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

“You never married?” I asked. “Found a partner?”

“Married who?” Her voice rose sharply. “Another woman?” Her cheeks colored. “No. I wasn’t interested in that.”

Najma returned to her desk but did not sit down. “The girls will be coming soon.” She leaned toward me, fists on the desktop. “What is it that you want to hear, Ms. Hardaway?”

“You found Rashmi before I did. How?”

“She called me. She said that she had had a fight with her girlfriend who was involved in some secret experiment that she couldn’t tell me about and they were splitting up and everything was shit, the world was shit. She was off her meds, crying, not making a whole lot of sense. But that was nothing new. She always called me when she broke up with someone. I’m her mother.”

“And when you got there?”

“She was sitting on the bed.” Najma’s eyes focused on something I couldn’t see. “She put the inhaler to her mouth when I opened the door.” Najma was looking into Room 103 of the Comfort Inn. “And I thought to myself, what does this poor girl want? Does she want me to witness her death or stop it? I tried to talk to her, you know. She seemed to listen. But when I asked her to put the inhaler down, she wouldn’t. I moved toward her, slowly. Slowly. I told her that she didn’t have to do anything. That we could just go home. And then I was this close.” She reached a hand across the desk. “And I couldn’t help myself. I tried to swat it out of her mouth. Either she pressed the button or I set it off.” She sat down abruptly and put her head in her hands. “She didn’t get the full dose. It took forever before it was over. She was in agony.”

“I think she’d made up her mind, Ms. Jones.” I was only trying to comfort her. “She wrote the note.”

“I wrote the note.” She glared at me. “I did.”

There was nothing I could say. All the words in all the languages that had ever been spoken wouldn’t come close to expressing this mother’s grief. I thought the weight of it must surely crush her.

Through the open windows, I heard the snort of the first bus pulling into the turnaround in front of the school. Najma Jones glanced out at it, gathered herself and smiled. “Do you know what Rashmi means in Sanskrit?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Ray of sunlight,” she said. “The girls are here, Ms. Hardaway.” She picked up the origami on her desk. “We have to be ready for them.” She held it out to me. “Would you like a swan?”

By the time I came through the door of the school, the turnaround was filled with busses. Girls poured off them and swirled onto the playground: giggling girls, whispering girls, skipping girls, girls holding hands. And in the warm June sun, I could almost believe they were happy girls.

They paid no attention to me.

I tried Sharifa’s call. “Hello?” Her voice was husky with sleep.

“Sorry I didn’t make it home last night, sweetheart,” I said. “Just wanted to let you know that I’m on my way.”

Alaya Dawn Johnson is the author of six novels for adults and young adults. Her novel The Summer Prince was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Her most recent, Love Is the Drug , won the Andre Norton Award. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Interzone, Subterranean, Zombies vs. Unicorns , and Welcome to Bordertown . In addition to the Norton, she has won the Nebula and Cybils awards and been nominated for the Indies Choice Award and Locus Award. She lives in Mexico City, where she is getting her master’s in Mesoamerican studies.

It’s noon, the middle of wheat harvest, and Tris is standing on the edge of the field while Bill and Harris and I drive three ancient combine threshers across the grain. It’s dangerous to stand so close and Tris knows it. Tris knows better than to get in the way during harvest, too. Not a good idea if she wants to survive the winter. Fifteen days ago a cluster bomb dropped on the east field, so no combines there. No harvest. Just a feast for the crows.

Tris wrote the signs (with pictures for the ones who don’t read) warning the kids to stay off the grass, stay out of the fields, don’t pick up the bright-colored glass jewels. So I raise my hand, wave my straw hat in the sun—it’s hot as hell out here, we could use a break, no problem—and the deafening noise of eighty-year-old engines forced unwillingly into service chokes, gasps, falls silent.

Bill stands and cups his hands over his mouth. “Something wrong with Meshach, Libby?”

I shake my head, realize he can’t see, and holler, “The old man’s doing fine. It’s just hot. Give me ten?”

Harris, closer to me, takes a long drink from his bottle and climbs off Abednego. I don’t mind his silence. This is the sort of sticky day that makes it hard to move, let alone bring in a harvest, and this sun is hot enough to burn darker skin than his.

It’s enough to burn Tris, standing without a hat and wearing a skinny strappy dress of faded red that stands out against the wheat’s dusty gold. I hop off Meshach, check to make sure he’s not leaking oil, and head over to my sister. I’m a little worried. Tris wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t important. Another cluster bomb? But I haven’t heard the whining drone of any reapers. The sky is clear. But even though I’m too far to read her expression, I can tell Tris is worried. That way she has of balancing on one leg, a red stork in a wheat marsh. I hurry as I get closer, though my overalls stick to the slick sweat on my thighs and I have to hitch them up like a skirt to move quickly.

“Is it Dad?” I ask, when I’m close.

She frowns and shakes her head. “Told me this morning he’s going fishing again.”

“And you let him?”

She shrugs. “What do you want me to do, take away his cane? He’s old, Libs. A few toxic fish won’t kill him any faster.”

“They might,” I grumble, but this is an old argument, one I’m not winning, and besides that’s not why Tris is here.

“So what is it?”

She smiles, but it shakes at the edges. She’s scared and I wonder if that makes her look old or just reminds me of our age. Dad is eighty, but I’m forty-two and we had a funeral for an eight-year-old last week. Every night since I was ten I’ve gone to sleep thinking I might not wake up the next morning. I don’t know how you get to forty-two doing that.

Tris is thirty-eight, but she looks twenty-five—at least, when she isn’t scanning the skies for reapers, or walking behind a tiny coffin in a funeral procession.

“Walk with me,” she says, her voice low, as though Harris can hear us from under that magnolia tree twenty feet away. I sigh and roll my eyes and mutter under my breath, but she’s my baby sister and she knows I’ll follow her anywhere. We climb to the top of the hill, so I can see the muddy creek that irrigates the little postage stamp of our corn field, and the big hill just north of town, with its wood tower and reassuring white flag. Yolanda usually takes the morning shift, spending her hours watching the sky for that subtle disturbance, too smooth for a bird, too fast for a cloud. Reapers. If she rings the bell, some of us might get to cover in time.

Sometimes I don’t like to look at the sky, so I sprawl belly-down on the ground, drink half of the warm water from my bottle and offer the rest to Tris. She finishes it and grimaces.

“Don’t know how you stand it,” she says. “Aren’t you hot?”

“You won’t complain when you’re eating cornbread tonight.”