Michael Cunningham - Specimen Days

Simon said, “Do you miss Nadia?”

“No.”

“It’s your home. It’s where you come from.”

“Nothing there.”

He hesitated over how to respond. There was something there. There was something everywhere. True, the people of Earth had hoped for more from their first (and possibly only) contact with an inhabited planet. All those zillions spent getting there, the decades of effort, and what do they find? A people who in ten thousand years had failed to come up with a written language. Who lived in huts made of dried mud and pulled one another around in wooden carts. Where were the golden cities, the shamans and scientists? Where were the great discoveries, the cures, the art?

He said, “It’s a rough place, I hear.”

“Nothing for me.”

“You know,” he said, “maybe there’s no real point in you being so mysterious about your past. Doesn’t it seem just the tiniest bit unnecessary?”

She sat beside him in the dark. She exhaled the little song.

After an interval, he said, “So. Do you have any questions about me?”

“No.”

“Are all Nadians like this?”

“Like how?”

The wind blew across his face. It had a dry green smell.

He said, “Do you mind listening to me? Do I bore you when I talk?”

“No. I like.”

“Nice of you to say so.”

Silence, and the breath song.

He said, “It’s just that I seem to have a few questions. For a biological.”

“Ask.”

“I know a lot of it may not apply. The whole human-versus-Nadian question, I mean.”

“Ask.”

“Okay. Dreams. Can I ask you something about dreams?”

“Yes.”

“I have these little flickers when I sleep. There are sounds and images. They don’t seem exactly random, but they don’t hold together, either. I can’t really tell if they’re dreams at all or just my circuits discharging. As I understand it, biologicals have dreams that involve whole stories. Mysterious stories, often oblique, but coherent and full of meaning. True?”

“No,” she said.

“Would it be painful for you to give me a little more detail?”

“Not whole stories. Change.”

“You mean, as you’re dreaming? The stories change as they progress?”

“Yes.”

“But don’t you wake up feeling like you’ve seen something important? Even if its meaning isn’t clear. Don’t you feel in the morning like something has been explained to you as you slept?”

“No.”

“Well. Okay. Let’s try another subject. The voice I’m speaking in right now, what you know as my voice, and by extension my, shall we say, personality, is programmed. Cadences, vocabulary, modulation, slang, all of it designed by Emory Lowell to make me seem more human. Plus, of course, these involuntary fits of poetry. What’s in my brain is different. I listen to myself speak I’m listening to myself right now and it’s strange to me. It doesn’t match what I hear inside my head. The impulses are my own, I make a decision to say this or say that, but the expression is beyond my control. I suspect that if you could somehow see inside my head, if you could see the circuitry going through the motions, you’d recoil. You’d understand that I’m mechanical. And heartless.”

“I am same,” she said.

“What you say doesn’t match what’s in your head?”

“Yes.”

“Of course it doesn’t. You’re speaking a foreign language.”

“In my language.”

“You mean, back on Nadia, you felt this divide between who you appeared to be and who you knew yourself to be?”

“Yes.”

“Sweet of you to say so.”

“True.”

They sat for a while in silence. Simon felt the withdrawal of her, which had become familiar, though this time it seemed deeper, as if she had removed her attention more thoroughly than ever before. He thought for a moment that she had actually gone away, but he looked over and saw her there, unaltered.

He wanted her to be again as she’d been in the pond. He wanted her to be a dark shape cut out of the darkening sky, turning shyly to face him when he said the word “beautiful.” But that moment had passed, and she was this again, stolid as an abandoned suitcase.

He said, “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”

“I sleep now.”

“I’m going to stay out here a little while longer.”

“Yes.”

“Goodnight.”

She rose soundlessly. He heard the soft click of the Winnebago’s door as she went inside.

By midmorning of the following day, Luke had fallen ill. He was flushed and feverish. He insisted that he wasn’t as sick as he appeared to be. He insisted on riding in his usual place between Simon and Catareen until he was suddenly compelled to tell Simon to stop the Winnebago immediately so he could get out and vomit, after which Catareen insisted that the regurgitated bits of meat had to be buried. Simon bore it patiently. The child and the Nadian were only doing what was required of them. Still, he thought he recalled a situation similar to this one, from a vid the image of a man on a journey, bearing up patiently as a child and a woman caused delays for which they could not reasonably be held accountable but which the man found irksome nevertheless.

Catareen put Luke to bed on Simon’s bedshelf. Once the boy had been settled, they drove on.

Simon said, “There was probably something in that water after all.”

“Yes,” Catareen answered.

“Are you a little queasy, too?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have let you go in. Either of you.”

“No fault.”

“It’s easy to forget,” Simon said, “that none of this is as pure as it looks. I don’t like to think what all is in these creatures we’re eating. Or what kinds of genetic mutations are going on in the deer that look so lovely out there on the horizon at sunset.”

A silence passed. They drove through the heat and the light. Then she said, “Simon?”

She had never spoken his name before. He had not been entirely sure she knew it.

“Yeah?”

“Stroth.”

“More specific, please.”

“This.”

“This is, shall we say, strothful, right now?”

“Yes.”

She sat as she always did, placid as a lawn ornament, hands folded in her lap.

“We seem to be sick from swimming in tainted water. We have radioactive groundhog breath. We have no idea what’s going to happen to us. This is what you mean by ‘stroth’?”

“I mean we.”

A low crackle shot through his circuitry, a quick electrical whir.

“I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy. To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand,” he said.

“Yes.”

He said, “We’ll be in Denver in a few hours. Have you given any thought to what you want to do when we get there?”

“To do?”

“You know. Destination attained. I’ll find out what, if anything, June 21 means. Luke will probably get some sort of scam going within the first ten minutes. What are you thinking of for yourself?”

“Die in Denver,” she said.

“That’s what you said before. Would you mind telling me what exactly you mean by that?”

“Die in Denver.”

“I have to admit that I just don’t follow you here. We seem to be having one of those Earthling/Nadian moments. Could you be a little more specific?”

Silence. The soft, breathy song.

“Okay,” he said. “End of discussion. Your plan is to die in Denver. You could probably also get a job as a waitress, if dying doesn’t work out.”

She was gone, though. She had removed herself to that lizard-eyed nowhere she seemed to call home.