Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  A half-alien thing: the shape still human but the face so strange! Ovoid eyes, the bony skull-sheath jutting over her cheekbones. She held her small brown hands before her and saw the tips curving into hard pincers, transforming almost as she stood there, transfixed with horror and wonder. She looked down at herself in the hard, honest light and saw that the reflection was not false. What am I? she wondered, aghast.

  And the alien within answered her, not in words but in a swell of understanding that took her breath away. She remembered what it had proposed, what she had agreed to; the terrifying darkness within its body, her screams echoing in her ears as the thin tendrils inside it wrapped around her, penetrated her skin. After that, the chrysalid sleep as the new bridges between the two of them formed and hardened, as alien transforming organelles coursed through her body, as great, chemical swathes of emotion—pleasure and fear, hunger and sweet, nameless desire swept through her. Then she was lifted from the dead shell of the alien into a brief light, and into the life-sac which eased her once more into the sleep of forgetfulness ….

  So the Eavesdropper stood before the stranger, who might or might not be her son; she, a creature not alien, not human, but a bridge, a thing that was new, the first of its kind. He (or was it she?) stood away from her, bumping gently against the life-pod, the long umbilicus stretching out into the dark like a luminous, flexible bridge. The stranger’s hands were as yet empty, but the posture was wary, as though poised to activate the space-suit’s weapons systems. She felt some ancient part of her cry out: Do you not know me, son? And something inside her gave way, crumbled like a mud wall before a flood.

  I must know, she said to herself. I must know if you are him. She stretched her arms toward him, slowly, saw him tense, then relax. Suddenly she wanted to enclose him in the dark, to exchange blood with blood, to share synapse with synapse, to know him cell by cell, and so become something new. The sharpness of her hunger took her breath away. In that brief moment she saw that the Life-pod itself was her kin, a hybrid of the original alien species and some gravid denizen of a distant ocean-world, and its mind was clear to her for the first time. Why couldn’t she know the stranger in the same way? No, she said, feeling or imagining the infant mouth straining to open in her chest. That was the alien within, as it had once been, remembering. There had to be some other way.

  She opened her hands to show him that they were empty. She put the palms together in the old Indic gesture of greeting; then moved the fingers to make a circle, a window through which she could see him against the life-pod and the infinity of stars. Around her, along pathways invisible to human and alien, sang the tachyons, leaving ghost trails in space-time that the sleeping woman in the chamber under her feet could only imagine. Only the Eavesdropper could sense them, could see where they were leading, to the heart of the great galactic beast, the Hidden One. She saw for just a moment that she had been conceived and forged for a great purpose. But for now she was only a bridge in the darkness between ship and ship, being and being. Through the window of her hands she watched the stranger come slowly toward her.

  Four Eyes

  Tobias Buckell

  Manny had Bob Marley cranking on the stereo, his van was full of passengers, and the air conditioning was working after a long week of giving him trouble.

  The sun beat down on the wet-looking asphalt road that ran along the harbor, next to the concrete waterfront. It curved along in front of the brightly colored Dutch Colonial warehouses of Charlotte Amalie, which were now converted restaurants and jewel shops. Tourists in Day-Glo shirts and daubs of sunscreen rubbed over peeling skin crowded both sides of the waterfront road. Manny slowed somewhat, keeping an eye on them.

  On the sidewalk by the shops a tall black man stood by a food cart. The hand-painted wooden sign hanging from the cart’s side had faded letters. The man wore a grand suit with tails, like an orchestra his shaved head. A cigar burned in his mouth. For a brief second he held Manny’s attention. Then the food cart’s owner stepped forward and the strangely dressed man disappeared.

  Manny looked at the other side of the road. A white girl with oval shaped sunglasses and pink leather pants stepped off the sidewalk into the road in front of his van.

  He slammed on the brakes, trying to dodge her, but the van couldn’t respond that fast. Her ponytail flew up toward the windshield and her head struck the star-shaped hood ornament. She bounced along the asphalt. Manny weaved the van to a stop, with swearing from the passengers in the back.

  He opened the door and stepped out into the heat. Get up, stand up, the radio cried out, and that was what Manny hoped would happen. He hoped that she would at least just stir and be okay.

  But she just lay there.

  Manny’s stomach pulled itself tight and began to hurt. He looked back at the van. One of the passengers, an elderly lady with a straw hat and sunscreen on the tip of her nose, stepped down through the sliding door. She covered her mouth with the back of her palm.

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  A trickle of blood ran down from the girl’s head, muddying the dust in the gutter.

  A passenger with a large belt buckle, working boots, and a southern accent crawled out the sliding door with a cell phone in his hand. A mahogany-skinned man in khakis and a floral print shirt followed close behind.

  “An ambulance is on its way here,” the southern man said. The man in khakis walked over to the girl and squatted. He held a small piece of rope in his hand, tied in an elaborate weave of knots. He shook his head.

  “She dead,” he said.

  “How you know?” Manny demanded. The man in khakis said nothing, but looked sad.

  The southerner closed his cellphone. “He seems to know about these things,” he said. “I met him on the plane here. His name’s Jimiti. I’m Stan.”

  In the distance, Manny heard the low wail of an ambulance start, fighting its way through the snarl of waterfront traffic. The world rippled, and Manny swallowed hard. He hoped she was alive.

  “It’s a shame,” Stan said.

  “I never knock into no-one before,” Manny said, still stunned.

  A bystander, an old lady with a large handbag, called out from the bench she sat on. “Don’t fret so, man. She walk right out in front of you. Nothing you could do.”

  Manny looked down at the girl, the trickle of blood from her head growing. The man in khakis, Jimiti, nodded. He put the knotted rope in his hands back into his pants pocket.

  “Nothing you could do,” Jimiti agreed. The wail of the ambulance began to drown out the din of traffic and town noise.

  Jimiti stood up and walked over to Manny. He put a small length of knotted rope into Manny’s hand, as well as a business card. The card was simple. Plain white. Jimiti, it said in black letters. Obeah and other practices.

  Manny started to put the card and rope in his pocket, but Jimiti’s leathery hand grabbed his wrist.

  “Keep the rope out in you hand. It suck up you fear.”

  “Look …” Manny said, annoyed. He met Stan’s eyes, though.

  “He means well,” Stan said. He had a similar piece of knotted rope around his wrist. “He gave me one when I met him on the plane coming down here.” Manny slipped the knotwork over his hands.

  The ambulance pulled in front of them, killing its sirens and bringing back the usual wash of background noise. Manny watched as two men jumped out of the doors in the back and knelt by the girl.

  Please live, Manny hoped.

  Manny revved the engine and turned into his driveway. He parked to the right of the out-of-control hibiscus bush and just to the left of the brand new Acura he hardly ever had time to drive. The Acura was painted a glossy gold, fully tricked out with rims, low ground effects, tinted windows, and a spoiler. The twelve-inch speakers in the back had once cracked the rear window.

  He knew the car was an extravagance. He had bills to pay, large ones that he owed doctors who had done surgery on his granddad. But since he’d been a kid Manny
wanted a car like this. Something that said he was someone, not just a taxi driver ordered around by tourists.

  When he got out of the van, Manny took a deep breath.

  The sun disappeared just over the galvanized tin roof. It sent streamers of clouds out in all directions, and random bands drifted around the sky like streaks of brilliant colored cotton candy. They started rosy at the horizon, and graduated all the way to off-white over his head.

  “Manny,” his grandfather called from inside the house. “You late.”

  “Yes, G.D.”

  Manny walked up to the door. The house needed painted. Jagged flaps of aquamarine made the outside walls look like they’d caught some sort of scaly disease. His grandfather backed the wheelchair away from the doorjamb as Manny walked in.

  “What happen?”

  “Some white girl step in front the van.”

  G.D picked up his glasses with unsteady hands. Once they were on he looked out into the driveway and blinked his super-magnified eyes.

  “The girl okay?”

  “No.” Manny had stood with the police and answered question after question, and signed his name to documents. And strangely enough he stayed calm throughout it all, despite the shaky feelings he was sure would come later.

  “You supper up by the microwave.”

  Manny shook his head. He emptied his pockets and tossed everything into a decorative terra-cotta dish at the edge of the kitchen counter. He pulled the stupid piece of rope off his wrist and threw it on top of the card the obeah man had given him.

  “I don’t feel hungry,” he said. He walked out of the kitchen and passed the door to the guestroom. Still locked, he saw with relief. He and G.D stayed out of there. Ever since last year. Ever since after his grandmother’s funeral.

  The continuous whine of the wheelchair just behind him gave Manny the feeling that G.D and the machine were stalking him. He walked the rest of the way down the hall, past G.D’s room to his bedroom. The doorknob felt cool to the touch.

  When the door creaked open wind sucked in and slightly moved the drapes.

  The white girl, in pink leather pants, Gucci sunglasses hanging by her neck, sat motionless on the chair next to Manny’s bed.

  “Oh God, oh no,” he said. Suddenly unable to breathe he stepped back and tripped over the wheelchair. The concrete wall smacked him in the back of his head and the world jumped to the left.

  G.D pulled his cane out of the side of the wheelchair and pointed it at Manny’s throat. He held the business card up in front of him, the name “Jimiti” still large in the center of the card. G.D glanced quickly into the room. He licked his lips.

  “She the girl you run over?” G.D asked, his voice wavering.

  Manny nodded.

  G.D pushed the card forward at him.

  “The card here, it for real?”

  Again, Manny nodded. He glanced into the room. The girl hadn’t moved. G.D reached out with the cane and pulled the door closed with energy Manny hadn’t seen from him in years. His eyes bulged behind the glasses, and a bead of sweat ran down his papery cheek.

  “Go call the man on the card.”

  “Why?” he asked, still fuzzy.

  G.D smacked Manny’s leg with the cane.

  “Ever since you was just a little child you had go around vexing people with you questions,” G.D hissed. He lashed out with the cane again, and it bit down into Manny’s shoulder. “Just call the man.”

  Manny grabbed the cane and wrenched it away from G.D.

  Still breathing heavily he walked back to the kitchen. He ran the tap, water pooling in his cupped hands until it spilled over his fingers into the sink, and splashed water on his face. He looked down at the card.

  Jimiti, the card still said. But in the corner it now showed the words: Duppy removal and other services.

  Days passed for Manny. Days of driving taxi, but not paying attention to the small winding roads around the coast. He drove all up and down the fourteen miles of St. Thomas, up the spine of the mountains into the small patch of rain forest, and back down again into dry and dusty town. Days that built and mounted onto Manny’s shoulders. He began to wonder if the obeah man would ever respond.

  He even spent one night in a motel, tired of waking up on the couch with crusty eyes and a cramped back. Too scared to walk into his room. Too scared to see the motionless statue sitting by his bed.

  When Manny came back and parked his Acura, G.D threatened him with the cane the moment he passed through the kitchen.

  “Where you been?”

  “Out,” Manny said. “Leave me alone.”

  G.D pointed out the window.

  “You should sell that ugly car. You can’t self afford it.”

  “I never had anything nice like that, ever,” Manny said. He was tired. He looked around for the keys to his taxi-van. Another day of following the roads for money lay ahead.

  “You just a taxi driver, you can’t afford no fancy car. You ain’t rich.”

  Manny found the keys and clenched them.

  “You think I don’t know that!” He snapped. “I feed you, I pay you bills. I been keeping you alive all them year, and all you do is trouble me so. I pay the doctor-man. What you ever done? You useless, that’s what you do.”

  G.D rolled his chair away. Manny continued.

  “Yeah, I just the taxi-driver. And I all you got, old man. I ain’t selling the car unless we poor, you hear?”

  Manny stopped and faced G.D. His granddad’s tears ran down his cheeks, magnified by the glasses. G.D rolled away, and Manny angrily made sandwiches for the two of them.

  Afterwards he checked the porch looking for G.D, then cautiously peered into his room and shuddered. The ghost still sat there patiently, hands in her lap.

  But no G.D.

  Manny walked to the guestroom. He took the key from over the door, and with a trembling hand unlocked it. The room swarmed with dust that made slow, lazy spirals and patterns in the air.

  In the corner of the room sat the still figure of an old lady with a veil over her face. Her hands were crossed politely in her lap, just like the dead girl in Manny’s room.

  “I should have gone with she,” G.D said from next to the doorframe. Manny jumped, heart pounding. “Caroline …” G.D cried. “I miss you so, dear.”

  Still angry, still feeling he’d been caught between everything and everyone, Manny wanted to both yell and hug G.D’s frail body.

  G.D wheeled out past him. Manny closed the door and locked it.

  “You right,” G.D said to Manny. “What I ever done?”

  Manny leaned his head against the wall.

  “I have to go work, G.D,” he said.

  He drove more. From Red Hook, on the East end of the island where the ferries left for St. John, to Brewer’s Bay on the West End. He drove over Crown Mountain and down onto North Side to let tourists take their pictures with the donkey by Drake’s Seat.

  At the end, when he counted the day’s take, he had a bit. But not enough.

  He sat with a bottle of soda and a pate. He wondered if it was faulty memories that made it seem like he was making less and less, and that fewer and fewer tourists were coming to the islands as the years passed.

  He’d once had other things in mind for himself. University. Stateside. Computers. But driving taxi brought in money for G.D and living. Manny had left those plans far behind.

  The radio interrupted to tell him he had a last pickup for the day.

  “At Magens Bay?” Manny complained. “I’m in town.”

  “They had ask for you special.”

  Manny sighed and shut the door. He drove up the mountain from the back end of town and down into the cooler air of the North Side.

  Magens Bay stretched out, a white crescent in the dimming light. The last clumps of people were leaving, knocking the sand off their feet and getting into cars and taxis to leave.

  The sun’s last streamers of orange pastels dripped behind the islands off the North
Side. The last few vehicles coughed on, then drove off. Manny was alone, slightly nervous that he was about to be mugged.

  Instead, Jimiti stepped out from behind a coconut tree, barefoot, his red floral shirt unbuttoned.

  “Sorry I took so long,” the obeah man said. “I had a lot of thing to reflect on.”

  “Okay,” Manny said.

  The obeah man’s hands hung loose by his side.

  “Walk with me.”

  Manny took off his shoes and socks and followed Jimiti. They walked down the long beach, until the water sucked and splashed at their toes. The darker it got, the whiter the beach seemed. Manny slapped at bites to his exposed arms. Mosquitos and no-see-ums hungry for his skin.

  “You got duppy?” Jimiti asked.

  “That a ghost?”

  Jimiti sighed. He stopped walking and faced the huge bay.

  “A ghost,” he confirmed, with sadness in his voice. “I don’t self understand what I doing here. I would have prefer to stay in Florida, helping all them old people over, giving them some company. Instead, I explaining what a duppy is.”

  “Who you talking too?” Manny asked, because Jimiti spoke to the water.

  “You see duppy often?”

  Manny hesitated.

  “Never mind.” Jimiti took one more step toward the water. The steady roll of waves against the beach began to slow, almost to a crawl, and then died away. The wind dropped, the air hushed.

  One lone rogue wave washed toward them. It broke, a miniature froth of salty mist spinning off from its top. And from that, Manny saw it wash against a form.

  “You see her?” Jimiti asked.

  Manny blinked. The wave died, but a lady stood out of the water. Her skin glistened with rivulets of water that dripped down between her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs, and then back into the ocean. Her features never stayed in focus, but wavered like a reflection in a windy puddle.