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

“Hello,” said a voice.

“Is this Rashmi Jones?”

The voice hesitated. “My name is Brigit. Leave me alone.”

“Your mother is worried about you, Rashmi. She hired me to find you.”

“I don’t want to be found.”

“I’m reading your novel, Rashmi.” It was just something to say; I wanted to keep her on the line. “I was wondering, does she find her father at the end?”

“No.” I could hear her breath caressing the microphone. “The devils come. That’s the whole point.”

Someone said something to her and she muted the speaker. But I knew she could still hear me. “That’s sad, Rashmi. But I guess that’s the way it had to be.”

Then she hung up.

The mom was relieved that Rashmi was all right, furious that she was with Christers. So what? I’d found the girl: case closed. Only Najma Jones begged me to help her connect with her daughter. She was already into me for twenty bucks plus expenses, but for another five I said I’d try to get her away from the church long enough for them to talk. I was on my way over when the searchlet I’d attached to the Jones account turned up the hit at Grayle’s Shoes. I was grateful for the reprieve, even more pleased when the salesbot identified Rashmi from her pix. As did the waitress at Maison Diana.

And the clerk at the Comfort Inn.

Ronald Reagan Elementary had been recently renovated, no doubt by a squad of janitor bots. The brick facade had been cleaned and repointed; the long row of windows gleamed like teeth. The asphalt playground had been ripped up and resurfaced with safe-t-mat, the metal swingsets swapped for gaudy towers and crawl tubes and slides and balance beams and decks. The chain link fences had been replaced by redwood lattice through which twined honeysuckle and clematis. There was a boxwood maze next to the swimming pool that shimmered, blue as a dream. Nothing was too good for the little girls—our hope for the future.

There was no room in the rack jammed with bikes and scooters and goboards, so I leaned my bike against a nearby cherry tree. The very youngest girls had come out for first recess. I paused behind the tree for a moment to let their whoops and shrieks and laughter bubble over me. My business didn’t take me to schools very often; I couldn’t remember when I had last seen so many girls in one place. They were black and white and yellow and brown, mostly dressed like janes you might see anywhere. But there were more than a few whose clothes proclaimed their mothers’ lifestyles. Tommys in hunter camo and chaste Christers, twists in chains and spray-on, clumps of sisters wearing the uniforms of a group marriage, a couple of furries and one girl wearing a body suit that looked just like bot skin. As I lingered there, I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shade of a tree. I had no idea who these tiny creatures were. They went to this well-kept school, led more or less normal lives. I grew up in the wild times, when everything was falling apart. At that moment, I realized that they were as far removed from me as I was from the grannies. I would always watch them from a distance.

Just inside the fence, two sisters in green-striped shirtwaists and green knee socks were turning a rope for a ponytailed jumper who was executing nimble criss-crosses. The turners chanted,

Down in the valley where the green grass grows,

there sits Stacy pretty as a rose! She sings, she sings, she sings so sweet,

Then along comes Chantall to kiss her on the cheek!

Another jumper joined her in the middle, matching her step for step, her dark hair flying. The chant continued,

How many kisses does she get?

One, two, three, four, five…

The two jumpers pecked at each other in the air to the count of ten without missing a beat. Then Ponytail skipped out and the turners began the chant over again for the dark-haired girl. Ponytail bent over for a moment to catch her breath; when she straightened, she noticed me.

“Hey you, behind the tree.” She shaded her eyes with a hand.“You hiding?”

I stepped into the open. “No.”

“This is our school, you know.” The girl set one foot behind the other and then spun a hundred and eighty degrees to point at the door to the school. “You supposed to sign in at the office.”

“I’d better take care of that then.”

As I passed through the gate into the playground, a few of the girls stopped playing and stared. This was all the audience Ponytail needed. “You someone’s mom?”

“No.”

“Don’t you have a job?” She fell into step beside me.

“I do.”

“What is it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

She dashed ahead to block my path. “Probably because it’s a pretend job.”

Two of her sisters in green-striped shirtwaists scrambled to back her up.

“When we grow up,” one of them announced, “we’re going to have real jobs.”

“Like a doctor,” the other said. “Or a lion tamer.”

Other girls were joining us. “I want to drive a truck,” said a tommy. “Big, big truck.” She specified the size of her rig with outstretched arms.

“That’s not a real job. Any bot could do that.”

“I want to be a teacher,” said the dark-haired sister who had been jumping rope.

“Chantall loves school,” said a furry. “She’d marry school if she could.” Apparently this passed for brilliant wit in the third grade; some girls laughed so hard they had to cover their mouths with the backs of their hands. Me, I was flummoxed. Give me a spurned lover or a mean drunk or a hardcase cop and I could figure out some play, but just then I was trapped by this giggling mob of children.

“So why you here?” Ponytail put her fists on her hips.

A jane in khakis and a baggy plum sweater emerged from behind a blue tunnel that looked like a centipede. She pinned me with that penetrating but not unkind stare that teachers are born with, and began to trudge across the playground toward me. “I’ve come to see Ms. Jones,” I said.

“Oh.” A shadow passed over Ponytail’s face and she rubbed her hands against the sides of her legs. “You better go then.”

Someone called, “Are you the undertaker?”

A voice that squeaked with innocence asked, “What’s an undertaker?”

I didn’t hear the answer. The teacher in the plum sweater rescued me and we passed through the crowd.

Ididn’t understand why Najma Jones had come to school. She was either the most dedicated teacher on the planet or she was too numb to accept her daughter’s death. I couldn’t tell which. She had been reserved when we met the first time; now she was locked down and welded shut. She was a bird of a woman with a narrow face and thin lips. Her gray hair had a few lingering strands of black. She wore a long-sleeved white kameez tunic over shalwar trousers. I leaned against the door of her classroom and told her everything I had done the day before. She sat listening at her desk with a sandwich that she wasn’t going to eat and a carton of milk that she wasn’t going to drink and a napkin that she didn’t need.

When I had finished, she asked me about cyanide inhalers.

“Hydrogen cyanide isn’t hard to get in bulk,” I said. “They use it for making plastic, engraving, tempering steel. The inhaler came from one of the underground suicide groups, probably Our Choice. The cops could tell you for sure.”

She unfolded the napkin and spread it out on top of her desk. “I’ve heard it’s a painful death.”

“Not at all,” I said. “They used to use hydrogen cyanide gas to execute criminals, back in the bad old days. It all depends on the first breath. Get it deep into your lungs and you’re unconscious before you hit the floor. Dead in less than a minute.”