It was a strange-looking man in a chubby suit, with a big box on his back and a gleaming mirror instead of a face. There was something irresistably puppetlike about the way the man bounced up and down when he walked: something that struck the young Alexander as both comical and graceful at the same time.
Alexander struggled free of his Mommy’s lap, toddled over to the TV, and pointed a single questing finger at the funny man. “Who dat?”
“Get away from the screen, son,” Mark said. “We’re trying to watch.”
Alexander complied as much as his curiosity would allow him, backing up all of two inches. “Who dat, Daddy? Who dat?”
“Alex, why won’t you listen to me? We’re trying to watch. Be nice.”
“You could answer his question,” Faye said. She was, by this point, hypersensitive to slights of her son, especially where her husband was concerned: especially in light of the little subliminal flinch that sometimes passed across Mark’s face when Alexander fixed those oversized black eyes on his. She didn’t give Mark a chance to redeem himself, but instead turned to Alexander and said, “That’s an astronaut, honey.”
Alexander blinked doubtfully, and repeated the unfamiliar word, “As’not?”
Faye repeated it with exaggerated care, “As-tro-naut. That’s what we call somebody who goes to outer space. That man on the TV is walking on the Moon.”
Alexander knew what the Moon was. He saw it in the sky all the time, both day and night, and his Mommy had taught him what it was called. But up until this moment, it had never occured to him that it was more than a pale round ball just out of reach…that it was an actual place, so far away that there had to be a special name for the people who went there. He stabbed his finger at the astronaut’s helmet. “Dat?”
“That’s his space suit. He needs that to breathe.”
Alexander later told me how his toddler mind processed this information. He thought astronauts wore their space suits all the time, even when they weren’t on the Moon, even when they were home in bed, even when they were in the bathtub. It didn’t make much sense to him.
Mark Drier said something that couldn’t have been any help endearing him to his wife, “He’s too young, hon. He can’t possibly understand this.”
Despite his confusion about the spacesuits, Alexander resented that. He understood more than his Mommy and Daddy gave him credit for. Like most toddlers, his comprehension vocabulary was already far ahead of his deceptively primitive speech, and he’d used it to figure out a lot of things they couldn’t even begin to guess he knew: among them that his Daddy was a very sad man.
Then the astronaut on TV hopped over a small rock in his path, both rising and falling with unnatural slowness, and Alexander found himself smiling. He turned toward his mother. “I go dere? I be ast-not?”
The assembled grownups met each other’s eyes.
And Mark Drier said, “No. You won’t.”
“Dat man ast-not.”
“Yeah…well…it’s different for him.”
Alexander asked the dreaded Next Question always asked by children, “Why?”
Mark Drier silently appealed to one relative after another, imploring them to rescue him. “Because…nobody has the wrong idea about where he comes from.”
“That does it,” Faye said.
She rose from her easy chair, picked up her son, and carried him from the room, leaving Mark enveloped by a silence echoing with all the words that would have emerged from a perfect man’s mouth.
Space Boy Draws Circles in Sandbox!
UFO Scientists Note Uncanny Similarities To Crop Circles In Europe!
The young Alexander couldn’t understand why something as wondrous as an astronaut made the grownups around him so upset.
He was too young to know that he’d been watching the live coverage of the First Saudi Expedition to the Moon.
In the wake of the Third Gulf War, the Saudis, flush with their apparent invincibility, had grown rich enough and fanatical enough and crazy enough to sink an obscene amount of petrodollars into their very own space program—mostly staffed, in a particularly cruel irony, by unemployed veterans of the moribund Japanese and United States space programs. Like Projects Mercury through Apollo, and the Golden Dawn expeditions sponsored by the late emperor, this particular project took the better part of a decade to achieve its stated goal: and though there’d been some who said that the Saudis would change their minds before they got that far, the day had finally come, and the rest of the world could do little but watch as the Saudis did just what they’d said they would do.
Many Islamic factions had never liked the idea of a Western Moon. The Saudis had therefore taken the position that Armstrong, Aldrin, and those who followed them had profaned it with their presence. The entire purpose of their space program was to remove, and destroy, everything that the Americans and the Japanese had left behind during their various missions—starting with Tranquility Base, which they now dismantled before a television audience of two billion people.
Reactions to this varied, depending upon where in the world you were. In some parts of the world, anything that humiliated America was reason to cheer. In others, it was considered a sad victory of barbarians. Even Americans weren’t united in their reaction. Some wept for triumphs long-gone. Some were so outraged by the slap in the face they advocated military action against the Saudis. Some thought the whole space program a waste of money better spent elsewhere, and applauded the symbolic burial of Kennedy’s folly.
All too many people simply didn’t care—it was too far away, and had nothing to do with their lives. Their vote was heard in the form of over ten thousand phone calls to the TV networks, protesting not the desecration of Tranquility Base but the preemption of their favorite sitcoms. Most of those were of the opinion that the landing on the Moon had been a hoax anyway. The Japanese, and the Saudis, had simply leased parts of Arizona to film their sequels.
I know how I reacted. I was eight years older than Alexander. I cursed at the set with all the rage of a boy who considered the desecration a personal assault, thinking the world a place ruled only by madmen and fools.
I still believe that.
As for Alexander, he never did make it to the Moon. The universe didn’t have anything that obvious in mind for him. I didn’t make it there, either. It was a world that would never be part of our futures, either shared or separate. But I do look at it sometimes: still just as mysterious, still just as bright in the night sky. And I wonder, in light of everything that’s happened since, if the Saudis succeeded only in keeping the dream alive for us.
New Space Boy Shocker: Mirrors Don’t Reflect Him!
Will Parents Still Deny His Origin?
The year Alexander turned four, the science scores of America’s high school students hit an all-time low. The President of the United States was caught making major policy decisions on Tarot readings. The newest cult to claim one million converts preached poverty, abstinence, and the worship of the planet Jupiter. And two different prime-time newscasts began devoting five minutes of each program to the astrological readings of singers and movie stars.
I still have a copy of the reading one of those shows gave for the Space Boy himself. “This is a time of growth and learning. Expect major changes in the coming year. But don’t forget to depend on those close to you.”
A brilliantly prescient horoscope for any four-year-old child.
It wasn’t surprising they got around to him. He was, after all, still a frequent topic of the tabloids, and even the comparatively respectable media ran updates on the various milestones of his life. The Driers had even allowed Life magazine to do a photospread of him attending the birthday party of one of his little friends—the theory being that pictures of Alexander with pink cake smeared on his chin were the only possible antidote for stories claiming that his real parents were the ancient astronauts personally responsible for the Pyramid of Cheops. Alas, they only helped to keep him in the public eye—and
though the good people of Sweethaven kept direct intrusion to a minimum, coverage of Alexander’s life was still so ubiquitous that the Driers actually put their TV set in storage to save him from being traumatized by accidental exposure to Space Boy shtick.
No, he had to suffer different traumas entirely.
Take the night he spent one full hour making faces in the mirror. It wasn’t one of his favorite games—not because he hated his face, as he hadn’t been raised to have such a poisonous feeling, but because his smooth masklike features simply weren’t very good at the comical art of grinning. Alexander smiling looked a lot like Alexander frowning, and Alexander calm looked a lot like Alexander angry: there were subtle differences which his family could read, but anybody else had to rely on context or body language. Genuinely funny faces were so hard to make that even Alexander, who was at this point just beginning to get a grasp of how truly odd he looked, knew he just wasn’t very good at making them.
Today was different, though. Today he was practicing a trick he’d discovered not very long before: i.e. making the world appear to jump side to side by opening and closing each eye in turn. The phenomenon, which also has application in astronomy, is known as parallax, and every child with two functional eyes takes a turn being fascinated by it. He was most enthralled by the way it looked in the mirror—the way his whole head flickered back and forth, just like a bouncing ball…
Somebody at the door said, “Alex.”
Alexander jumped before he saw who it was. “Oh. Daddy.”
Many years later, he’d have to grope for the words to describe his childhood feelings for Mark Drier. There was love involved, of course; Mark had been a good and gentle man, who might have been a fine father for a less unusual son. He’d certainly tried to be a fine father to Alexander, saying the things he was supposed to say, doing the things he was supposed to do, never being deliberately cruel. But he was also a man whose affection seemed forced, a man who couldn’t quite conquer that little subliminal flinch he demonstrated whenever his son entered a room…a man who had very little to say to Alexander and by this point not much more to say to Faye.
Without ever being struck, without ever being abused, Alexander couldn’t help being always just a little bit afraid of him.
And his father knew it, “Sorry. Did I scare you?”
“Maybe a little bit,” Alexander said self-consciously. “I was making faces.”
Mark flashed a little wan smile at that. “Any good ones?”
“Not really. I think maybe I need a moustache.”
Another wan smile. “I think maybe I could use one, too.” He held the expression for all of ten seconds before seeming to remember something that pained him—then gathered up his strength, and with a joviality that rang false, said, “Hey, Sport? I know it’s near your bedtime, but how’d you like to take a walk with your old man? Just for a few minutes?”
Alexander glanced at the window beside the shower stall. The little sliver of sky visible between the mostly drawn curtains was a shade of purple-blue not very far removed from black; it would not be long before the heavens got the news that the sun was gone for another day. He spoke with caution: “It’s dark.”
“That’s okay. We won’t be going far.”
“Is Mom coming?”
“Not tonight,” Mark Drier said. “But don’t worry. She already knows we’re going.”
He took Alexander downstairs, zipped him up in his jacket, took his hand, and walked him into the backyard. They had a big backyard. They were at the edge of town, just south of the hills, on a slope that was the first of a long bumpy ride to the horizon. Their property was entirely surrounded by chain-link fence, not high enough to keep away determined intruders, but enough to discourage the merely curious. Alexander had seen folks with cameras scramble over once or twice; he’d also seen his Dad chase them away, shouting words that Alexander himself was not permitted to speak. But there hadn’t been an incident like that since his last birthday.
Mark unlocked the back gate and walked Alexander to the top of the first hill, home of a jutting slab of rock that the boy was allowed to climb only when his parents were watching. It was a big rock for a kid Alexander’s age, almost as tall as his Dad. Mark didn’t give him a chance to climb it—just picked him up and put him there, before climbing the rock himself and taking his place by Alexander’s side.
They sat without speaking for the several minutes it took the last light of day to surrender to the blackness of night. Mark said nothing because he was a smoker, and a sedentary man, who did not climb hills easily; his ragged breaths burst from him like little explosions. Alexander said nothing because his father was holding his hand, which was in and of itself such an unusual thing that he was scared to disturb it with the sound of his own voice.
Time passed. Mark’s breathing slowed to normal.
The stars came out.
It was a clear night over a very small town, and the lights burning down below were not enough to force many stars into hiding. Some of them shone like pinprick flames. And as the night grew darker above Sweethaven, and Alexander searched his father’s face for the reason they’d hiked all the way up here, Mark seemed less and less a recognizable presence and more and more a man-shaped shadow eclipsing the lights in the sky above him.
Forever came and went before Mark spoke. “You cold?”
“No,” Alexander said.
“Tired?”
How could Alexander be tired, when all this was going on? “No.”
“Good,” Mark said, still without looking at him.
More time passed. So much time that Alexander thought they were supposed to sit here, holding hands, all the way to morning.
Then Mark’s profile shifted slightly, and he spoke in a strange, faraway voice that didn’t sound like he knew who he was talking to. “You know…I used to love the stars. Not astronomy; I was never any good at that. But once upon a time, when I was a kid, I used to pitch a tent on a hilltop not far from here. I didn’t sleep in the tent unless it was raining, though. When it was a nice, clear night, like tonight, I laid out my sleeping bag and slept in the open…just looking up at the constellations. Some of those nights, time just seemed to stop.” He hesitated, glanced at his son, and turned his gaze back to the sky. “Sometimes I wish it did.”
“You can wish on stars,” Alexander said knowledgably.
“I’ve heard that. But by the time somebody told me I was too old to believe it.” He sighed. “It took me a long time to learn that even if you do wish on stars, you don’t always get what you want from them.”
Alexander said, “You can still wish.”
“That’s right. You can.”
And because Mark seemed even sadder now than he’d ever managed to seem before, Alexander came right out and asked, “What do you wish, Daddy?”
The shadow in the shape of Alexander’s father shifted, no longer a profile turned up but a black oval looking down at the boy. Alexander didn’t have enough light to see his expression; the oval contained nothing but darkness. In the silence, Alexander was terribly afraid that he’d said something wrong.
Then Mark squeezed his hand extra tight. “We better get you back to the house. It’s getting late, and your mother’s going to want to tuck you back in.”
Alexander could only be relieved that the strange interlude was over. “Sure.” He allowed his father to help him down from the rock, even though he knew he could climb down by himself, and followed him back to the house.
Something else happened late that night, long after he went to bed. Though somewhere deep within the land of sleep, he realized he was not alone. He opened his great black eyes a slit and looked across the pitch-black room to a shape barely visible in the doorway. It was his father, standing with slumped shoulders, one arm braced against the doorframe. Alexander shouldn’t have been able to see him at all, since the hall was dark, too, but there was just enough ambient light coming from elsewhere in the house to render Mark Dr
ier’s outline crisp and sharp. Too sleepy to get up, Alexander fell back to sleep before it occurred to him to wonder just what his father wanted now. When he opened his eyes again, still surrounded by darkness, the doorway was empty.
The divorce was uncontested. Mark Drier moved to San Francisco, where he got a one-room apartment and a job behind the counter in a souvenir shop on Fisherman’s Wharf. He didn’t aspire to anything else, he didn’t marry again, and he didn’t get a phone. The few times he received visits from journalists desiring inside gossip about his son, he simply ejected them, always silently, and never with unnecessary force.
Father and Son didn’t see each other again for almost two decades.
Space Boy Goes to School!
Teaches Classmates Orbital Mechanics
The year Alexander Drier entered first grade, the Jupiter Cult boasted over three million members nationwide. A couple with a million-dollar home in Texas was driven to personal bankruptcy by the wife’s seven-digit debt to the Home Astrology Network. Three colleges offered their first courses in UFO abductions during the twentieth century. Psychic surgeons opened successful clinics in New York, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago—curing nobody but building a sizeable clientele among inoperable cancer patients who had nothing left to lose. And a certain best-selling book, written by the kind of writer who specializes in such things, declared that photographs of the stone face on Mars taken over the past ten years proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that its lips were moving. He claimed that the government was trying to prevent the rock formation from delivering its truly momentous message to humanity—his chief proof an allegation that there were no deaf lip-readers working at NASA.
I own a crayon drawing Alexander made at about this age. His mother gave it to me—no big sacrifice on her part, since she saved all his drawings, and had hundreds of them. It’s about as impressive as you’d expect from a drawing made by a six-year-old: stick figures, lollipop trees, lopsided houses, garish color that refuses to accept the authority of the lines meant to hold it in check. Faye Drier stands at one side of the picture, with exaggerated curlycue hair that seems to be made out of wildly askew Slinkies. She is clearly smiling, clearly a figure meant to be seen with love. The rest of Alexander’s extended family is also in the picture, though harder to identify. The bald man with the tie is probably Uncle George. The woman standing next to him, a smaller version of Faye, would then have to be Aunt Jude. Aunt Wendy, who lived on the east coast now but visited at least twice a year, stands next to her, identifiable by her big hoop earrings. Then there’s a blob of color that must have been intended to represent Alexander’s dog, Arnold….
The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack Page 16
