He has published forty-two books, mostly novels.

  Dark Heaven

  GREGORY BENFORD

  The body was bloated and puckered. The man looked to be in his thirties maybe, but with the bulging face and goggle eyes it was hard to tell. His pants and shirt were gone so he was down to his skivvies. They were grimy on the mud beach.

  That wasn’t unusual at all. Often the Gulf currents pulled the clothes off. Inquisitive fish or sharks came to visit, and indeed there was a chunk out of the left calf and thigh. Someone had come for a snack. Along the chest and belly were long raised red marks, and that was odd. McKenna hadn’t seen anything like that before.

  McKenna looked around but the muddy beach and stands of reeds held nothing of interest. As the first homicide detective there it was his case, and they were spread so thin he got no backup beyond a few uniforms. Those were mostly just standing around. The photo/video guy was just finishing with his systematic sweep of the area.

  The body didn’t smell. It had been in the salt water at least a day, the medical examiner had said, judging from the swelling. McKenna listened to the drone of the ME’s summary as he circled around the body, his boots scrunching on the beach.

  Outside Mobile and the coastal towns, most bodies get found by a game warden or fisherman or by somebody on a beach party who wanders off into the cattails. This one was apparently a wash-up, left by the tide for a cast fisherman to find. A kid had called it in. There was no sign of a boating accident and no record of men missing off a fishing boat; McKenna had checked before leaving his office.

  The sallow-faced ME pointed up to a pine limb. “Buzzards get the news first.” There were three up there in the cypress.

  “What are those long scars?” McKenna asked, ignoring the buzzards.

  “Not a propeller, not knife wounds. Looks swole up.” A shrug. “I dunno for now.”

  “Once you get him on the table, let me know.”

  The ME was sliding the corpse’s hands into a metal box with a battery pack on the end. He punched in a command and a flash of light lit the hand for an instant.

  “What’s that?” McKenna pointed.

  The ME grinned up at him as he fitted the left hand in, dropping the right. “I thought the perfessor was up on all the new tech.”

  McKenna grimaced. Back at the beginning of his career he had been the first in the department to use the internet very much, when he had just been promoted into the ranks that could wear a suit to work. He read books too, so for years everybody called him the “perfessor.” He never corrected their pronunciation and they never stopped calling him that. So for going on plenty years now he was the “perfessor” because he liked to read and listen to music in the evenings rather than hang out in bars or go fishing. Not that he didn’t like fishing. It gave a body time to think.

  The ME took his silence as a mild rebuke and said finally, as the light flashed again, “New gadget, reads fingerprints. Back in the car I connect it and it goes wireless to the FBI database, finds out who this guy is. Maybe.”

  McKenna was impressed but decided to stay silent. It was better to be known as a guy who didn’t talk much. It increased the odds that when you did say something, people listened. He turned and asked a uniform, “Who called it in?”

  It turned out to be one of the three kids standing by a prowl car. The kid had used a cell phone, of course, and knew nothing more. He and his buddies were just out here looking, he said. For what, he didn’t say.

  The ME said, “I’d say we wait for the autopsy before we do more.” He finished up. Homicide got called in on accidental deaths, suicides, even deaths by natural causes, if there was any doubt. “How come you got no partner?” the ME asked.

  “He’s on vacation. We’re shorthanded.”

  McKenna turned back to the beach for a last look. So the case was a man in his thirties, brown hair cropped close, a moustache, no scars. A tattoo of a dragon adorned the left shoulder. Except for the raised red stripes wrapped around the barrel chest, nothing unusual that McKenna could spot. But those red ridges made it a possible homicide, so here he was.

  Anything more? The camera guy took some more shots and some uniforms were searching up and down the muddy beach but they weren’t turning up anything. McKenna started to walk away along the long curve of the narrow beach and then turned back. The ME was already supervising two attendants, the three of them hauling the body onto a carry tarp toward the morgue ambulance. “Was it a floater?” McKenna called.

  The ME turned and shouted back, “Not in long enough, I’d say.”

  So maybe in the Gulf for a day, tops, McKenna figured as his boots squished through the mud back to his car. Without air in the lungs, bodies sank unless a nylon jacket or shirt held a bubble and kept them on the surface. More often a body went straight down to the sand and mud until bacteria in the gut did its work and the gas gave lift, bringing the dead soul back into sunshine and more decay. But that took days here so this one was fresh. He didn’t have to wait on the ME to tell him that, and except for fingerprints and the teeth that was probably all the physical evidence they would ever get from the poor bastard back there.

  The ME caught up to him and said, “He’s real stiff, too, so I’d say he struggled in the water a while.”

  McKenna nodded. A drowning guy burns up his stored sugar and the muscles go rigid quickly.

  Two uniforms were leaning against his car, picking their teeth, and he answered their nods but said nothing. This far from Mobile McKenna was technically working beyond his legal limits, but nobody stood on procedure this far into the woods. Not on the coast. The body might be from Mississippi or even Louisiana or Florida, given the Gulf currents, so jurisdiction was uncertain, and might never be decided. A body was a body was a body, as an old New Orleans cop had told him once. Gone to rest. It belongs to no one anymore.

  People started out in life looking different. But they ended up a lot alike. Except this one had some interesting ridges.

  McKenna recalled being called out for bodies that turned out to be parts of long-drowned deer, the hair gone missing from decay. People sometimes
mistook big dogs and even cows for people. But he had never seen any body with those long ridges of reddened, puckering flesh on anything. At least those made this case interesting.

  He paused in the morning mist that gathered up from the bayou nearby and watched the impromptu funeral cortège escort the body away, prowl cars going first, crunching along the narrow oyster shell road. The kids were staring at the body, the uniforms, eyeing every move.

  Routine, really, probably leading to nothing at all. But something about this bothered him and he could not say what.

  He drove back toward Mobile with the window open to the pine-scented spring breezes. To get back from Bayou La Batre, you turn north toward U.S. 90. But he kept going east on two-lane blacktop. At a Citgo station a huge plastic chicken reared up from the bed of a rusted-out El Camino, pointing to a Sit’n Rest Restaurant that featured shrimp and oysters and fresh catch, the proceeds of the Gulf that had long defined Bayou La Batre.

  The book that turned into the movie Forrest Gump was set partly around there and the whole place looked it. But Katrina and the hurricanes that came after, pounding the coast like an angry Climate God, had changed the terms of discussion. As if the aliens hadn’t, too.

  He watched people walking into the Sit’n Rest and wondered if he should stop and eat. The sunset brimmed the empty sky with rosy fingers, but he didn’t feel like eating yet. There was a bottle of Pinot Grigio waiting at home and he somehow didn’t want to see people tonight. But he did want to swing by the Centauri Center. The ones around here regarded everybody else as “farmers,” as locals along the coast refer to anyone who lives inland. Tough and hard-working people, really, and he respected them. They could handle shrimp, hurricanes, civil rights, Federal drug agents, so why should aliens from another star be any more trouble? At least the aliens didn’t want to raise taxes.

  And he had taken this case off the board right away, back in Mobile, because it gave him a chance to go by the Centauri Center. He kept going across the long flat land toward the bay, looking for the high building he had read about but never seen. The Feds kept people away from here, but he was on official business.