Masterpieces

by Orson Scott Card

  “Here,” I said.

  She let me help her up and then snatched her hand away, half turned from me. “Don’t touch me. Get away from me.”

  “Here,” I said again, and walked down the dune where it curved in the moonlight, tipped back into the wind and down and became not dune but beach. “Here,” I pointed behind the dune.

  At last she followed me. She peered over the dune where it was chest-high, and again where it was knee-high. “Back there?”

  She nodded.

  “I didn’t see them.”

  “So dark . . .” She stepped over the low dune and into the aching black of those moon-shadows. She moved away cautiously, feeling tenderly with her feet, back to where the dune was higher. She sank down into the blackness and disappeared there. I sat on the sand in the light. “Stay away from me,” she spat.

  I rose and stepped back. Invisible in the shadows, she breathed, “Don’t go away.” I waited, then saw her hand press out of the clean-cut shadows. “There,” she said, “over there. In the dark. Just be a . . . Stay away from me now . . . Be a—voice.”

  I did as she asked, and sat in the shadows perhaps six feet from her.

  She told me about it. Not the way it was in the papers.

  She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning’s hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

  Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

  For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belonged to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.

  So she raised her eyes, and there above her was the saucer.

  It was beautiful. It was golden, with a dusty finish like that of an unripe Concord grape. It made a faint sound, a chord composed of two tones and a blunted hiss like the wind in tall wheat. It was darting about like a swallow, soaring and dropping. It circled and dropped and hovered like a fish, shimmering. It was like all these living things, but with that beauty it had all the loveliness of things turned and burnished, measured, machined, and metrical.

  At first she felt no astonishment, for this was so different from anything she had ever seen before that it had to be a trick of the eye, a false evaluation of size and speed and distance that in a moment would resolve itself into a sun-flash on an airplane or the lingering glare of a welding arc.

  She looked away from it and abruptly realized that many other people saw it—saw something—too. People all around her had stopped moving and speaking and were craning upward. Around her was a globe of silent astonishment, and outside it, she was aware of the life-noise of the city, the hard-breathing giant who never inhales.

  She looked up again, and at last began to realize how large and how far away the saucer was. No: rather, how small and how very near it was. It was just the size of the largest circle she might make with her two hands, and it floated not quite eighteen inches over her head.

  Fear came then. She drew back and raised a forearm, but the saucer simply hung there. She bent far sideways, twisted away, leaped forward, looked back and upward to see if she had escaped it. At first she couldn’t see it; then as she looked up and up, there it was, close and gleaming, quivering and crooning, right over her head.

  She bit her tongue.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw a man cross himself. He did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought. And that was the greatest single thing that had ever happened to her. No one had ever looked at her and made a respectful gesture before, not once, not ever. Through terror, through panic and wonderment, the comfort of that thought nestled into her, to wait to be taken out and looked at again in lonely times.

  The terror was uppermost now, however. She backed away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous cakewalk. She should have collided with people. There were plenty of people there, gaping and craning, but she reached none. She spun around and discovered to her horror that she was the center of a pointing, pressing crowd. Its mosaic of eyes all bulged, and its inner circle braced its many legs to press back and away from her.

  The saucer’s gentle note deepened. It tilted, dropped an inch or so. Someone screamed, and the crowd broke away from her in all directions, milled about, and settled again in a new dynamic balance, a much larger ring, as more and more people raced to thicken it against the efforts of the inner circle to escape.

  The saucer hummed and tilted, tilted . . .

  She opened her mouth to scream, fell to her knees, and the saucer struck.

  It dropped against her forehead and clung there. It seemed almost to lift her. She came erect on her knees, made one effort to raise her hands against it, and then her arms stiffened down and back, her hands not reaching the ground. For perhaps a second and a half the saucer held her rigid, and then it passed a single ecstatic quiver to her body and dropped it. She plumped to the ground, the backs of her thighs heavy and painful on her heels and ankles.

  The saucer dropped beside her, rolled once in a small circle, once just around its edge, and lay still. It lay still and dull and metallic, different and dead.

  Hazily, she lay and gazed at the gray-shrouded blue of the good spring sky, and hazily she heard whistles.

  And some tardy screams.

  And a great stupid voice bellowing, “Give her air!” which made everyone press closer.

  Then there wasn’t so much sky because of the blue-clad bulk with its metal buttons and its leatherette notebook. “Okay, okay, what’s happened here stand back figods sake.”

  And the widening ripples of observation, interpretation and comment: “It knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down.” “He knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down and—” “Right in broad daylight this guy . . .” “The park’s gettin to be . . .” onward and outward, the adulteration of fact until it was lost altogether because excitement is so much more important.

  Somebody with a harder shoulder than the rest bulling close, a notebook here, too, a witnessing eye over it, ready to change “ . . . a beautiful brunet . . .” to “an attractive brunet” for the afternoon editions, because “attractive” is as dowdy as any woman is allowed to get if she is a victim in the news.

  The glittering shield and the florid face bending close: “You hurt bad, sister?” And the echoes, back and back through the crowd, “Hurt bad, hurt bad, badly injured, he beat the hell out of her, broad daylight . . .”

  And still another man, slim and purposeful, tan gaberdine, cleft chin and beard-shadow: “Flyin’ saucer, hm? Okay, Officer, I’ll take over here.”

  “And who the hell might you be, takin’ over?”

  The flash of a brown leather wallet, a face so close behind that its chin was pressed into the gaberdine shoulder. The face said, awed: “FBI” and that rippled outward, too. The policeman nodded—the entire policeman nodded in one single bobbing genuflection.

  “Get some help and clear this area,” said the gaberdine.

  “Yes, sir!” said the policeman.

  “FBI, FBI,” the crowd murmured, and there was more sky to look at above her.

  She sat up and there was a glory in her face. “The saucer talked to me,” she sang.

  “You shut up,” said the gaberdine. “Y
ou’ll have lots of chance to talk later.”

  “Yeah, sister,” said the policeman. “My God, this mob could be full of Communists.”

  “You shut up, too,” said the gaberdine.

  Someone in the crowd told someone else a Communist beat up this girl, while someone else was saying she got beat up because she was a Communist.

  She started to rise, but solicitous hands forced her down again. There were thirty police there by that time.

  “I can walk,” she said.

  “Now, you just take it easy,” they told her.

  They put a stretcher down beside her and lifted her onto it and covered her with a big blanket.

  “I can walk,” she said as they carried her through the crowd.

  A woman went white and turned away moaning, “Oh, my God, how awful!”

  A small man with round eyes stared and stared at her and licked and licked his lips.

  The ambulance. They slid her in. The gaberdine was already there.

  A white-coated man with very clean hands: “How did it happen, miss?”

  “No questions,” said the gaberdine. “Security.”

  The hospital.

  She said, “I got to get back to work.”

  “Take your clothes off,” they told her.

  She had a bedroom to herself then for the first time in her life. Whenever the door opened, she could see a policeman outside. It opened very often to admit the kind of civilians who were very polite to military people, and the kind of military people who were even more polite to certain civilians. She did not know what they all did nor what they wanted. Every single day they asked her four million five hundred thousand questions. Apparently they never talked to each other, because each of them asked her the same questions over and over.

  “What is your name?”

  “How old are you?”

  “What year were you born?”

  “What is your name?”

  Sometimes they would push her down strange paths with their questions.

  “Now, your uncle. Married a woman from Middle Europe, did he? Where in Middle Europe?”

  “What clubs or fraternal organizations did you belong to? Ah! Now, about that Rinkeydinks gang on Sixty-third Street. Who was really behind it?”

  But over and over again, “What did you mean when you said the saucer talked to you?”

  And she would say, “It talked to me.”

  And they would say, “And it said—”

  And she would shake her head.

  There would be a lot of shouting ones, and then a lot of kind ones. No one had ever been so kind to her before, but she soon learned that no one was being kind to her. They were just getting her to relax, to think of other things, so they could suddenly shoot that question at her. “What do you mean it talked to you?”

  Pretty soon it was just like Mom’s or school or anyplace, and she used to sit with her mouth closed and let them yell. Once they sat her on a hard chair for hours and hours with a light in her eyes and let her get thirsty. Home, there was a transom over the bedroom door and Mom used to leave the kitchen light glaring through it all night, every night, so she wouldn’t get the horrors. So the light didn’t bother her at all.

  They took her out of the hospital and put her in jail. Some ways it was good. The food. The bed was all right, too. Through the window she could see lots of women exercising in the yard. It was explained to her that they all had much harder beds.

  “You are a very important young lady, you know.”

  That was nice at first, but as usual, it turned out they didn’t mean her at all. They kept working on her. Once they brought the saucer in to her. It was inside a big wooden crate with a padlock, and a steel box inside that with a Yale lock. It only weighed a couple of pounds, the saucer, but by the time they got it packed, it took two men to carry it and four men with guns to watch them.

  They made her act out the whole thing just the way it happened, with some soldiers holding the saucer over her head. It wasn’t the same. They’d cut a lot of chips and pieces out of the saucer, and, besides, it was that dead gray color. They asked her if she knew anything about that, and for once, she told them.

  “It’s empty now,” she said.

  The only one she would ever talk to was a little man with a fat belly who said to her the first time he was alone with her, “Listen, I think the way they’ve been treating you stinks. Now, get this: I have a job to do. My job is to find out why you won’t tell what the saucer said. I don’t want to know what it said and I’ll never ask you. I don’t even want you to tell me. Let’s just find out why you’re keeping it a secret.”

  Finding out why turned out to be hours of just talking about having pneumonia and the flower pot she made in second grade that Mom threw down the fire escape and getting left back in school and the dream about holding a wineglass in both hands and peeping over it at some man.

  And one day she told him why she wouldn’t say about the saucer, just the way it came to her: “Because it was talking to me, and it’s just nobody else’s business.”

  She even told him about the man crossing himself that day. It was the only other thing she had of her own.

  He was nice. He was the one who warned her about the trial. “I have no business saying this, but they’re going to give you the full dress treatment. Judge and jury and all. You just say what you want to say, no less and no more, hear? And don’t let ’em get your goat. You have a right to own something.”

  He got up and swore and left.

  First a man came and talked to her for a long time about how maybe this Earth would be attacked from outer space by beings much stronger and cleverer than we are, and maybe she had the key to a defense. So she owed it to the whole world. And then even if Earth wasn’t attacked, just think of what an advantage she might give this country over its enemies. Then he shook his finger in her face and said that what she was doing amounted to working for the enemies of her country. And he turned out to be the man that was defending her at the trial.

  The jury found her guilty of contempt of court, and the judge recited a long list of penalties he could give her. He gave her one of them and suspended it. They put her back in jail for a few more days, and one fine day they turned her loose.

  That was wonderful at first. She got a job in a restaurant, and a furnished room. She had been in the papers so much that Mom didn’t want her back home. Mom was drunk most of the time and sometimes used to tear up the whole neighborhood, but all the same she had very special ideas about being respectable, and being in the papers all the time for spying was not her idea of being decent. So she put her maiden name on the mailbox downstairs and told her daughter not to live there anymore.

  At the restaurant she met a man who asked her for a date. The first time. She spent every cent she had on a red handbag to go with her red shoes. They weren’t the same shade, but anyway, they were both red. They went to the movies, and afterward he didn’t try to kiss her or anything; he just tried to find out what the flying saucer told her. She didn’t say anything. She went home and cried all night.

  Then some men sat in a booth talking and they shut up and glared at her every time she came past. They spoke to the boss, and he came and told her that they were electronics engineers working for the government and they were afraid to talk shop while she was around—wasn’t she some sort of spy or something? So she got fired.

  Once she saw her name on a jukebox. She put in a nickel and punched that number, and the record was all about “the flyin’ saucer came down one day, and taught her a brand-new way to play, and what it was I will not say, but she took me out of this world.” And while she was listening to it, someone in the juke joint recognized her and called her by name. Four of them followed her home and she had to block the door shut.

  Sometimes she’d be all right for months on end, and then someone would ask for a date. Three times out of five, she and the date were followed. Once the man she was with arrested the man who was t
ailing them. Twice the man who was tailing them arrested the man she was with. Five times out of five, the date would try to find out about the saucer. Sometimes she would go out with someone and pretend that it was a real date, but she wasn’t very good at it.

  So she moved to the shore and got a job cleaning at night in offices and stores. There weren’t many to clean, but that just meant there weren’t many people to remember her face from the papers. Like clockwork, every eighteen months, some feature writer would drag it all out again in a magazine or a Sunday supplement; and every time anyone saw a headlight on a mountain or a light on a weather balloon, it had to be a flying saucer, and there had to be some tired quip about the saucer wanting to tell secrets. Then for two or three weeks she’d stay off the streets in the daytime.

  Once she thought she had it whipped. People didn’t want her, so she began reading. The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies—all about the pretty ones who really own the world. So she learned things—animals, trees. A lousy little chipmunk caught in a wire fence bit her. The animals didn’t want her. The trees didn’t care.

  Then she hit on the idea of the bottles. She got all the bottles she could and wrote on papers which she corked into the bottles. She’d tramp miles up and down the beaches and throw the bottles out as far as she could. She knew that if the right person found one, it would give that person the only thing in the world that would help. Those bottles kept her going for three solid years. Everyone’s got to have a secret little something he does.

  And at last the time came when it was no use anymore. You can go on trying to help someone who maybe exists; but soon you can’t pretend there’s such a person anymore. And that’s it. The end.

  “Are you cold?” I asked when she was through telling me.

  The surf was quieter and the shadows longer.

  “No,” she answered from the shadows. Suddenly she said, “Did you think I was mad at you because you saw me without my clothes?”

  “Why shouldn’t you be?”

  “You know, I don’t care? I wouldn’t have wanted . . . wanted you to see me even in a ball gown or overalls. You can’t cover up my carcass. It shows; it’s there whatever. I just didn’t want you to see me. At all.”