Connie Willis - The Best of Connie Willis

The only progress these people and their predecessors had made by the time I joined the commission was to get the Altairi to follow them various places, like in out of the weather and into the various labs that had been set up in University Hall for studying them, although when I saw the videotapes, it wasn’t at all clear they were responding to anything the commission said or did. It looked to me like following Dr. Morthman and the others was their own idea, particularly since at nine o’clock every night they turned and glided/waddled back outside and disappeared into their ship.

The first time they did that, everyone panicked, thinking they were leaving. “Aliens Depart. Are They Fed Up?” the evening news logo read, a conclusion which I felt was due to their effect on people rather than any solid evidence. I mean, they could have gone home to watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show , but even after they re-emerged the next morning, the theory persisted that there was some sort of deadline, that if we didn’t succeed in communicating with them within a fixed amount of time, the planet would be reduced to ash. Aunt Judith had always made me feel exactly the same way, that if I didn’t measure up, I was toast.

But I never did measure up, and nothing in particular happened, except she stopped sending me birthday cards with a dollar in them, and I figured if the Altairi hadn’t obliterated us after a few conversations with Reverend Thresher (he was constantly reading them passages from Scripture and trying to convert them), they weren’t going to.

But it didn’t look like they were going to tell us what they were doing here, either. The commission had tried speaking to them in nearly every language, including Farsi, Navajo code-talk, and Cockney slang. They had played them music, drummed, written out greetings, given them several PowerPoint presentations, text-messaged them, and shown them the Rosetta Stone. They’d also tried Ameslan and pantomime, though it was obvious the Altairi could hear. Whenever someone spoke to them or offered them a gift (or prayed over them), their expression of disapproval deepened to one of utter contempt. Just like Aunt Judith.

By the time I joined the commission, it had reached the same state of desperation my mother had when she redecorated the living room and had decided to try to impress the Altairi by taking them to see the sights of Denver and Colorado, in the hope they’d react favorably.

“It won’t work,” I said. “My mother put up new drapes and wallpaper, and it didn’t have any effect at all,” but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.

We took them to the Denver Museum of Art and Rocky Mountain National Park and the Garden of the Gods and a Broncos game. They just stood there, sending out waves of disapproval.

Dr. Morthman was undeterred. “Tomorrow we’ll take them to the Denver Zoo.”

“Is that a good idea?” I asked. “I mean, I’d hate to give them ideas,” but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.

Luckily, the Altairi didn’t react to anything at the zoo, or to the Christmas lights at Civic Center, or to the Nutcracker ballet. And then we went to the mall.

By that point, the commission had dwindled down to seventeen people (two of the linguists and the animal psychic had quit), but it was still a large enough group of observers that the Altairi ran the risk of being trampled in the crowd. Most of the members, however, had stopped going on the field trips, saying they were “pursuing alternate lines of research” that didn’t require direct observation, which meant they couldn’t stand to be glared at the whole way there and back in the van.

So the day we went to the mall, there were only Dr. Morthman, the aroma expert Dr. Wakamura, Reverend Thresher, and me. We didn’t even have any press with us. When the Altairi’d first arrived, they were all over the TV networks and CNN, but after a few weeks of the aliens doing nothing, the networks had shifted to showing more exciting scenes from Alien , Invasion of the Body Snatchers , and Men in Black II , and then completely lost interest and gone back to Paris Hilton and stranded whales. The only photographer with us was Leo, the teenager Dr. Morthman had hired to videotape our outings, and as soon as we got inside the mall, he said, “Do you think it’d be okay if I ducked out to buy my girlfriend’s Christmas present before we start filming? I mean, face it, they’re just going to stand there.”

He was right. The Altairi glide-waddled the length of several stores and then stopped, glaring impartially at The Sharper Image and Gap window displays and the crowds who stopped to gawk at the six of them and who then, intimidated by their expressions, averted their eyes and hurried on.

The mall was jammed with couples loaded down with shopping bags, parents pushing strollers, children, and a mob of middle-school girls in green choir robes apparently waiting to sing. The malls invited school and church choirs to come and perform this time of year in the food court. The girls were giggling and chattering; a toddler was shrieking, “I don’t want to!”; Julie Andrews was singing “Joy to the World” on the piped-in Muzak; and Reverend Thresher was pointing at the panty-, bra-, and wing-clad mannequins in the window of Victoria’s Secret and saying, “Look at that! Sinful!”

“This way,” Dr. Morthman, ahead of the Altairi, said, waving his arm like the leader of a wagon train, “I want them to see Santa Claus,” and I stepped to the side to get around a trio of teenage boys walking side by side who’d cut me off from the Altairi.

There was a sudden gasp, and the mall went quiet except for the Muzak. “What—?” Dr. Morthman said sharply, and I pushed past the teenage boys to see what had happened.

The Altairi were sitting calmly in the middle of the space between the stores, glaring. A circle of fascinated shoppers had formed a circle around them, and a man in a suit who looked like the manager of the mall was hurrying up, demanding, “What’s going on here?”

“This is wonderful,” Dr. Morthman said. “I knew they’d respond if we just took them enough places.” He turned to me. “You were behind them, Miss Yates. What made them sit down?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t see them from where I was. Did—?”

“Go find Leo,” he ordered. “He’ll have it on tape.”

I wasn’t so sure of that, but I went to look for him. He was just coming out of Victoria’s Secret, carrying a small bright pink bag. “Meg, what happened?” he asked.

“The Altairi sat down,” I said.

“Why?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out. I take it you weren’t filming them?”

“No, I told you, I had to buy my girlfriend— Jeez, Dr. Morthman will kill me.” He jammed the pink bag into his jeans pocket. “I didn’t think—”

“Well, start filming now,” I said, “and I’ll go see if I can find somebody who caught it on their cellphone camera.” With all these people taking their kids to see Santa, there was bound to be someone with a camera. I started working my way around the circle of staring spectators, keeping away from Dr. Morthman, who was telling the mall manager he needed to cordon off this end of the mall and everyone in it.

“Everyone in it?” the manager gulped.

“Yes, it’s essential. The Altairi are obviously responding to something they saw or heard—”

“Or smelled,” Dr. Wakamura put in.

“And until we know what it was, we can’t allow anyone to leave,” Dr. Morthman said. “It’s the key to our being able to communicate with them.”

“But it’s only two weeks till Christmas,” the mall manager said. “I can’t just shut off—”