Collected Short Fiction, page 1348
Today, though, a great brownish-black column was climbing toward the stratosphere out of the fire zone down there. As it hit the upper air it turned blunt and spread laterally, forming a dismal horizontal dirty smear across the middle of the sky.
Whole towns must be going up in flames! He wondered about his brother Mike, right there in the middle of the city: whether he was okay, whether the fire was threatening his neighborhood at all. The Colonel reached tentatively for the phone at his hip. Mike was usually part of the volunteer airborne fire-fighting crew that went up to dump chemicals on fires like this. He had gone to New Mexico last week; but if he was back, he was in all likelihood up there right now fluttering around in some rickety little plane.
If he wasn’t back, though, the Colonel would probably just get Mike’s wife Cindy on the phone. He didn’t enjoy talking to her. Cindy was too aggressively perky, too emotional, too goddamned strange. She spoke and acted and dressed and thought like some hippie living thirty years out of her proper era. The Colonel didn’t like the whole idea of having someone like Cindy being part of the family, and he had never concealed his dislike of her from Mike. It was a problem between them.
The phone rang and rang. No answer at his brother’s house; no way to leave a message, either. A backup number came up on the little screen: Cindy’s jewelry studio. No answer there either.
A second backup number appeared—the gallery in Santa Monica where she had her retail shop. A clerk answered, a boy who by the sound of his high scratchy voice was probably about sixteen. The Colonel asked for Mrs. Carmichael. Hasn’t been in yet today, the clerk said. The kid didn’t sound very concerned. He made it seem as if he was doing the Colonel a favor by answering the phone at all. Nobody under twenty-five had any respect for telephones. They were all getting biochips implanted, the Colonel had heard. That was the hottest tiling now, passing data around with your forearm pressed against an X-plate. Or so his nephew Paul had said. Paul was twenty-seven, or so—young enough to know about these things. Telephones, Paul had said, were for dinosaurs.
“I’m Mrs. Carmichael’s brother-in-law,” the Colonel said. “Ask her to call me when she comes in, will you, please?”
“Is there some problem?”
“I don’t know if there is or not. I’m up in Santa Barbara, and I was wondering whether . . . the fire, you know . . . their house . . .”
“Oh. Right. The fire. It’s, like, out by Simi Valley somewhere, right?” The kid said it as if that were in some other country. “The Carmichaels live, like, in L.A., you know, just above Sunset. I wouldn’t worry about them. But I’ll have her phone you if she checks in with me. She have your implant access code?”
“I just use the regular data web.” I’m a dinosaur, the Colonel thought. I come from a long line of them. “She knows the number.” As soon as he clipped the cellphone back in his waistband it made the little bleeping sound of an incoming call.
“Yes?” he said, a little too eagerly.
“It’s Anse, dad.” His older son’s deep bail tone. The Colonel had three children, Rosalie and the two boys. Anse—Anson Carmichael IV—was the good son, decent family man, sober, steady, predictable. The other one, Ronald, hadn’t worked out quite as expected. “Have you heard what’s going on?”
“The fire? The critter’s from Mars? Yes. Rosalie called me about it about half an hour ago. I’ve been watching tire TV. I can see the smoke from out here on the porch.”
“Dad, are you going to be all right? The wind’s blowing east to west, straight toward you. They say the Santa Susana fire’s moving into Ventura County already.”
“That’s a whole county away from me,” the Colonel said. “It would have to get to a lot of other places first.—How are things down your way, Anse?”
“Here? We’re getting Santa Anas, sure, but the nearest fire’s up back of Anaheim. Not a chance it’ll move down toward us. It’s you I’m worried about, Dad.”
“Don’t. Fire comes anywhere within thirty miles of here, I’ll get in tire car and drive up to Monterey, San Francisco, Oregon, someplace like that. But it won’t happen. We know how to cope with fires in this state. I’m more interested in these E-Ts. What the devil do you suppose they are? This isn’t all just some kind of movie stunt, is it?”
“I don’t think so, dad.”
“No. Neither do I, really. Nobody’s that dumb, to set half of L.A. on fire for a publicity event. I hear that they’re in New York and London and a lot of other places too.”
“Washington?” Anse asked.
“Haven’t heard anything about Washington,” said the Colonel. “Haven’t heard anything from Washington, either. Odd that the President hasn’t been on the air yet.”
“You don’t think they’ve captured him, do you?”
The Colonel laughed. “This is all so crazy, isn’t it? Men from Mai’s marching through our cities—No, I don’t suppose they’ve captured him. I figure he must be stashed away somewhere very deep, having an extremely lively meeting with the National Security Council. Wouldn’t you say so?”
“We don’t have any kind of contingency plans for alien invasions, so far as I know. But I’m not up on that sort of stuff these days.” Anse had been an officer in the Army’s materiel-procurement, arm, but he had left the service about two years back, tempted away by a goodly aerospace-industry paycheck. The Colonel hadn’t been pleased. After a moment Anse said, sounding a little uncomfortable, as he always did when he said something he didn’t really believe simply because he suspected the Colonel wanted to hear it, “Well, if it’s war with Mars, or wherever it is they come from, so be it. I’m ready to go back in, if I’m needed.”
“So am I. I’m not too old. If I spoke Martian, I’d volunteer my services as an interpreter. But I don’t, and nobody’s been calling me for my advice so far, either.”
“They should,” Anse said.
“Yes,” the Colonel said, perhaps a little too vehemently. “They really should.”
There was silence at the other end for a moment. They were reading on dangerous territory.
Anse said, finally, “You want to hear one more crazy thing, Dad? I think I caught a glimpse of Cindy on the news this morning, in the crowd at the Porter Ranch mall.”
“Cindy?”
“Or her twin, if she has one. Looked just like her, for sure. Five, six hundred people standing outside the entrance of the WalMart watching the E-Ts go walking by, and for a second the camera zoomed down and I was sure I saw Cindy right in the front row. The hair was like hers, dark, cut in bangs. Big earrings, the hoops she always wears.—Well, maybe it was someone else. But I wouldn’t put it past her, going up to that mall to look at the E-Ts.”
“It would have been cordoned off right away, the moment the critters arrived. Not likely that the police would have been letting rubberneckers in. You must have been mistaken.”
“Maybe so.—Mike’s out of town, right?”
“Yes,” said the Colonel. “Supposed to be back today. Called his house, got no answer. If he’s back already, I suspect he’s gone out on volunteer fire duty the way he always does.”
Anse laughed. “Old Mike would have a fit if it. turned out that that really was Cindy out there at the mall with the E-Ts.”
“I suppose he would. But that wasn’t Cindy out there.—Listen, Anse, I do appreciate your calling. Stay in touch, okay?”
She had never seen anything so beautiful. She had never even imagined that such beauty could exist.
The place was palatial. Every chamber was at least twenty feet high. The shining walls tapered upward in eerie zigzag angles, meeting far overhead in a kind of Gothic vault, but not rigid-looking the way Gothic was. Instead there was a sudden twist and leap up there, a quick baffling shift of direction, as though the ceilings were partly in one dimension and partly in another.
And the ship was one huge hall of mirrors. Every surface, every single one, had a reflective metallic sheen. Wherever your eye came to rest you saw a million ricocheting shimmering images, receding dizzyingly to infinity. There didn’t seem to be any actual sources of illumination in here, just a luminous glow that came out of nowhere, as though being generated by the back-and-forth interaction of all those mirror-bright metal surfaces.
And the plants . . . the flowers . . .
Cindy loved plants, tire stranger the better. The garden of their little Laurel Canyon house was dense with them, chosen for their tropical strangeness, their corkscrew stems and spiky leaves and unusual variegations.
But her garden looked like a dull prosaic bunch of petunias and marigolds compared with the fantasy-land plants that grew everywhere about the ship, drifting freely in mid-air, seemingly having no need of soil or water.
Forking things with fleshy turquoise leaves big enough to serve as mattresses for elephants; plants that looked like clusters of spears, and one that had a lightning-bolt shape, and some that grew upside-down, standing on fanned-out sprays of delicate purple foliage. And the flowers! Green blossoms with bright inquisitive magenta eyes at their centers; furry black flowers, tipped with splashes of gold, that throbbed like moth-wings; flowers that seemed to be made out of silver wire; flowers that looked like tufts of flame; flowers that emitted low musical tones.
Cindy loved them all. She yearned to know their names. Her mind went soaring into ecstasy at the thought of what a botanical garden on Planet Hesteghon must look like.
Eight hostages were in here with her, the youngest a girl of about eleven, the oldest a man who looked to be in his eighties. They all seemed terrified. They were sitting together in a sorry little heap, sobbing, shivering, praying, muttering. Only Cindy was up and around, wandering through the immense room like Alice let loose in Wonderland.
It weirded her out to see how miserable the others all were in the presence of such fantastic beauty.
“No,” Cindy told them, coming over and standing in front of them. “Stop crying! This is going to be the most wonderful moment of your lives. They don’t intend to harm us.”
A couple of them glared at her. The ones who were sobbing sobbed harder.
“I mean it,” she said. “I know. These people are from the planet Hesteghon, which you could have read about in the Testimony of Hermes. The Hesteghon people come to Earth every five thousand years. They were the original Sumerian gods, you know. Taught the Sumerians how to write on clay tablets. On an earlier visit they taught the Cro-Magnons to paint on cave walls.”
“She’s a lunatic,” one of the women said. “Will somebody please shut her up?”
“Hear me out,” Cindy said. “I promise you, we’re absolutely safe in their hands. On this visit their job is to teach us at long last how to live in peace, forever and ever. Weil be their communicants. They’ll speak through us, and we’ll carry their message to all the world.” She smiled. “You think I’m a nut case, I know, but I’m actually the sanest one here. And I tell you—”
Someone screamed. Someone pointed, stabbing her finger wildly into the air. They all began to cower and cringe.
One of the aliens had entered the huge room. It stood about ten yards to her rear, swaying gently on the little tips of its walking-tentacles. There was an aura of great tranquility about it. Cindy felt a wonderful stream of love and peace emanating from it. Its two enormous golden eyes were benign wells of serene radiance.
They are like gods, she thought. Gods.
“My name is Cindy Carmichael,” she told the alien straight away. “I want to welcome you to Earth. I want you to know how glad I am that you’ve come to fulfill your ancient promise.”
The giant creature continued to rock pleasantly back and forth. It did not appeal to notice that she had spoken.
“Talk to me with your mind,” Cindy said. “I’m not afraid of you. They are, but I’m not. Tell me about Hesteghon. I want to know everything there is to know about it.”
One of the airborne flowers, velvety black with pale green spots on its two fleshy petals, drifted nearer to her. There was a crevice at its center that, looked remarkably like a vagina. From that long dark slit emerged a little tendril that quivered once and gave off a low-pitched blurt of sound. Abruptly Cindy found herself unable to speak. She had lost the power of shaping words entirely. But there was nothing upsetting about, that; she understood that the alien simply did not want her to speak just now. When it was ready to restore her ability to speak it would certainly do so.
A second quick sound came from the slit at the heart, of the black flower, a higher-pitched one than before. And Cindy felt the alien entering her mind.
It was almost a sexual thing. It went inside her smoothly and easily and completely, and it filled her just as thoroughly as a hand fills a glove. She was still there inside herself, but there was something else in there too, something immense and omnipotent, causing her no injury, displacing nothing, but making itself at home in her as though there had always been a space within her large enough for the mind of a gigantic alien being to occupy.
She felt it massaging her brain.
That was the only word for it: massaging. A gentle soothing kneading sensation, as of fingertips lovingly caressing the folds and convolutions of her brain. What the alien was doing, she realized, was methodically going through her entire accumulation of knowledge and memory, examining every single experience of her life from the moment of birth until this second, absorbing it all. In a few seconds it was done with the job, and now, she knew, it would be able to write her complete biography, if it wanted to. It knew whatever she knew, the street she had lived on when she was a little girl and the name of her first, lover and the exact design of the star sapphire ring she had finished making last Tuesday, and all the rest of the things in her mind, including a good many things, very probably, that she had long ago forgotten herself.
Then it withdrew from her and she could speak again and she said as soon as she could, “You know now, don’t, you, that I’m not frightened of you. That I love you and want to do everything I can to help you fulfill your mission.”
And, since she suspected it preferred to communicate telepathically instead of by voice, she said to it also, silently, with all the mental force that she could muster.
Tell me everything about Hesteghon.
But the alien did not seem to be ready to tell her anything. It contemplated her gravely and, Cindy drought, tenderly, but she felt no sense of contact with its mind. And then it went away.
The Colonel’s phone bleeped again. A hearty booming unfamiliar voice said, “Anson? Anson Carmichael? Lloyd Buckley here!”
“I’m sorry,” the Colonel said, a little too quickly. “I’m afraid I don’t know—”
Then he placed the name, and his heart began to pound, and a prickle of excitement began running up and down his back.
“Calling from Washington.”
Buckley. The Colonel remembered him. Big red-faced man, loud, cheery, smart, Career State Department man; during the latter years of the Clinton administration an assistant secretary of state for third-world cultural liaison who had done diplomatic shuttle service in Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Seychelles, and other post-Cold-War hot-spots. A student of military history, he liked to call himself, brandishing the names of Clausewitz, Churchill, Fuller, Creasy. Fancied himself something of an anthropologist, too. Had audited one semester of the course that the Colonel had taught at the Academy, the one in the psychology of non-western cultures.
“You’ve been keeping up with the situation, naturally,” Buckley said. “You’re not having any problem with those fires, are you?”
“Not here. They’re a couple of counties away.”
“Good. Good. Splendid.—Seen the Entities on the tube yet? The shopping-mall thing, and all?”
“The Entities, is that what we’re calling them, then?”
“The Entities, yes. The aliens. The extraterrestrials. The invaders. ‘Entities’ seems like the best handle, at least for now. Nice neutral term. ‘E-T is too Hollywood and ‘Aliens’ makes it sound like a problem for the Immigration & Naturalization Service.”
“And we don’t know that they’re invaders yet, do we?” the Colonel said. “Do we? Lloyd, tell me what the hell this is all about.”
Buckley chuckled. “As a matter of fact, Anson, we were hoping you might be able to tell us. Do you flunk you could get your aging bones off to Washington first thing tomorrow? The White House has called a meeting of high honchos and overlords to discuss our response to the . . . all . . . event, and we’re bringing in a little cadre of special consultants. If we have an Air Force helicopter on your front lawn at half past Five tomorrow morning to pick you up, do you think you could manage to clamber aboard?”
The meeting was at the Pentagon, not the White House. That seemed unusual. But why should anything be usual today, with alien beings wandering the face of the Earth?
The main action, the Colonel knew by now, was in cities. Rio de Janeiro. Johannesburg. Moscow. Istanbul. Frankfurt. London. Oslo. Istanbul. Bombay. Melbourne. Et cetera, et cetera. Aliens all over the place, in fact, except for a few strikingly obvious places where they had somehow not bothered to land, like Washington D.C., and Tokyo, and Beijing.
The ships they arrived in were of various kinds, driven by varying means of propulsion that ranged from noisy thrust-driven chemical rockets up to the mysterious and unfathomably silent. Some came in on mighty trails of fire, like the one that had landed near Los Angeles. Some just popped into view out of nowhere, as the one in New York had done. Some landed in the middle of big cities, like the one in Istanbul that set itself down on the plaza between Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque and the one in Rome that parked itself in front of St. Peter’s, but others chose suburban landing sites.
They made no announcements, made no demands, decreed no decrees, offered no explanations. They didn’t say a tiling.
