Earthbound

10

After an energy-bar breakfast and cold coffee, we carried all our stuff down to the road and started walking, Namir in front and Dustin bringing up the rear, each of them armed with laser and pistol. It was a little too military for me, bad first impression, but I kept it to myself. We might be walking into an ambush.

The plane had measured a straight-line distance of 7.4 miles from the commune to the highway. That would probably come to about ten miles along the winding river road. So we should reach the commune by mid-day. My feet were a little tired and perhaps blistered. I felt every pebble in the road through my thin-soled shoes, but could avoid the big and sharp ones.

When we first started walking, we startled a deer drinking at the river’s edge. From then on the animals stayed away from us.

Better woodsmen might have suspected that the lack of wildlife meant that we weren’t alone. But our military contingent mainly knew the perils presented by city and desert. Namir did study the trees for snipers, I noticed, and scanned the ground, I supposed for trip wires and mines.

The semi-wild sylvan setting had been preserved, back in Dustin’s time here, by government edict. Thousands of acres had been gathered up and added to an existing federal parkland. Fruit Farm was “grandfathered in,” allowed to stay and operate as a private, non-mechanized cultural relic. We walked by what remained of the old mechanized farms, doomed by unprofitability to return to nature. Abandoned machinery turned into elaborate birdhouses, streaked with rust and guano. The vegetation that had replaced pasture and farmland, mostly scrub pine, was not as heavy and shadowy as the older forests, and it felt safer walking alongside it.

After about an hour and a half, we stopped under the shade of an old oak to rest, breaking out sandwiches from the NASA vending machines, welcome but starting to go a little stale.

Paul sorted through the stuff in the rolling mailbag. “We have food for two or three days, if they turn us away. What if we have to go back to the plane and find that it’s been vandalized—or just gone?”

“You said not many people could fly it,” Card said.

“Land it. It wouldn’t take much skill to take off, and then crash somewhere. I’m just wondering whether it might be towed away by some highway maintenance machine. Or pushed into the river to keep the road clear.”

“I’d guess not,” Card said. “I don’t think the maintenance robots are going anywhere without satellite communication and GPS.”

“Let’s worry about that when we have to,” Namir said. “How do we approach the commune? They’ll probably be expecting us.”

“They might be having lots of visitors,” Dustin said. “It’s going to be a popular place, once the power goes off permanently.”

“Sure,” Card said. “That accounts for the traffic jam all around us.” A butterfly wafted by in the quiet air. “This place would be in the middle of nowhere even if the autoway was working. You can’t just pull off the autoway and start hiking. People without airplanes would have to start wherever this road starts. And it’s probably not on maps.”

“Didn’t used to be,” Dustin said. “People who wanted our produce would make a day of it. Drive up this dusty old road with no signs.”

“Must’ve been pretty good vegetables,” I said.

“People are funny. We’d sell them stuff like elephant garlic, that we’d buy in bulk down in Sacramento. If it was odd, they would assume we grew it here.”

“Looked like a lot of crops when we flew over.”

“Bigger than when I was a kid, and we were more than self-sufficient then.”

“You said there were a couple of hundred back then,” I said. “Doesn’t look like that many now.”

“Hard to say, the hour we flew over. Lot of people resting up after morning chores and lunch.”

Namir sat down at the base of the oak and studied the scene with binoculars. He braced his elbow on his knee and turned the zoom lever all the way up, looking back down the road.

“See anything?” Elza said.

He shook his head slightly, still staring. “Feels like we’re being followed.”

“I had that feeling, too,” I said. “I thought it was just nerves.”

“Probably.” He lowered the binoculars, rubbed his eyes, and raised them to look again. Sharp intake of breath. “There.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Sun glint off something. Maybe metal, maybe a lens. Maybe a shiny leaf.”

“Sniper?” Paul said.

“No. I don’t think so. A rifle scope would be hooded, sniper or hunter. There it is again.”

I carefully didn’t look in that direction. “What should we do?”

“I’m tempted to wave and see if they wave back. If it’s a sniper with a gig laser, we’re all pot roast anyhow.”

“Like someone would carry that much weight into the woods,” Dustin said. “Even if the Earthers had one.”

Namir set down the binoculars and leaned back against the tree. He folded his hands on his chest and closed his eyes. “Probably wouldn’t be your Earthers, anyhow. More likely someone like us, interlopers after all that good organic food.”

Something splashed in the river, and I jumped. “Should we do something?”

“Just relax. We’ll be back in the woods in a couple hundred meters. I’ll hide at the edge and see if anyone’s following us.”

“We’ll be at the farm in another hour and a half,” Paul said.

“I’ll catch up. Leave one of the cells with me.”

I handed him mine. “Punch number one for Paul.”

He smiled at Paul. “Does this mean we’re a couple now?”

“Oral only. I have standards.”

“Two condoms.” He put the phone in his shirt pocket. “I’ll call before I leave. Or if I see anything.”

We rested under the tree for a while and then walked on unhurriedly. When we came to the woods where the river curved, Namir silently stepped into the brush and disappeared.

Dustin walked past me to take Namir’s point position and looked toward where he’d gone. “I’m impressed,” he said sotto voce.

I wasn’t sure this was smart. Namir was the only one of us who actually looked dangerous. That might be important in a confrontation.

Paul and I were as recognizable as movie stars, and to a lot of people we were symbols of treason. Cooperating with the Martians, giving in to the Others. Dustin looked like a college kid and Elza, a fashion model. Alba was so small she looked like a girl wearing a cop costume, though the riot gun gave her a certain air of authority. Card looked like an overweight couch vegetable, which I guess he was.

Namir had something in his eyes that the rest of us lacked. Not arrogance, but a kind of physical confidence, certainty. Like he’d done everything, and most of it well. He’d told me, though, back at the motor pool last night, that Card was the kind of guy you’d watch out for in a bar fight. Heavy but not slow, and hard to knock down.

Of course, you could always go to a different class of bar.

I was always kind of curious about that aspect of Earth culture, American culture. I’d left before I was old enough to drink legally, most places, so my experience was limited to one beer joint in the Galápagos, the Orbit Hilton, and the dome in Mars. On Mars, actually, above the colony. No boisterous drunks anywhere, no fisticuffs, just the occasional voice raised in dispute over a Scrabble word. All the fun I’d missed. But I did know not to pick a fight with someone who looked like my brother.

I’d forgotten how good it was to be out walking—my body had forgotten. Dutifully treading on the treadmill on ad Astra, walking one day and jogging the next, was no substitute for the real thing, no matter how exact or exotic the VR surround was. Walking the Malibu beach or the skyways of Koala Lumpur, my body knew I was a hamster on a treadmill in an interstellar cage.

I walked along like that, in a reverie, for maybe an hour, everybody not talking and not bunching up. We were trying to be inconspicuous but not sneaky, in case someone was watching or trailing us.

Then a familiar sound, the toy-piano Mozart Paul used on his cell. He put it to his ear and whispered something, then gave it a shake and tried again.

“Could it be low?” I said.

“I don’t know. It got a flash charge at the motor pool. Should still be good.”

He shrugged and held it out to me. The ON button glowed green. I put it to my ear. “Namir? Hello?” Nothing but a white-noise sound.

“Could he have turned yours on accidentally?”

“Don’t see how.” I handed his back. “I mean, you might turn it on, but you wouldn’t punch up the number accidentally.”

“Give it to me,” Elza said. “Hush.” She listened to it, stopping her other ear. After a minute she shook her head and handed it back. “If it’s in his pocket, you ought to hear something when he moves.”

“Unless he’s not moving,” I said.

We all flinched at a sudden machine-gun sound. “Just a woodpecker,” Alba said. “Pileated.” It was a big thing, right over us, bright red head.

I held up the phone. “So should I just talk to him?”

Elza nodded, still staring at the bird. “Yeah. Tell him to turn it off.”

“Hello, Namir?” I repeated his name twice, louder. “Maybe he turned it on accidentally, and dropped it?”

“Or there’s something wrong with it,” Paul said. “So we either go back and check on him, or wait for him here, or move on.”

“Move on,” Elza said when he looked at her. Everybody seemed to agree, except perhaps me. That cell phone had done some screwy things, but I didn’t remember it making calls on its own.

A couple more curves in the river, and we were almost there. The stockade looked more formidable from the ground than it had from the plane.

We studied it from hiding, on the edge of the woods, over a long, empty parking lot. To the right and left were cornfields, regularly spaced plants two and three feet high. The produce stand was empty, with a hand-lettered sign saying ARMAGEDDON OUT OF BUSINESS SALE. No guards visible, but the two guard towers probably had people behind the dark aiming slots.

The road had a chain across it with a CLOSED sign. “We ought to just leave the weapons behind and walk up to the door,” Paul said.

“I don’t know,” Dustin said. “No ace in the hole? We should leave someone in reserve.”

“How about just the women?” Elza said. “Carmen and Alba and I walk up to them unarmed. Buck naked.”

“No way,” Alba said.

“In underwear?” She grinned.

“I don’t have underwear, and you know it,” I said. “Let’s go back to ‘no guns.’”

“I am naked without a gun,” Alba said. “But it makes sense.” She took off her cop jacket and I left behind the sweater I’d stolen from Camp David, under which I might have concealed something more dangerous than my natural endowments. Elza left behind the pistol she’d been carrying in her waistband, the one that Paul had killed with. Protecting me.

Alba checked her cell and it worked on Paul’s number. She left the phone turned on and we set off, trying to walk casually despite being stared at, presumably from both sides.

It was still a dirt road, but hard like asphalt. I asked Alba about it.

“It’s probably laser-fused,” she said. “A lot of country folks do driveways like that.”

“Nice to know they have big lasers,” Elza said.

“Might have been hired out.”

“Stop right there,” an amplified male voice said. “Put up your hands.”

We were only about halfway to the door, maybe fifty meters away. It opened slightly, and two people came out in thick body armor with assault rifles. One of them beckoned.

We kept our hands raised and walked toward them. They didn’t point guns at us, but kept them ready, what the boys called “port arms.”

“You’re from the plane,” one of them said, a man.

“That’s right,” Elza said.

“Where are the others?”

“God damn,” the other one said, a woman. “You’re the Mars Girl.”

“When I was a girl,” I said automatically.

“How many others, Mars Girl?” the man said. “You can put your hands down.”

“Four.” We hadn’t discussed whether to lie.

“Hiding in the woods? Watching us?” He was looking past me, at the tree line.

“That’s right.”

“I think you mean three.”

“We got the one you left back down the road,” the woman said.

“You got him? What did you do?”

“Come inside,” the man said. He tipped his weapon toward the door.

“He’s my husband,” Elza said. “What did you do to him?”

“Inside.”

We went through the door and found ourselves surrounded by forty or fifty staring people in a crowded semicircle. There were some children and even two babes in arms. Two dogs, no guns. More women than men.

“Is this all of you?” I said.

“You don’t need to know,” the man said, but a couple of people shook their heads no. Somebody whispered the “the Mars Girl.” The burden of fame.

A big white man, bald with a close-cropped gray beard, stepped forward. He looked at the armed and armored man. His voice was loud and harsh: “Where are the others?”

“Hiding back in the woods.”

“Still heavily armed, I assume.” He pointed at the cell on Alba’s belt. “You want to call them and tell them to come on in? Unarmed, like you.”

“No, sir. I can’t do that.”

“‘Sir,’ is it?” He reached to the small of his back and drew a small black pistol. He put his other hand out. “Give me the phone.”

She did, and he looked at the green light, nodded, and spoke into it: “You’ve got five minutes. Come on in without your weapons, or I’ll shoot the black woman. Five minutes more, I shoot the black-haired one. Five minutes after that, the Mars Girl goes to heaven.” He pointed the gun up and fired it, a loud bang that echoed off the walls, and looked at his watch. He turned off the phone and handed it back to Alba.

“You’re serious,” she said.

“Oh, we’re always serious, here at Funny Farm.”

“I thought you were Fruit Farm,” I said.

“That was a joke, back when ‘fruit’ meant homosexual. It’s not funny anymore.”

“We meant to join you,” I said, “but if we’re not welcome, we can go on our way.”

“We’ll talk about that.” Alba’s phone beeped. “You can answer that.”

She did. “Hello… yes, he has.” She held up the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

“Your leader?” Alba shrugged. “If he wants to talk, he has to come here. He has four minutes and ten seconds.” He looked at his watch. “You have. Four minutes five seconds.”

“We have weapons,” Elza said, “but we never intended to use them on you. Only to add to the farm’s defenses.” Her voice was harsh and strained. Could he see that she was tensed to attack?

He stared at her. “What do you think they’ll do?”

“Why don’t you think, for a change, Rico?” A gray-haired woman walked out of the crowd. “This is not the way.”

She stood next to him with her hands on her hips. “I have a good idea. Let’s have the farm surrounded with a group of armed men, and then threaten to kill their women. Maybe they’ll leave their guns outside and come in for a chat.” She stepped closer to him. “Or maybe they’ll think with their balls, like some people I know, and come over the walls shooting, with nothing to lose.”

“I wasn’t really going to—”

“I know that, but what do they know?” She held out her hand to Alba. “Let me talk to them, quick.”

She took the phone. “Hello, hello? That ay-hole who just talked to you is not our leader.”

“Look, Roz—” She shot him a silencing look.

“Your people are free to leave,” she said into the cell, “and I wouldn’t blame them if they did. Or you could come join them, and we could talk.” She listened for a moment, nodding. “Okay. Which one of you is Carmen?”

I held out my hand, and she gave me the phone. It was Paul. “If it’s safe for us to come in, tell me where we first met.”

“Galápagos,” I said. “But wait.” I looked at the man with the gun. “What did you do to the man we left behind?”

“A tranquilizer dart. He’s still sleeping.”

“We want to see him, before this goes any further.”

“Easy enough,” the woman said. I followed her to the nearest building, which had a silver letter A over the door.

Namir was lying on a cot under a window, his shirt off and a white bandage around his neck. I felt above the bandage for a pulse. It was regular but shallow. “How did you get him past us?”

“GEV,” she said, ground-effect vehicle. “We took him around you, along the autoway.”

I asked Paul whether he’d gotten all that, and he had. “We’ll leave Card behind with most of the stuff.”

Roz and I went back outside. “So he’s not the leader. Are you?”

She laughed. “No one is, technically. It’s a paradise of democratic anarchy. But I was elected Primus this year, ‘first among equals.’ I get to listen to everybody and suggest who’s wrong.”

“Do you have any friends left?”

“A few. Life became simpler here when the whole world decided to join us in anarchy. We just chased all the strangers off and blew down two bridges. People can get to us, but it’s not easy.”

“That’s why there wasn’t anybody on the highway, the autoway?”

“Right. Takes a plane, and who knows how to fly one without satellites? You guys surprised us.”

“Glad you didn’t shoot us down.”

“Two people asked for permission. By the time I could respond, you were gone.”

“What would you have said?”

“Bring me their heads and save the bodies for the stewpot.” She smiled. “It was pretty obvious where you’d be landing. There was a lookout party in the woods with the GEV, so I called them and had them go take a look.”

“You’re pretty well-equipped for a bunch of Earthers.”

“Well, some of us are practical. But it’s back to nature for everybody Wednesday, right?”

“That’s what the Others say. Not like they’ve never lied.”

“Wait, now… the Mars Girl? You’ve actually met the Others?”

“Yes and no. They were behind glass, two-hundred-some degrees below zero. They talked to us through their intermediary, Spy, but it was like a pre-recorded message. Always is.”

“On the cube they look like big lobsters.”

“Kind of.” A lobster is a close cousin in comparison.

“Must’ve been terrifying.”

“We were scared.” But in a sense we weren’t, not in any familiar way. Helpless and in mortal danger, but it was so unreal that normal emotions were suspended, confused. I remembered smelling peanuts on Paul’s breath and wondering what the aliens would smell like, if we could smell them, but there was nothing else in the frosty air, just peanuts.

How can you tell when you’re kissing an elephant? went the joke when I was a girl. You can smell the peanuts on his breath.

“Do you have cube here, in case they send another message?” Elza said.

She nodded. “Somebody’s watching all the time. Fucking depressing, twenty-four-hour news. But nothing’s new.”

A young man walked over from the group at the door. “Two of them on their way, Roz.” We followed him back.

Paul and Dustin were carrying laser rifles. When they were about twenty feet away, they set them on the ground, and warily continued.

I stepped into the doorway, and Paul rushed to me. “You all right?”

“Fine. Namir seems okay, just sedated.”

“Police-issue tranquilizer dart,” Roz said from behind me, and held out her hand. “Oralee Roswell. They call me Roz.”

He looked through the door at all the people, nodding, counting. “So I guess it’s your move, Roz. What do we do now?”

She squinted up at the sun. “Too early for dinner. Come in for a drink?” The big gray-bearded guy, Rico, watched this exchange with a blank expression. He came along when we followed her, though.

The dining hall was a few decades past its prime, fading peeling green paint on warped plywood walls. It reminded me of the way the cafeteria smelled when I was a little girl. Layers of old stale food. We went through the dining hall, though, to a screened-in porch with clean blue plastic furniture and a nice rich farm smell from the pastures that surrounded it.

We made introductions on the way. It turned out that Dustin’s story was familiar to them; people at the Farm had been following our fortunes since we left the earth. The fact that his parents had left Fruit Farm as dissenting rebels had been forgotten. He was the Farm’s only famous alumnus.

Two other elders joined us, pulling together two of the plastic tables. One, probably male, was wraithlike, pale, tall, and thin, with a wispy halo of white hair.

“This building was new when we left,” Dustin said. “We kids helped paint the outside. It was dark red then, like a barn.”

“I remember it being red,” Rico said thoughtfully. “They painted it white when I was about ten.”

“Green after you left Earth,” the pale one said. “In the nineties sometime. Thanks, Analese.” A girl of about ten had brought in a tray of cups of steaming brown liquid with a mild aroma.

“We can’t grow coffee or tea here, of course, so we get used to this stuff. Yerba Buena.”

I tasted it. Maybe I wouldn’t get used to it. “You said you blew down two bridges what, yesterday?”

“A few hours after the power went out. We had some early-morning customers we had to escort out, first.”

“You just happened to have lots of high explosives lying around?” Dustin said, “And you knew how to use them?”

“We’ve been ready for a long time, since before I was born. The elders called it Code Red. It goes back to Lazlo’s Rebellion, when a total breakdown outside seemed possible, probable.”

“I was one of the bridge team,” Rico said. “Four of us trained by elders, where to set the charges and what to do. They’d been trained by their elders, and so on.”

“Lucky the charges still worked.”

“Yes. The alternative directions seemed more wishful thinking than sound engineering. But the antique explosives worked fine.”

“It was pretty loud even here,” Roz said.

Namir appeared at the door, walking unsteadily, a young woman supporting his elbow.

“The sleeper wakes,” Paul said.

“I walked right into a set-up,” he said. “As soon as you were out of sight, they popped me with a dart.”

“Our good luck and your bad,” the woman said. “I tried to aim for your shoulder, but you moved too fast. Wouldn’t hurt so much.”

He patted her on the back in mock affection. “My assailant, Miche Onadato. Glad you missed my eyes.”

I touched him. “You’re feeling all right now?”

He smiled at me. “Better than all right. What was in that shot you just gave me?”

“Epinephrine. You’ll feel great until you don’t.”

Roz brought over a chair for him. “So does your group have a plan?”

Dustin spoke first. “I guess our plan was to see whether you had a plan.”

Roz shook her head slowly. “It’s a farm. The calendar and the weather make our plans for us.”

“We know a lot about agriculture,” I said, “if you need help maintaining starship hydroponics.”

“You can grow a lot on twenty square meters, if you don’t have anything else to do,” Dustin said.

“When I was young, I did a lot of dirt farming on the kibbutz,” Namir said. “I could probably still control a shovel.”

Rico was studying him. “I think we’d rather have you on patrol, for the time being. You have military experience?”

“Of a kind.” Before he surrendered his commission, he was a colonel in the Mossad.

“Unlike us, he’s been shot at,” Dustin said. “Elza and I were intelligence officers, too, for the US. But I never shot at anything any more dangerous than a target.”

“Me neither,” Elza said, “until the other day.”

“I heard about that on the news,” Roz said. “You lost one of your number.”

“Stray round.” My voice caught. “She was just standing in the kitchen.”

Roz shook her head. “Sorry.”

“Probably be a lot of shooting,” Rico said, “before everybody runs out of ammo. Not many of us gonna be dying of old age.”

Roz gave him a tired look. “Maybe here.”

“You’ve been watching the news,” Elza said. “Is it all bad?”

Rico said yes, but Roz shook her head no. “There are other places like this, where they’re self-sufficient and well defended. Eugene, Oregon, is the closest.”

“You’re in contact with them?” I asked.

“Just by cell. Till Wednesday. I talked to their town manager, Benjie what’s-his-name?”

“Sweeney,” Rico supplied.

“Benjamin Sweeney.”

“We decided to have a meeting, a physical meeting, the first of every month. Starting a month from now, June first.”

“What were you going to meet about?” Paul asked.

She shrugged. “First off, a damage appraisal. See what we have and how we might help each other.”

“They have something you don’t?”

“Books, mainly. Non-electronic, printed paper books. Tens of thousands of them.”

“Why on Earth?” Elza said. “Is it a museum?”

“I guess it will be, and a library. Right now it’s a huge antique bookstore. There was a cube special about it, a couple of weeks ago. When it was just a curiosity.”

“Probably one in every big city,” Rico said. “Burned to the ground by now. So Eugene’s is special.”

I remembered Dad taking us to a huge paper bookstore in St. Petersburg, when I was little. Rare even then, I did a report on it for school. The owner had died of a mosquito bite in Africa, I suppose looking for books.

“Thought we’d talk to them about trading,” Roz said. “We have a lot of books, a couple of hundred. Not many of them useful, though.”

“Long walk?” I asked.

“A week or so. Depending on how straight a route we take.”

“You could fly,” Paul said. “I could get you there in twenty minutes.”

She cocked her head at him. “How big an operation would that be?”

“If the plane hasn’t been damaged, just have to turn it around. Five or six people. The autoway’s straight for more than a quarter mile there; I can take off easily. Eugene probably has an airport.”

“Lot of trouble to go look at some books,” Rico said.

“Might as well use the plane while we can,” Paul said. “Gonna be scrap metal in a few days.”

“You think it’s safe?” the pale elder said.

“No. But what is, nowadays?” He grinned at him. “As a plane, sure, it’s safe enough. It got us to Russia and back, by way of Maryland. It can make it to Oregon. If nobody shoots it down, and the Martian power keeps working.”

Her brow furrowed. “If the power went off, could you glide to a landing?”

“Maybe. There are emergency mechanical links to the control surfaces. But you have to find someplace flat, not too far away.” He looked around at the mountains surrounding us. “It would drop really fast.”

“So you would do it?” Rico said.

“Sure.” He said that a little too fast. What, me afraid?

“We might ought to use it for something more useful than books,” the other elder said.

“I could fly anywhere you want,” Paul said.

“Not much we need,” the pale one said. “Lead for bullets, primers, powder… all for reloads. You know of a place we could walk in and buy some. Or trade?”

“Not on this planet,” Roz said. “Same with other survival stuff. Even if you could find it, what would you use for money?”

“Maybe we shouldn’t fly anywhere,” Rico said. “Don’t remind people that we’re up here. Self-sufficient and comfortable.”

“For the time being,” the pale one said.

A little girl walked onto the porch, looking apprehensive. She silently raised her hand.

“What is it, Bits?” Roz said tiredly.

“Someone wants to talk to this lady.” She pointed at me. “The Mars lady?”

“Weren’t you told not to answer the phone?”

“He isn’t on the phone, Primus. He’s on the cube.”

“What does he look like?” I said.

“I think he’s a zombie. He don’t look real.”

“Doesn’t,” Roz said. She took the child by the hand, and we followed them through the cafeteria smells into a dark room with high windows and a central cube. In it, the image of Spy.

“Kid here says you look like a zombie,” Paul said.

“How perceptive. I’m not exactly alive.”

“You’re nearby,” I said. No lag in his reply.

“Close enough. Cable. Did you have a nice flight?”

“It was eventful. As you must know.”

He nodded. “You went to Russia and came back to the US, threatened to murder the president, and escaped to this bucolic paradise. Do you want to know whether the president’s security people are after you?”

“Would you tell us the truth?” Paul said.

“Ask Epimenides. They are not after you. Things are somewhat confused back at Camp David, not to mention Washington, but if you went back, they might give you a medal.”

“What about the president?” I said.

“Under house arrest, in a manner of speaking. The soldiers are negotiating via cell with their erstwhile enemies. It’s all very chummy, democracy in action.”

“Are we still going to lose power on Wednesday?” Roz said.

“As far as I know. Would you rather it be sooner?”

“Later would be nice,” I said. “Like not lose it at all. If there’s a lesson, we’ve learned it.”

“ ‘Don’t fuck with the aliens’? I suppose you have learned that. But I don’t think it’s actually a lesson. Someone wants to talk with you.”

His image faded and was replaced with one I didn’t at first recognize; he looked sort of like the pale elder, but with more hair, streaming in thick white Medusa locks. Then he spoke, without moving his lips: Moonboy, gaunt.

“You’re looking well,” he said.

While I was doing a sort of goldfish imitation, Namir found his voice: “Moonboy. You were frozen solid. You can’t be alive.”

The Others had chosen Moonboy to represent the human race in their deep-freeze zoo, even though he was not mentally or emotionally competent by our standards.

“I am more alive than any of you are, in terms of intellectual growth. I synapse faster, and my memory is not limited by organic considerations. I don’t lose my temper anymore.”

He still had a scar on his forehead from where Dustin had whacked him with a pool cue after Moonboy had broken his wife’s nose.

“How are you any different from Spy? You’re hooked up to the Others like him, and exist at their convenience.”

“Our shared history makes me different. Your group once had a person who loved me.”

“How do you feel about that?” Namir said. “The fact that Meryl is dead.”

His eyes blinked slowly. I don’t think he used them for seeing. “How could I feel things, Namir? As you pointed out, I’m long dead myself.”

Not as dead as Meryl, I thought. My palms still stung with blisters from the shovel we used for her grave.

“I’m not just a mouthpiece for the Others,” he said. “I can communicate with you in real time. When I’m speaking for them, I’ll hold my hand up, like this.”

He raised his right hand and left it up. “You present an interesting problem, the five of you whom we have met physically.”

“How nice that we’re interesting,” Namir said.

“Along with what I, Moonboy, remember, there is a context”—he shook his head, frowning—“a universe of discourse? Between humans and the Others. That is not simply predator and prey.”

“You can eat us?” Namir said. “That clears up a few things.”

“I know that is just humor. I caution you against using it. You don’t want me to misunderstand you.”

Moonboy put his hand back down. “I can say whatever I want to you, but of course they overhear. Do you have any questions?”

“An obvious one,” Paul said. “When the Others captured and froze you, we were all almost twenty-five light-years away from here. When they sent us back, it was as if no time had elapsed at all, but twenty-five years had passed on Earth.”

Moonboy nodded. “Twice twenty-five, there and back.”

“Was the transfer instantaneous to you? Or have you been thinking about things for a quarter of a century?”

“There is no plain answer. It did just take an instant, in the way you’re measuring time. But I thought a lot while that was going on, in a way that I perceive time. I’m sorry that’s not clear. Time itself is not what you think it is.”

Actually, that was about as clear as he had been when he was last alive. But he had started to lose it after a couple of years aboard ship. Then he broke Elza’s nose while they were having sex, and things went downhill fast from there.

In a way, that seemed like a couple of weeks ago. But I guess time is not what I think it is. “In what sense are the Others predators?” I asked. “How are we prey?”

“You offer the new,” he said. “Any new organism does. But social creatures, who can communicate about their surroundings, add another dimension.”

“So now the Others can leave us alone,” Namir said, “since we’re not new anymore.”

“How you react to what’s happening is always new. There is plenty left to happen.”

“And after they’ve learned enough?” I said.

“When you had biology in school, you dissected a cat.” I remembered talking with him about that, and nodded. “After you had learned enough about the cat, what did you do with it?”

“It wasn’t a cat anymore.”

“I suppose not.” He faded away.

“That was informative,” Namir said.

Spy appeared again. “This may not be the last time we want to talk to you. Please stay near a cube receiver, or carry a small one. It makes things simpler.”

“After the power goes out?” Namir’s fists were clenched.

“We can make do.” He flickered and disappeared.

“I wonder if that means they’ll eventually just go,” Paul said. “Once they learn enough.”

“Leaving us in pieces on the dissecting table,” Namir said.

We waited in the cube room for a few minutes, in case Spy had another afterthought. Then Paul and Namir went with two of the guys on GEVs, to clean up the jet, assuming it hadn’t already been plundered. Paul said he’d scavenge the portable cube from the plane, to carry in case Spy wanted to make a call.

Meanwhile, the rest of us worked on domestic arrangements. There was a cabin with only one couple in it, and they moved out with more grace than I would’ve displayed. We managed to fit in three pallets and two beds, each large enough for two people who didn’t mind touching. There was a rickety table with four chairs on the porch. The nearest toilet was a hundred meters away, but the room had a sink and three one-gallon jugs for carrying water. Rico found us an assortment of sheets, towels, and pillows.

We rested, waiting for the scavengers to return. I took a pallet on the floor, tired but not sleepy, glad to have a pillow.

Why had the Others contacted us? Just to make sure we knew they were watching? We would have been surprised if they weren’t. I went over the short exchange with Moonboy in my mind.

They were using us to collect new experiences. Had they ever told us that before? I wished Snowbird was still with us. Or one of the yellow family, ideally. They had more direct contact with the Others, though I wasn’t sure they understood them better.

We should call Snowbird, at Novisibirsk, and fill her in on everything that had happened. Wait until Namir comes back, to handle the Russian phone system.

Other than the stuff about collecting “the new,” what had we learned? Don’t joke with them; that was very useful. Moonboy claimed to experience time differently from us, but that’s probably true of all dead people.

Speaking directly for, or as, the Others, what had he said? With his hand up. That there is a “universe of discourse” connecting us and them. Things that we share. As predator and prey? Then he put his hand down, after warning Namir about joking. Did they say anything else through him?

Of course, there’s no reason to think Moonboy was telling the truth or, even if he was, it was for the purpose of helping us. Even before he died, it was hard to figure out what was going on in that unbalanced head.

I fell asleep and dreamed a memory of him on ad Astra, before he’d snapped. He was composing at the keyboard, which he’d always done silently, with earphones. In the dream he was playing out loud, the same four-note sequence over and over, a look of terrible Beethovenian concentration on his unlined face. The notes never varied in volume or phrasing. Someone once said that was a functional definition of insanity: doing the same thing time and again, always expecting a different outcome.

Dinner was a madhouse of cheerful disorganization. There was a big iron kettle of vegetable stew on an outdoor fire, and a smaller pot of deer-meat chili, peppery enough to make my eyes water. Plates of cornbread and biscuits.

Almost all of the eighty-nine people ate at the same time, mostly out on the porch or spilled onto the weedy lawn behind it. People drank yerba maté or a sugary drink with some citrus flavor. Everyone except the smallest children served themselves.

Eating with lots of people still made me nervous, after years on the cramped starship. But this rambunctious clan was easier than the formal dinners when we first returned, everybody staring at us and speculating.

Here, we were the invaders from outer space, and these folks rarely saw anyone outside their extended family. When the children stared, I just stared back.

I wondered about my own children—not the fifty-four-year-old twins I talked to through the Martian time-lag, just before we landed on Earth—but the youngsters who had grown up hardly knowing their mother. They’d been three and a half—not quite two ares—when I left on ad Astra. Their generation was all raised by professional parenters, so it wasn’t child desertion, no matter what it had felt like at the time to me. I watched these women here, scolding and playing with and fussing over their offspring, and felt an emptiness that couldn’t be there for Elza and Alba. No hole to fill.

But I wasn’t even a biological mother, just a gene donor who had occasionally played with the results. How much greater the lack would be for the woman who carried a person inside her for nine months, had it pulled from her body and then watched it, an actual piece of her own flesh, acquire a separate personality and go out into the world. That would leave a hole.

We would never talk again. Never even breathe the same air, feel the same gravity.

They could read all about Paul and me, and presumably had. Every clinical detail of our stressed hothouse lives aboard the starship was available for inspection. Maybe because anyone could read it, they would leave it alone.

At least I wouldn’t be entertaining observers with the interesting sexual geometries Elza and Meryl had experienced, assuming the public record was also a pubic record. But neither of them had children to be embarrassed by Mother’s example.

The scavengers came back during dinner with the happy news that the plane seemed not to have been touched; it was still locked up unharmed. They brought the rest of the weapons and powder ammunition. (The elder named “Wham-O” was in charge of recycling ammunition, but he had run out of primers, a little metal thing that’s pressed into the rear of the cartridge. Without that, the bullet won’t go anywhere, so primers were at the top of some theoretical wish list. Along with U-235 and the philosopher’s stone.)

Paul had the portable cube in a bright orange Sea Rescue knapsack. They also emptied out the jet’s liquor cabinet, mostly full bottles of whisky, rum, gin, and vodka. Some had obviously sampled a bit on the way home, but had managed not to wreck the floaters.

There was a raucous vote as to whether the devil’s brew ought to be saved, consumed on the spot, or destroyed. Some form of consensus wisdom prevailed, and they measured out one ounce apiece for each adult, and preserved an ounce for each child. The ones in their teens objected, but were somewhat mollified by the attraction of specialness: on their eighteenth birthdays, they would get something no one else could have.

I chose an ounce of rum, but gave it to Paul. Not that I didn’t sort of want it. But it wouldn’t relax me, and it did him.

Dustin had told us about a telescope that Wham-O maintained, an old thing they’d picked up at auction when Dustin was little. He had fond memories of looking through it at the stars and moon and planets. After dinner, we took candles out under the starry sky to the big shed where the machine was kept, on the other side of the cornfield.

The roof of the shed rolled off, squeaking into a rail frame, and there was the old machine, a long brass tube about a foot wide glittering in the candlelight. It was mounted on a heavy black cast-iron thing but was balanced exquisitely; you could move it around with a fingertip. We blew out all the candles, to preserve night vision.

Wham-O used a big brass key to wind a spring-driven clock mechanism that ticked and moved the tube so it would slowly track the stars.

He used a small telescope mounted on the side of the big one to point it. First we looked at Uranus, which he warned would not be too impressive, and that was an understatement. It was a little bluish green ball, shimmering in the dark, along with two faint stars he said were its brightest moons. Neptune wouldn’t be up for a couple of hours, but there wasn’t much to see there anyhow. Years ago, you could’ve seen its largest satellite, Triton, but the Others blew it up back in 2079. Warming up for the main act.

(Wham-O seemed personally offended that the Others had blown up Earth’s Moon. That deprived him of the telescope’s most impressive target.)

We looked at a couple of pairs of galaxies, faint, faraway ovals, and a brilliant double star, Gamma something. Then he pointed it to Mars.

I had to blink away tears. It wasn’t at all like the familiar sight of its globe from orbit—this fuzzy ball was too orange and indistinct. But it was clear enough, the white polar cap and the dark “continent” of Syrtis Major, and the broad Hellas desert, under which the Martians were living. Lying in wait, a trap, though neither they nor we had had any reason to suspect that.

I went back to stare at it some more after the others had looked. Probably the last time I would see my home planet.

I allowed myself to hope that we still had children and grandchildren there; that the Others had let them keep the technology they needed to live and breathe. They had not been humane with us, but not sadistic either, in spite of what the popular press claimed.

More mysterious than mean. If that made any difference to the outcome.

We looked at some more faint fuzzballs, distant galaxies less impressive than we’d seen earlier, and some wisps of interstellar cloud. It wasn’t boring, exactly, but the sky seemed full of bright stars that would be more interesting, and I wanted to see Mars again. I asked him about that, and he chuckled.

“Well, to tell you the truth, I want you all to be part of an experiment. I didn’t want you to look at anything bright for a few minutes.

“You know how to find Polaris?”

Paul had showed us that; I let Elza answer. Just draw a line from the two stars, the “pointers,” on the end of the Big Dipper’s bowl.

“Look there and tell me what you see.” Not much. Polaris was noticeably blue, but not very bright. The other stars in the Little Dipper were even dimmer, and hardly looked like a dipper at all.

Dustin noticed it first. “It’s darker.”

“That’s right,” Wham-O said. “Not a lot of stars around there. But what else?”

“No moonglow,” he said. “There’s… there’s not as much lunar debris in that direction?”

“Not much at all. If you look in that direction with the telescope, the sky is noticeably blacker. It’s been that way for a couple of days.

“Now look up there.” I could just see him pointing. “Up by Gemini and Taurus, the Pleiades.”

“It’s a lot brighter up there,” I said.

“Brighter than it used to be?”

“I’m certain of it,” he said.

“So the dust is moving away from the celestial pole,” Paul said, “toward the equator?”

“It looks that way to me.”

“So we’re going to wind up with a ring, like Saturn?” Dustin said.

“I don’t know that much about astronomy. I just know how to use the telescope.”

“Paul?” I said. He had a fresh Ph. D. in astrophysics.

“I didn’t study the solar system much. But my instinct says it would take a lot longer. Millions of years, at least.

“The Earth might have had rings when it was younger; might have had them and lost them several times. They weren’t gravitationally stable, not with the Sun and Moon pulling at them.”

“Saturn has moons with its ring,” Dustin said.

“But they’re not large compared to Saturn itself. The Moon was a quarter as big as the Earth.”

“So now that it’s not there,” Wham-O said, “maybe the Earth can have a ring?”

“Worth keeping an eye on.”

“So we could leave, right?” There was a spark of excitement in his voice. “Speaking as a space pilot… if all that crap was in a ring, you could just avoid it, couldn’t you?”

“I guess in theory you could just power in or out. Aim your spaceship somewhere and go there. But in fact, you can’t not be in Earth orbit. That orbit defines a plane that goes through the center of the Earth and would cut through the ring in two places.”

“Can’t you just, like, get on the North Pole and shoot straight up?”

“Sure, if you could get to the North Pole with a hell of a lot of fuel. Trade your horses and cows for some good sled dogs.”

“I’ll take it up with Roz.”

Paul was lost in thought for a minute. “You could do it, you know. Spaceports are near the equator for economy; use the planet’s rotation to add to launch speed. But if you had to launch from a pole, you could.”

“You’d want electricity, though.”

He shrugged. “Thought experiment. Big chemical fireworks, like Jules Verne. Besides, the power might come back.”

“Once the Others are through playing with us,” I said, which was the way a lot of conversations ended.

We lit a couple of the candles and walked back to the main house, quiet now with the children asleep. The adults were sitting around talking, drinking wine in the candlelight, rustic and romantic.

With a few unsubtle hints, Paul and I were allowed a bit of privacy in the cabin before the others came to bed.

I hadn’t had time to think about how much I missed that part of him, being alone with him. He felt that, too. We joke about men’s sexuality as if it were just stimulus and response and hydraulics. But Paul has always been gentle and sweet with me, maybe too gentle.

Not for the first time, I felt a little jealous of Elza, with her two men. Not so much Dustin—I guess I already have a philosopher. Namir was the big unknown, capable of who knows what. Strong, cabled arms; deep, troubled eyes.