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

Bill turns his head abruptly, stalks back to the kitchen door with a “Fuck,” and he wipes his eyes. Tris leans against the sink.

“Esther,” he says quietly, his back to us. “The name of a person, the name of a place, I don’t know. But you ask for that, my buddy says you should find what you’re after.”

I follow him outside, barefoot and confused that I’d bother when he’s so clearly had enough of us. I call his name, then start jogging and catch his elbow. He turns around.

“What, Libby?”

He’s so angry. His hair didn’t grow in very long or thick after he came back. He looks like someone mashed him up, stretched him out and then did a hasty job of putting him back together. Maybe I look like that, too.

“Thanks,” I say. We don’t touch.

“Don’t die, Libs.”

The air is thick with crickets chirping and fireflies glowing and the swampy, seaweed-and-salt air from the Chesapeake. He turns to walk away. I don’t stop him.

We take Dad’s boat. There’s not enough gas left to visit Bishop’s Head, the mouth of our estuary, let alone Annapolis. So we bring oars, along with enough supplies to keep the old dinghy low in the water.

“I hope we don’t hit a storm,” Tris says, squinting at the clear, indigo sky as though thunderheads might be hiding behind the stars.

“We’re all right for now. Feel the air? Humidity’s dropped at least 20 percent.”

Tris has the right oar and I have the left. I don’t want to use the gas unless we absolutely have to, and I’m hoping the low-tech approach will make us less noticeable to any patrolling glassmen. It’s tough work, even in the relatively cool night air, and I check the stars to make sure we’re heading in more or less the right direction. None of the towns on our estuary keep lights on at night. I only know when we pass Toddville because of the old lighthouse silhouetted against the stars. I lost sight of our home within five minutes of setting out, and God how a part of me wanted to turn the dinghy right around and go back. The rest of the world isn’t safe. Home isn’t either, but it’s familiar.

Dad gave us a nautical chart of the Chesapeake Bay, with markers for towns long destroyed, lighthouses long abandoned, by people long dead. He marked our town and told us to get back safe. We promised him we would and we hugged like we might never see each other again.

“What if we hit a jewel?” Tris asks. In the dark, I can’t tell if it’s fear or exertion that aspirates her words. I’ve had that thought myself, but what can we do? The glassmen make sure their cluster bombs spread gifts everywhere.

“They don’t detonate that well in water,” I offer.

A shift in the dark; Tris rests her oar in the boat and stretches her arms. “Well enough to kill you slowly.”

I’m not as tired, but I take the break. “We’ve got a gun. It ought to do the trick, if it comes to that.”

“Promise?”

“To what? Mercy kill you?”

“Sure.”

“Aren’t you being a little melodramatic?”

“And we’re just out here to do a little night fishing.”

I laugh, though my belly aches like she’s punched me. “Christ, Tris.” I lean back in the boat, the canvas of our food sack rough and comforting on my slick skin, like Mom’s gloves when she first taught me to plant seeds.

“Libs?”

“Yeah?”

“You really don’t care who the father is?”

I snort. “If it were important, I’m sure you would have told me.”

I look up at the sky: there’s the Milky Way, the North Star, Orion’s belt. I remember when I was six, before the occupation. There was so much light on the bay you could hardly see the moon.

“Reckon we’ll get to Ohio, Jim?” Tris asks in a fake Southern drawl.

I grin. “Reckon we might. If’n we can figure out just how you got yerself pregnant, Huck.”

Tris leans over the side of the boat, and a spray of brackish water hits my open mouth. I shriek and dump two handfuls on her head and she splutters and grabs me from behind so I can’t do more than wiggle in her embrace.

“Promise,” she says, breathing hard, still laughing.

The bay tastes like home to me, like everything I’ve ever loved. “Christ, Tris,” I say, and I guess that’s enough.

We round Bishop’s Head at dawn. Tris is nearly asleep on her oar, though she hasn’t complained. I’m worried about her, and it’s dangerous to travel during the day until we can be sure the water is clear. We pull into Hopkins Cove, an Edenic horseshoe of brown sand and forest. It doesn’t look like a human foot has touched this place since the invasion, which reassures me. Drones don’t do much exploring. They care about people.

Tris falls asleep as soon as we pull the boat onto the sand. I wonder if I should feed her more—does she need extra for the baby? Then I wonder if that’s irrational, since we’re going all this way to kill it. But for now, at least, the fetus is part of her, which means we have to take it into consideration. I think about Bill with his big, dumb eyes and patchy bald head telling me that it’s a sin, as though that has anything to do with your sister crying like her insides have been torn out.

I eat some cornbread and a peach, though I’m not hungry. I sit on the shore with my feet in the water and watch for other boats or drones or reapers overhead. I don’t see anything but seagulls and ospreys and minnows that tickle my toes.

“Ain’t nothing here, Libs,” I say, in my mother’s best imitation of her mother’s voice. I never knew my grandmother, but Mom said she looked just like Tris, so I loved her on principle. She and Tris even share a name: Leatrice. I told Mom that I’d name my daughter Tamar, after her. I’d always sort of planned to, but when my monthlies stopped a year ago, I figured it was just as well. Stupid Bill, and his stupid patchy hair, I think.

I dream of giant combines made from black chrome and crystal, with headlights of wide, unblinking eyes. I take them to the fields, but something is wrong with the thresher. There’s bonemeal dust on the wheat berries.

“Now, Libby,” Bill says, but I can’t hear the rest of what he’s saying because the earth starts shaking and—

I scramble to my feet, kicking up sand with the dream still in my eyes. There’s lights in the afternoon sky and this awful thunder, like a thousand lightning bolts are striking the earth at once.

“Oh, Christ,” I say. A murder of reapers swarm to the north, and even with the sun in the sky their bombs light the ground beneath like hellfire. It’s easier to see reapers from far away, because they paint their underbellies light blue to blend with the sky.

Tris stands beside me and grips my wrist. “That’s not… it has to be Toddville, right? Or Cedar Creek? They’re not far enough away for home, right?”

I don’t say anything. I don’t know. I can only look.

Bill’s hair is patchy because the glassmen arrested him and they tortured him. Bill asked his outside contacts if they knew anything about a place to get an illegal abortion. Bill brought back a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of farm equipment and scars from wounds that would have killed someone without access to a doctor. But what kind of prisoner has access to a real doctor? Why did the glassmen arrest him? What if his contacts are exactly the type of men the glassmen like to bomb with their reapers? What if Bill is?

But I know it isn’t that simple. No one knows why the glassmen bomb us. No one really knows the reason for the whole damn mess, their reapers and their drones and their arcane rules you’re shot for not following.

“Should we go back?”

She says it like she’s declared war on a cardinal direction, like she really will get on that boat and walk into a reaper wasteland and salvage what’s left of our lives and have that baby.