Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

Dead ahead, a long line of whitecaps marked the reef of the old railway embankment. Lucas swung the tiller into the wind and he and Damian ducked as the boom swung across and the boat gybed around. The sails slackened, then filled with wind again as the boat turned towards one of the gaps blown in the embankment, cutting so close to the buoy that marked it that Damian could reach out and slap the rusty steel plate of its flank as they went by. And then they were heading out across a broad reach, with the little town of Acle strung along a low promontory to port. A slateless church steeple stood up from the water like a skeletal lighthouse. The polished cross at its top burned like a flame in the sunlight. A file of old pylons stepped away, most canted at steep angles, the twiggy platforms of heron nests built in angles of their girder work, whitened everywhere with droppings. One of the few still standing straight had been colonised by fisherfolk, with shacks built from driftwood lashed to its struts and a wave-powered generator made from oil drums strung out beyond. Washing flew like festive flags inside the web of rusted steel, and a naked small child of indeterminate sex clung to the unshuttered doorway of a shack just above the waterline, pushing a tangle of hair from its eyes as it watched the little boat sail by.

They passed small islands fringed with young mangrove trees, an engineered species that was rapidly spreading from areas in the south where they’d been planted to replace the levee. Lucas spotted a marsh harrier patrolling mudflats in the lee of one island, scrying for water voles and mitten crabs. They passed a long building sunk to the tops of its second-storey windows in the flood, with brightly coloured plastic bubbles pitched on its flat roof amongst the notched and spinning wheels of windmill generators, and small boats bobbing alongside. Someone standing at the edge of the roof waved to them, and Damian stood up and waved back and the boat shifted so that he had to catch at the jib leech and sit down hard.

“You want us to capsize, go ahead,” Lucas told him.

“There are worse places to be shipwrecked. You know they’re all married to each other over there.”

“I heard.”

“They like visitors too.”

“I know you aren’t talking from experience or you’d have told me all about it. At least a dozen times.”

“I met a couple of them in Halvergate. They said I should stop by some time,” Damian said, grinning sideways at Lucas. “We could maybe think about doing that on the way back.”

“And get stripped of everything we own, and thrown in the water.”

“You have a trusting nature, don’t you?”

“If you mean, I’m not silly enough to think they’ll welcome us in and let us take our pick of their women, then I guess I do.”

“She was awful pretty, the woman. And not much older than me.”

“And the rest of them are seahags older than your great-grandmother.”

“That one time with my father… She was easily twice my age and I didn’t mind a bit.”

A couple of months ago, Damian’s sixteenth birthday, his father had taken him to a pub in Norwich where women stripped at the bar and afterwards walked around bare naked, collecting tips from the customers. Damian’s father had paid one of them to look after his son, and Damian hadn’t stopped talking about it ever since, making plans to go back on his own or to take Lucas with him that so far hadn’t amounted to anything.

He watched the half-drowned building dwindle into the glare striking off the water and said, “If we ever ran away we could live in a place like that.”

“You could, maybe,” Lucas said. “I’d want to keep moving. But I suppose I could come back and visit now and then.”

“I don’t mean that place. I mean a place like it. Must be plenty of them, on those alien worlds up in the sky. There’s oceans on one of them. First Foot.”

“I know.”

“And alien ruins on all of them. There are people walking about up there right now. On all those new worlds. And most people sit around like… like bloody stumps. Old tree stumps stuck in mud.”

“I’m not counting on winning the ticket lottery,” Lucas said. “Sailing south, that would be pretty fine. To Africa, or Brazil, or these islands people are building in the Pacific. Or even all the way to Antarctica.”

“Soon as you stepped ashore, L, you’d be eaten by a polar bear.”

“Polar bears lived in the north when there were polar bears.”

“Killer penguins then. Giant penguins with razors in their flippers and lasers for eyes.”

“No such thing.”

“The !Cha made sea dragons, didn’t they? So why not giant robot killer penguins? Your mother should look into it.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Didn’t mean anything by it. Just joking, is all.”

“You go too far sometimes.”

They sailed in silence for a little while, heading west across the deepwater channel. A clipper moved far off to starboard, cylinder sails spinning slowly, white as salt in the middle of a flat vastness that shimmered like shot silk under the hot blue sky. Some way beyond it, a tug was dragging a string of barges south. The shoreline of Thurne Point emerged from the heat haze, standing up from mudbanks cut by a web of narrow channels, and they turned east, skirting stands of seagrass that spread out into the open water. It was a little colder now, and the wind was blowing more from the northwest than the west. Lucas thought that the bank of fret looked closer, too. When he pointed it out, Damian said it was still klicks and klicks off, and besides, they were headed straight to their prize now.

“If it’s still there,” Lucas said.

“It isn’t going anywhere, not with the tide all the way out.”

“You really are an expert on this alien stuff, aren’t you?”

“Just keep heading north, L.”

“That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“I’m sorry about that crack about your mother. I didn’t mean anything by it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“I like to kid around,” Damian said. “But I’m serious about getting out of here. Remember that time two years ago, we hiked into Norwich, found the army offices?”

“I remember the sergeant there gave us cups of tea and biscuits and told us to come back when we were old enough.”

“He’s still there. That sergeant. Same bloody biscuits too.”

“Wait. You went to join up without telling me?”

“I went to find out if I could. After my birthday. Turns out the army takes people our age, but you need the permission of your parents. So that was that.”

“You didn’t even try to talk to your father about it?”

“He has me working for him, L. Why would he sign away good cheap labour? I did try, once. He was half-cut and in a good mood. What passes for a good mood as far as he’s concerned, any rate. Mellowed out on beer and superfine skunk. But he wouldn’t hear anything about it. And then he got all the way flat-out drunk and he beat on me. Told me to never mention it again.”

Lucas looked over at his friend and said, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“I can join under my own signature when I’m eighteen, not before,” Damian said. “No way out of here until then, unless I run away or win the lottery.”

“So are you thinking of running away?”

“I’m damned sure not counting on winning the lottery. And even if I do, you have to be eighteen before they let you ship out. Just like the fucking army.” Damian looked at Lucas, looked away. “He’ll probably bash all kinds of shit out of me, for taking off like this.”