Timothy Zahn - The Green And The Gray

"Even residential ones?" Caroline asked.

"We find the concept of living shields repulsive," Sylvia said darkly. "I hope the Grays will be noble enough not to hide behind sleeping Humans. But if they do..." She shook her head. "We'll just hope they don't."

For a minute the room was silent. Caroline found herself staring out the window at the afternoon sunlight playing through the forest. She'd always loved trees and forests, and had spent hours walking in them when she was younger.

Now, all she could see out there was hidden death.

"I was also wondering," Sylvia said, "if you'd like to finish our chess game."

"Our chess game?" Caroline echoed incredulously.

Sylvia's lip twitched. "No, I didn't think so," she said. "Well. You may go, then. We'll be eating at six."

"Those Warrior field ration things?"

"I'm afraid that's all we have," Sylvia said. "Unless you'd like me to send someone to town for you.

If you're not in the mood for my company over a chessboard, I doubt you'd appreciate it over a dinner table."

"Actually, I would," Caroline said hesitantly. "Not your company itself, I admit, but I would like to go out."

"Hoping to escape?" Sylvia asked, lifting her eyebrows.

Caroline shook her head. "I've already promised I wouldn't try that." She paused, trying to put her feelings into words. "Roger and I went out to dinner with some friends on September tenth, 2001. It was a great evening—good conversation, wonderful food, everything just calm and cheerful and relaxed."

"And the next morning, the world fell apart," Sylvia said, nodding her understanding.

"And it's never been exactly the same since," Caroline said. "But I still have the memory of that evening to look back on."

She looked back at the window. "It's about to fall apart again," she said quietly. "I'd like to have another memory I can hold onto. Even if it's just a small-town diner surrounded by strangers."

Sylvia was silent another moment. "I suppose it can't do any harm," she said at last. "Your husband is well on his way home by now, and I hardly think anyone else up here would recognize you."

She lifted a finger warningly. "But if we do go, we'll have to wait until after sunset. That detective might have tried to set up something before he left, and if he did I want to have the advantage of darkness on our side. Can your stomach wait until, say, eight o'clock?"

Caroline's stomach was already feeling pretty empty. But she merely nodded. "Yes."

"Then I'll see you at seven-thirty," Sylvia said. "And if you change your mind about that chess game, let me know."

"A chess game," Fierenzo said flatly.

"Why not?" Roger persisted, gripping the wheel tightly as he guided the car down the highway.

"You saw the way the board was set up in the library. I've seen Caroline use that same opening a dozen times."

"Her, and half the chess players on the East Coast," Fierenzo pointed out. "I'm sorry, but it's not nearly enough for a search warrant."

"Then let's skip the search and move straight to an attack," Jonah said flatly from the backseat.

"Not if you want any of New York's Finest involved," Fierenzo warned. "We can't and won't do things that way."

"I was thinking more of Grays' Finest," Jonah countered. "Caroline wouldn't have written what she did about Damian unless she'd either seen him or Sylvia had specifically mentioned him. Torvald won't need much more convincing. I'll bet even Halfdan will go along."

Roger looked in his mirror. Seated in the middle of the backseat between the two Grays, Laurel was staring expressionlessly at the back of the seat in front of her. "You're awfully quiet, Laurel," he said.

"What do you expect me to say?" Laurel asked, her voice steady. "That I would willingly consent to my people being attacked? Possibly even destroyed?"

"We aren't going to destroy you," Jordan said earnestly.

"It would be a very surgical strike," Jonah agreed. "We'd take out Damian and that would be that."

"Maybe that's all you would intend," Laurel pointed out. "But you wouldn't be the ones in charge. Do you really think Torvald or even Halfdan would stop once Damian was killed?"

Roger shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "This really sounds weird to me," he said. "We're breaking our necks trying to keep Melantha from getting killed; yet here we are talking about a surgical strike on Damian."

"It's an entirely different situation," Jonah said firmly. "Melantha doesn't want to hurt anybody, Gray or Human. Damian, on the other hand, would probably enjoy slaughtering both groups. The Gray histories I've read concluded he was at least partially insane."

"Actually, so do our Pastsingers," Laurel confirmed reluctantly. "There was one incident in particular during the war where he deliberately targeted a cave in the Southcliff region where children and injured Grays had taken refuge, even though he knew full well there were no combatants anywhere nearby."

Roger grimaced. "Oh."

"In fact, I agree with Jonah that he has to be eliminated," Laurel went on. "I'm just worried that Torvald would take the opportunity to finish us off once and for all."

"Tell me about these Others you used to live with," Fierenzo said suddenly.

Roger frowned at him. "Why do we care right now?"

"Humor me," Fierenzo said. "You said they looked a lot like humans. What was their culture like?"

"The ones we lived near were mostly pastoral," Laurel said, sounding as confused by the sudden change in topic as Roger. "They farmed and kept flocks."

"Cities? Technology?" Fierenzo asked.

"Not much of either," Laurel told him. "They were supposed to have some cities, but we didn't live near any of them. Where we lived was mostly farm and pasture and small villages."

"What about you, Jonah?" Fierenzo asked, shifting in his seat to look back at their passengers. "Were your Others like that?"

"There was farming and herding, sure," Jonah said. "The ones who lived by the ocean also did a lot of fishing."

"How about marauding?" Fierenzo asked. "Did they like to raid other parts of the coastline?"

"I suppose," Jonah agreed slowly. "They were a rowdy, clan-driven bunch who did their fair share of fighting, both among themselves and with their neighbors. And with those long oceangoing sailing ships—sure, they must have done some plundering."

"I'll be damned," Fierenzo said, very quietly.

"What's the matter?" Roger demanded, throwing a quick look at him.

"The Greens and Grays," Fierenzo said. "They didn't come from some unknown planet a dozen lightyears away. They came from right here on Earth."

"What are you talking about?" Laurel asked, sounding startled. "Our world was wooded and primitive, nothing at all like this."

"What I'm talking about is the legends of our ancestors," Fierenzo said. "Specifically, the mythology of the ancient Greeks."

"The what?" Roger asked.

"The mythology of the Greeks," Fierenzo said tartly. "Come on, Whittier, your high school days aren't that far behind you. You can't have forgotten all of it already."

"I remember it just fine," Roger said. "But what do myths have to do with—?"

And suddenly, horribly, it clicked. "You're not saying... wood nymphs?"

"You've got it," Fierenzo confirmed. "One of my daughters dragged me through her mythology unit last year, and this whole thing has been bugging me ever since Jonah told me their history. I think the Greens are the real-life basis of the wood nymph legend."

"That's crazy," Roger protested. "Anyway, Velovsky told us they did come from somewhere else."

"Sure they did," Fierenzo agreed. "But their world and ours weren't separated by space. They were separated by time. A jump of four or five thousand years, I'd guess, into the future. After a gap that big, they might as well have been on another planet."