Earthbound

13

About halfway through my second watch, I saw something curious. At first I thought it was a bright, slow meteor among all the streaking lights. But it didn’t go out. It shone steadily until I lost it in the trees to the north. An old satellite?

Card didn’t come back that night or the next morning. I told people he’d seemed depressed, but didn’t elaborate. Paul obviously knew there was something more to it, but didn’t press me.

When Paul woke up, I mentioned the light I’d seen in the sky.

“Wouldn’t be a satellite,” he said. “It was going south to north?”

“I’m sure of it.” It was in the Big Dipper when it disappeared in the trees.

“Can’t be an artificial satellite; they’re all long gone. Maybe an Earth-grazing asteroid; they can have eccentric orbits.” He explained about the plane of the ecliptic, and I sort of understood. “More likely, it’s something that belongs to the Others. Something rocks bounce off, or protected by a force like a floater’s pressor field.”

“That would work, up in orbit?”

“Who knows? No way to get up and find out.”

“Maybe it came from Mars,” I said. “If the Others didn’t take their power away.”

Elza was listening. “Or maybe it’s from Heaven. Baby Jesus finally decided to step in and help us out.”

“If Mars had power and could send a ship to Earth,” Paul said, “why would it be over here? They’d send it to Washington or London or someplace.”

“We’re here,” I said. “Martians.”

“But there’s no way for them to know that,” Elza said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with hoping.”

We waited until the sun cleared the mountains to the east. “Card knows where we’re going,” Namir said. “We mustn’t wait any longer.”

I wasn’t going to disagree, and after his scene at the wreck, I probably wasn’t alone in hoping we’d seen the last of him. And none of the others had last seen him down the barrel of a gun.

We still had the NASA mail cart, though it wasn’t very efficient on gravel. We had to cull through the books, leaving half of them with the Lerners. The ones we kept leaned heavily toward children’s books and general references like the Britannica set.

In exchange for all the books, they gave us one of the shovels, a folding campers’ model called an entrenching tool. I hoped we wouldn’t need it.

We did carry all the ammunition, and enough weapons so everyone had at least one. Namir carried the riot gun and a pistol. Elza, with only one arm functional, carried the other pistol and two bandoliers of machine-gun ammunition for Paul’s weapon. I had an assault rifle and a machete.

I hoped we looked too dangerous to attack. More dangerous than I felt. Besides the rifle strapped across my back and the machete bumping my leg, I had two gallons of water hanging front and back, and the encyclopedia from CAM to FRA, three volumes, in a cloth bag under my right arm. From CAMera to FRATERNITY I couldn’t be beaten, though in a gunfight I might be a little slow.

The cart made noise, crunching through the gravel, and it really took two people to haul it along efficiently. So we wound up moving it in shifts: two of us would stay with it, along with another guard, while the other three, plus Germaine, moved quietly forward. They would signal when the coast was clear, and we’d drag the load up to join them. Then switch teams, Germaine always in front, in case we met neighbors.

It actually wasn’t too inefficient, with everybody resting half the time and moving pretty fast otherwise.

We picked up speed when we reached the T and turned into a paved road. We made steady progress for about an hour, and then ran into people.

We saw each other from a long way off. They stopped and waited for us, nervous, outnumbered and outgunned.

Two men, two women, and a baby. One of the men was old and the other looked worse than Mr. Lerner, radiation burns on both bare arms and face. Haggard and ill-looking.

Paul spoke to them as we approached. “Hello. You were caught on the border?”

The older man was leaning on a rifle, perhaps trying to look casual. “The boy here was. He drove home, but now the car doesn’t work.”

“Where you headed?”

“Yreka. Place in Holstock said they didn’t have anything for radiation.”

“Going the long way,” Germaine said.

“They told us not to take 2031. You’d best not, either. Some gangers got the road blocked.” Good thing we were headed the other way.

“Goddamn Crips,” Germaine said. “Think they own the road.”

“Huh uh,” the young man said. “This is a car gang. If it was Crips I could walk through.” He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal an elaborate dragon tattoo on his chest.

That must have meant something to Germaine. She nodded. “No radiation meds in Holstock?”

“Sent us to Yreka.”

“I’ll come along, you don’t mind. My old man got burned, too.”

“I know you,” the man with the rifle said to me. “You’re that woman from Mars.”

I almost said yeah, people say I look like her, but the NASA clothes were kind of conspicuous.

“Does us a lot of good,” Paul said, facing the man.

He nodded slowly, perhaps taking in Paul’s munitions. “Sure, come on along,” he said to Germaine.

“Good luck getting home,” she said to Roz, and gave me a confused look. Woman from Mars? They walked away slowly, not looking back.

It took another hour and a half to get into Holstock. We encountered two other small groups, though others may have watched from hiding. Those two saw us and ran into the woods.

The residential area of the town was a few blocks of individual homes mixed with condos, along with hotels and guest houses. The commercial part of town began abruptly, stores with a curious uniformity of design and apparent age. Germaine said that was because about a generation ago, most of the town was consumed in a runaway forest fire.

There was a short line, five people, waiting outside the care center; six more on chairs inside. A nurse came out with a piece of paper taped to an otherwise useless notebook. She was a pretty girl in a white uniform, brightly clean, bisected by a thick belt holding up a heavy pistol in a low-slung holster.

She was not surprised that we didn’t have any California dollars, and accepted a box of dehydrated rice and Thai chicken as “symbolic down payment.” Roz signed a two-paragraph document that said, essentially, that she would pay after things settled down. There were dozens of signatures on the front and back of the sheet of paper.

I had a feeling that a blank sheet of paper was soon going to be worth more than one printed with a picture of Ronald Reagan in a cowboy hat.

Roz got into line, and we settled in for a leisurely lunch of crunchy chow mein. There was no way to boil water without breaking up furniture for a fire, and the food wouldn’t completely soften with cold water. But if you didn’t know where it came from, you might take it for some new exotic oriental dish.

There was a kind of flea market set up on the lawn outside the hospital, three folding tables covered with things of some or no value. An exquisite pearl-and-diamond necklace next to an almost-full box of .22 ammunition; the ammo worth more than the jewelry.

Elza traded a good Eterna writing stick for an odd kitchen implement—three small hourglasses mounted together, timing out three, four, and five minutes. A useful timepiece for standing guard watches.

After about an hour, the nurse came back and collected Elza; they were seeing patients in order of the severity of their problems. When she returned she was wearing a clear plastic cast and a dazed expression, still buzzing with painkillers. She claimed she was ready to move on, but agreed to rest in the shade until her eyes uncrossed.

They put on a stretchy sling that held Dustin’s left arm against his chest, and went under the other arm in a kind of figure eight. It reduced the pain from the broken collarbone but restricted his movements. Roz’s rib wasn’t broken, just a big bruise, and I was only worth a few dabs of antiseptic and plastiflesh. Felt funny on the inside of my lips.

If I’d been sitting two rows back, the tree that killed Stack would’ve hit me. Mother always said I was born lucky.

We still had a few hours of light, so chose not to spend the night in Holstock. There were plenty of empty houses, and no reason not to commandeer one, except that word would get around. Our weapons and ammunition were our only defense, but they were also a concentration of the only kind of wealth that had meaning in some circles.

We got all our gear together and started off going north on 2031, keeping an eye out for the gravel “fire road” that Mr. Lerner had described. It would only be a few miles, and Paul and Namir agreed that it would be better to spend the night on guard hidden out in the woods, as we had night before last, than be exposed on the side of the abandoned autoway.

I wasn’t so sure. Nobody could sneak up on us if we were out in the open. Of course, my judgment might have been affected by fatigue. I was tired of playing soldier and water boy. I wanted to find a piece of shade and collapse into it.

It was only about an hour, though, before we found the gravel road that plunged into the forest to the left. We followed it for a few hundred yards uphill and made camp before it started to go downhill again.

We settled in for the night in a little clearing that wasn’t visible from the fire road, leaving one person on guard by the road.

I had the fourth watch, roughly two till four. Staying awake was no trouble; some animal kept moving around somewhere out of sight.

Elza’s timer was easy to see in the moonglow. I counted out twenty-four five-minute turns and went to wake Dustin. The creature had stopped making noise, so I slept easily on my bed of fragrant branches, next to Paul but not touching. I could have used some contact, but he was sleeping soundly.

I woke to an unpleasant surprise: we had company. Spy, squatting at the base of a tree like an unholy white Buddha. His clothing was seamless, as if he had been dipped in plastic.

Elza had stood the last watch. She didn’t know when he had appeared; hadn’t said anything to him.

He stared at me with silent intensity. “So how long have you been here?”

“What makes you think I ever left?” He stood and brushed himself off. “The Others asked me to show myself.”

“Why?”

“They don’t explain why they do things. Maybe they wanted to introduce an irritant.”

Paul came up beside me. “Jesus. And no coffee.”

“Here.” Spy made a small motion with one hand, and two white china mugs appeared at our feet, steaming, aromatic.

Paul picked one up. “This isn’t real.”

“Try it.”

The mug was solid, hot. The coffee tasted good.

“I know it looks and feels real.”

A cup appeared in Spy’s hand and he sipped. “But you can’t make something out of nothing?”

“That’s part of it.”

“Do you know the story about the primitive savages who were shown their first movie? Twentieth century, film image projected on a screen.”

“Enlighten me.”

“They looked behind the screen, and there was nothing there. Subsequently, the image disappeared to them. Because it wasn’t real.”

“Is that true?” I said.

He smiled. “I read it in a book.”

I heard Roz come up behind me.

“Hello,” she said. “What the hell are you?”

“Hello, Roz. Think of me as a translator between you and the Others. We decided to call me Spy.”

“So what is your real name?”

“I don’t need a name. There’s only one of me.”

She sighed. “Is that coffee?”

Spy eventually conjured a cup of coffee for everyone who wanted it, and afterward sent all the cups back to wherever they’d come from. We had to come up with our own breakfast, though, adding water to boxes of scrambled eggs and refried beans. They heated up nicely but tasted a little plastic.

“It would be a friendly gesture,” Namir said to Spy, “if you agreed not to travel with us.”

“Wouldn’t it?” Spy agreed. “But I have my orders, so to speak.”

Paul pointed the riot gun in his direction. “I could blow you to pieces, and then chop up the pieces with the machete. But I guess that would be a waste of ammunition.”

“I don’t know. You’re welcome to try.”

He looked like he was considering it. “I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction.”

It was a storybook-beautiful morning, walking through the waking forest, but the gravel was starting to bother my feet. Get some sturdy walking shoes the next time we came to a store.

Spy walked in front with Paul, who didn’t say anything to him. I went up the line to ask Paul a question, but forgot it instantly. Three men stepped out of hiding with guns leveled. “Drop it!” one said to Namir, and then pointed his gun at me.

Paul carefully set down his weapon, and I did the same. I remembered him clipping a holster with one of the pistols under his shirt at the small of his back, but didn’t know whether it was still there. Everybody else put their guns down.

Two of the men were stocky and one slim, all of them white and shirtless, with identical Toyota tattoos on their chests. Their weapons were civilian, obviously expensive, more wood than metal, elaborately carved.

“Saw you on the cube, asshole,” the bigger one said. I braced myself, but he was talking to Spy. “You’re the mouthpiece for the aliens.”

“I am their avatar,” he said neutrally.

“I’ll give you a message.” He aimed the rifle at Spy’s chest and fired a burst of three or four shots at him.

He rocked back at the impact. But there was no blood, not a mark on him where the bullets had struck. “You missed,” he said.

He hadn’t, of course, but he stepped closer and fired four measured shots point-blank. Spy simply absorbed them.

“Hold it, Number One,” the slender one said. He shrugged out of the pack he was carrying and unsnapped a wicked-looking axe from it. “Let’s see you disappear this.” He hefted it with one hand and stepped forward to swing.

“Could work,” Spy said, and pointed a finger at him. There was a pop noise like a toy gun, and the top part of the man’s head, above the eyebrows, blew off. His determined expression didn’t change as he fell dead.

“Shit,” the leader said, and stepped back. Spy pointed the finger at him, and said “bang.” A stream of bullets chewed a hole out of the center of his chest. Daylight showed through before he fell.

The third one threw down his gun and ran back into the woods.

Namir picked up one of the weapons and inspected it, avoiding the bloody stock. It hinged open in the middle.

“Sportsmen,” he said, and shook one cartridge out. “One powder bullet, but if you miss, you can fry the beast with a laser.”

“One shot would be plenty,” Paul said, looking at the huge cartridge. “I don’t guess we need it, though.”

“Carry them a while and throw them away,” Namir said. “Throw the bullets away someplace else.” He slung the man’s assault rifle over his shoulder and looked around the bloody scene. “I suggest we not waste time burying this… human waste.”

“In the old days,” Roz said, “they’d hang them from the trees as a warning.”

“This will do,” Paul said. “Let’s move on.”

“I’ll search them first,” Namir said. He and Dustin started going through pockets. I gave the spray of blood and brains a wide berth, but did look through the skinny one’s pack. Half a loaf of hard bread and four tins of sardines. A plastic bag had three rounds for the big-game rifle and a handful of smaller cartridges.

There was an envelope with three detailed maps, one of them the whole state of California. A wallet full of useless money and a roll of California hundred-dollar bills, held together with a rubber band. A metal flask full of liquor.

One side pocket had a small silver pistol, and another held two boxes of ammunition for it, .25 caliber. Paul suggested I keep them, though they wouldn’t be much use in a “real” fight. I might get into an unreal one, I supposed.

He offered me a hand grenade with only a little blood on it. I demurred, and Roz stuck it in her purse.

The pack had plenty of room for the encyclopedia volumes and food I was carrying in the cloth bag. It only had two specks of blood, but did give me an uncomfortable, unclean feeling as I hoisted it onto my back and tightened the straps. A dead man’s chest, complete with a bottle of rum. But it was easier than carrying the heavy cloth bag. Paul snapped the small axe onto the side.

In case the noise of the encounter might have attracted unwelcome attention, Namir set us up hiding along the bluff that overlooked the road, to watch and wait for an hour. So I took the pack off again after wearing it for a few seconds.

Some kind of birds clattered down behind us to feed on the dead. They didn’t caw or cackle; there was no noise but the thud of their beaks and the tearing of cloth and flesh.

They were still playing with their food when Namir finally declared an hour had passed, and we set off into the still-cool morning.

We used the same pattern as the previous day, with an added precaution: whenever we stopped to rest, Dustin would sneak back to make sure we weren’t being followed.

People who would follow after what we left behind would be made of sturdy stuff. I got a glimpse of the buzzards’ banquet hall, ribs glistening out of two piles of red guts. The ripped remains of a face.

Though I supposed scenes like that would become common as sunsets in most the world. How many billion were left today? Five? With how many months of food? Four?

It was high noon by the time we reached the autoway. There was a tall fence topped with barbed wire, but the bottom of it had been burned open with a laser, the edges of the hole rounded beads of melt.

We went back to the shade of the forest to eat and have an hour of rest.

Spy was studying a web woven densely in the lower branches of a shrub.

“Looks like a caterpillar,” I said.

“Malacosoma californicum. Happily unaware of everything,”

“Is it going to die soon?”

“They don’t live very long.” He picked up a stick and gently probed the web.

“I mean ‘are the Others going to kill it, along with us and everything else?’ ”

He didn’t look at me. “I really don’t have the faintest idea. They don’t consult me. Though presumably they know what I’m doing and thinking.”

“What do you think, then? Is there any chance we’ll get our world back?”

“If I were a human,” he said to the web, “and thought like a human, I would ask myself how on Earth the Others might benefit from restoring my world. What answer would I come up with, thinking as a human?”

“But you aren’t a human,” I insisted. “What do you think?”

He did look at me, with eyes as realistic and expressionless as a department store dummy’s. “In so many ways, that is not a meaningful question. There is no me here to think with. You should know that by now.”

“When you killed the man who was coming at you with an axe—”

“It was like swatting a fly. His partner was another annoyance. The one who ran away was of no concern. I knew that his testimony would spare us further interruptions.”

As he said that, we had an interruption, not particularly dramatic. A girl of about twelve came through the fence hole, chattering in Spanish, crying. Namir talked to her for a minute, calming her down.

“Her parents had a general store north of here. They’ve disappeared, and the store was gutted by looters. She waited for two days, and when her parents didn’t come home, she set out looking for them.”

She wailed something and sat down on the ground, wiping her eyes.

“She’s afraid they’re dead,” he said. “I don’t know what to say to her.”

Tell her she’s right? Roz came over and spoke to her softly in halting Spanish.

“Her name’s Hermosa, and she has relatives in San Sebastian, the way we’re headed, maybe ten miles down the road. Take her there?”

“Sure,” Namir said. “How much can she eat in ten miles?”

Quite a lot, as it turned out; a growing girl who’d been hungry for a couple of days. She hadn’t made any preparation for travel—just fled when she heard voices in the middle of the night. She said she had hidden from roving gangs as big as a hundred people. Even allowing for a twelve-year-old’s imagination, we had better be prepared.

Paul and I would “guard” Spy and Hermosa—stay out of trouble, that is, being the ones least experienced with weapons and mayhem. Namir and Elza would sneak forward a half mile or so, and come back to get us if the coast was clear. Roz and Dustin would stay behind, hidden, long enough to make sure we weren’t being followed. So we moved like a sort of elastic inchworm, with four legs in front and four behind. Paul and I and the two supernumeraries bulging along in the belly of the beast.

Hermosa asked Spy one question, and he answered in crisp, rapid Spanish. She quieted and moved to put me and Paul between herself and him.

“What did you just say?” I asked.

“She asked if I was a monster from space. I told her that all three of us were from space, and which of us were monsters depended on who you asked. Fair enough?”

“She seems to have figured it out,” Paul said, patting her on the shoulder. “Though actually, you’ve been more like an ally today. I don’t know what those clowns might’ve done to us.”

“That was fortunate for you,” he agreed. “I think it would have been a gun battle at close quarters. Many of you would have been hurt, perhaps killed.”

“The timing of your appearance was propitious.”

“As it often is. Would you care to commit a logical fallacy now?”

Paul frowned at him. “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” I said, since Dustin wasn’t around to say it. “Just because B follows A, it doesn’t mean that A caused B.”

“Yeah, I got it. Don’t worry; I didn’t think you conjured up those gangers. If you or the Others wanted to threaten us, you could do it more directly.”

“But would we? Just to play the devil’s advocate. Maybe I want you to trust me, and so manufactured an incident that would inspire trust.”

“And then throw in a counter-argument,” I said, “just to keep us confused.”

“I like this game,” he said.

After a few minutes of silence, Paul said, “Why don’t bullets affect you? I mean, they do have some effect; I’ve seen you rock back when they hit you. But then, nothing happens.”

“Well, something does happen. I feel them touch and, as you say, I apparently absorb some of their momentum. Then I absorb the metal itself.”

“It doesn’t hurt?” I asked.

“There’s some sensation. More like pleasure than pain, I think.

“I know it takes a lot of energy, or something like energy, to put me here and keep me here. I ‘absorb’ the kinetic energy of bullets and the chemical energy of food and the radiant energy from sunlight, and it all helps keep me here.”

“So if we locked you up in a light-tight box and didn’t feed you, you’d disappear?”

“You’re welcome to try. I think I’d just reappear outside, though. Or eat the box.”

Paul nodded, thoughtful. “Are you invulnerable, then?”

“I don’t think so. There must be limits. I could stand inside a burning house, for instance, but couldn’t maintain integrity inside a star. I’ve never tried it, but can’t imagine what could manufacture that kind of binding force.”

“Likewise a nuke.”

“Probably. But I think it would be a waste of time. The Others would just make another one of me.”

“I don’t suppose a hellbomb would do much,” I said.

“A constant blast of radiation? I’d love it! A banquet.” He looked up at the sky. “I can feel a little secondary warmth reflected off the atmosphere, from the one you flew over yesterday.”

“So radiation and bullets don’t bother you,” Paul said, “but you protected yourself from an axe.”

“That might’ve hurt. At any rate, it would have taken me time to rebuild, and during that time there would have been trouble.”

We walked along in silence for a bit, Paul frowning. “So whose side are you on, anyhow?”

He pointed a thumb at Paul’s assault rifle. “Whose side is that gun on?”

“It’s on the side of the person who owns it.”

“Really?” He reached over carefully and rubbed dirt from the rear end of the barrel, then scratched it with a thumbnail. He peered at what it revealed.

“According to the serial number, it’s an actual antique. In another year, it will be a hundred years old.

“It was manufactured in Argentina, for the Paraguayan armed forces, who at the time were fighting Uruguay and Cuba.”

“Cuba wasn’t a state anymore?” I said.

“Temporarily not. But you don’t own it, Paul, not really. I think it’s actually on the side of the person who pulls the trigger.”

“Okay. Splitting hairs.”

“You were asking whose side I am on. That weapon is obviously not on the side of Argentina or Paraguay or Uruguay or Cuba, even though people who identify with those places may have ‘owned’ it. Is it on your side now?”

“It’s an inanimate object.”

“That’s not exactly the answer. When that fellow with the Toyota tattoo stepped out of hiding and ordered you to drop this gun, why didn’t you shoot him?”

“That’s obvious.”

“He and the other two would have killed you. Because of the gun. Whose side would it be on, then?”

“That’s pretty tortuous.”

“Not really; not at all. You’re asking whose side I’m on. What if you ask me to do something that I know will result in your death? Or Carmen’s, or the whole group’s, or the country’s or the planet’s or the solar system’s?”

“Okay. So I ask you and you do it and trillions of people die. So it’s my fault?”

“Billions. But who said anything about ‘fault’? You asked whose side I am on. By all evidence, Paul, I’m on your side.”

“I’m honored, especially if you would murder billions of people on my behalf. But you’re manifestly not on my side. You’re on the side of the Others.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. I’m not sure it has any meaning. The Others don’t use tools, including organisms like you and me, the same way that humans do. To solve problems, to answer questions. That’s how different they are. As far as I can tell, they’re totally incurious.”

“I guess we would be, too,” I said, “if we already knew everything and could do anything.”

“They obviously fall short of that,” Paul said, “or we wouldn’t be fighting. They’d just crush us and move on.”

Spy nodded. “That’s part of the mystery. You might not have anything they need, or at least they’ve never taken anything from you.”

“A moon,” Paul said. “Jesus Christ, Spy!”

“They destroyed it, as they did Triton. But that’s not taking.

“They did make a tool out of the moon, so to speak—broke it up into rocks and gravel to surround the Earth with junk, to keep humans from leaving the planet.”

“Which worked so well,” I said.

“For two weeks,” he said. “That’s something I may not understand about them. Can they have been surprised that humans reacted by trying to get into space anyhow?”

“You wouldn’t be? Surprised.”

“Of course not. But it’s not as if they said ‘If you try to get into space, we’ll turn off the electricity.’ They presented you with a problem, and it’s human nature to step up and try to solve it.”

“Wait. Are you making excuses for us?”

“No; just trying to understand them. If I know that much about human nature, they must as well. So what’s the point in punishing you for being true to your nature?”

“Training us,” Paul said, “like some Old Testament God.”

“Not exactly. That God would say ‘Don’t look back at the city’ before he turned you into a pillar of salt. The difference isn’t subtle.”

“This god is an all-powerful infant,” I said, “throwing tantrums that blow up worlds. Kill millions. We should be training it.”

Spy gave me a strange look. “Maybe you are.”