He waited for the trio to react to that. Weldon got red in the face. Harley actually rolled his chair six inches closer.
But Zack just stared.
“Hey, I’m just kidding,” Dale said. “Just trying to...lighten the mood.” He backed away. “See you at the polls!”
He turned, feeling really good about himself.
Until he realized that Valya and Camilla were gone.
Fuck. Fucking alien.
ARRIVAL DAY: VALYA
“Where are you taking me?” Valya asked Camilla, as the pair left the Temple and the clustered humans from Bangalore and Houston.
“I want to show you something.”
“Should the others see it, too? Commander Stewart and Mr. Nayar?”
The girl smiled and shook her head. The gesture was rich with dismissal and contempt. “You’re the only one who understands me here.”
She glanced at the purse Valya had been clutching ever since their meeting. (Valya had the strap over her shoulder, and the purse itself tucked behind her right arm.) “Can I see what’s in your purse?”
“Maybe when we get back,” Valya said. “Sure.”
Charmingly, Camilla took Valya’s hand...and, for the first time in hours, seemed like a normal nine-year-old girl.
Valya Makarova had had many strange conversations in her life, seemingly with every trip out of Russia. Her gift for languages guaranteed that, of course; so did the fact that her jobs usually involved translating work, so she was often in situations where people didn’t understand each other. Strangers on buses or in restaurants would realize that this otherwise-grim-looking Russian woman could communicate with them, usually to their relief and pleasure.
For example, when working in Baghdad after the end of the American occupation, she had emerged from her hotel early one morning, hoping to get some exercise before the day’s barrage of broiling heat, to find a skinny older man wearing jeans, a tank top, and a cap from some American sports team doing exercises with recitations that he claimed were the original human root language—her field of interest. They started in Arabic, and shifted to the mutual linguistic ground of American-style English, but were interrupted by the arrival of Iraqi commercial security, who put the run to this fascinating man before Valya could get a name or a cell phone number—
None of these had prepared her for Camilla Munaretto.
To begin with, and allowing for the fact that Portuguese was not in her top five languages, Camilla was the most articulate child Valya had ever met. It wasn’t just her vocabulary—which was better than Valya’s—it was her apparent self-possession and confidence.
The girl was also quite pretty...dark-haired, yet blue-eyed, one of those luscious South American hybrids who had come to dominate the fashion industry in the past generation. Had she remained on Earth and grown to the appropriate height, Camilla would undoubtedly have followed in her mother’s spike-heeled footsteps, onto some runway or into a catalog.
But even in Valya’s former “normal existence,” the fashion world was never high on her mental playlist. To think about such things here, in these particular circumstances, was quite silly to begin with. At present, Camilla wore a ludicrously large T-shirt proclaiming the virtues of a Ron Jon Surf Shop. Apparently, when first encountered, she had been nearly naked, saved from terminal immodesty only by some bizarre coating, flakes of which still covered her upper arms and thighs...at least those parts of her still visible around the edges of the billowing shirt.
She also had a nasty-looking scratch or bite on her upper left arm.
Their meeting had been arranged by Vikram Nayar, who had said, “She didn’t arrive with either group. She was already here.”
That had required some explanation, and with Zack Stewart assisting, Nayar had told Valya that Camilla Munaretto had been the niece of Brahma cosmonaut Lucas Munaretto.
“Had been?” None of that made sense to her.
Steward explained that Camilla had died of leukemia a year and a half before the Brahma and Destiny launches, and that she, like several other humans, had been revived here inside Keanu.
Valya knew something of this. She had heard that Zack Stewart’s wife was one of these “Revenants,” the term that seemed to be catching on with the refugees. She wasn’t sure she believed any of it, of course.
“What do you want from me?”
“You’re the only one who speaks her language.”
“I’m barely fluent in Portuguese.”
“No one else seems to know a word of it, so you are, by default, our expert.” Apparently he felt he needed to make sure Valya understood. “She’s a child in very strange circumstances; she needs to be able to talk to someone.”
Valya had already felt uneasy around Camilla. Glimpsed earlier, the girl had been fidgety, moving quickly from group to group, like a beggar on speed. Then, given a candy bar by one of the Houston people, she had sat down in the shadows of the Temple to eat the treat.
Somehow, without Valya’s seeing her, Camilla had crept forward, into the lit part of the Temple, where for some reason she had fixed on Valya quite some time before Nayar came to her with his “offer.”
The girl’s gaze was disturbing, and for an instant, Valya felt angry; she did not want to be tethered to this strange girl!
But she recognized the inevitability, if not the wisdom, of Nayar’s plan. If Camilla had truly been “brought back,” then she held vital information that would be lost without Valya’s help.
She realized that she was happier knowing she had something to do. “What do you want me to ask her?” she said to Nayar.
“Whatever you want. I have no...guidance to offer, though obviously, anything you think important...” This was surprising; in the time she had worked with or around Vikram Nayar, he had always had a plan of some kind. Age and disruption were damaging him.
So she had introduced herself to Camilla and been rewarded with a genuine smile, though not one of surprise...it was closer to an acknowledgment, as if the girl were saying, I’ve been waiting for you.
Nevertheless, Valya stuck to the basics, asked if Camilla were hungry, how she felt, all good, all normal. Then, since she wanted to know...“How did you get here?”
The girl took a moment to organize her answer, or so it seemed. And then she delivered a narrative so precise that she might have been reading it. “I died in a hospice in São Paolo on February 27, 2018. I had leukemia from the time I was six. It made me very sick and very sad.” And, yes, her eyes shone with tears at this point...Valya felt her defenses weakening.
As if a switch had been thrown, Camilla was suddenly upright and happy again. “Then I woke here, in one of the boxes. It was difficult to get out.” She made pawing gestures.
“You must have been...completely amazed, to be alive again.” Valya tried to imagine it but could not get past the inevitable preceding step, which was dying of cancer.
“I died in my sleep,” Camilla said matter-of-factly. “They gave me many drugs. It was just as if I woke from sleep...” And here she spread her hands, as if to say, Look at me now. “And I was well!”
Valya had to accept the story: the girl was here, after all. She had no clever way of confirming her story, only the information Nayar had passed along from what he knew about Lucas Munaretto, and about what unusual things had happened during the Brahma mission.
“Who brought you back? Who...made you well?”
“God did,” she said.
At last, Valya thought, an answer that made sense...not to Valya’s religious beliefs, which were non-existent, but for a young girl from Catholic Brazil.
“But he worked through the Builders,” Camilla said.
“Who are the Builders? The builders of this place?”
For the first time, Valya saw confusion or doubt in the girl. “Yes...” she said, though she seemed quite uncertain. Valya had heard Zack Stewart mention Architects and assumed Camilla meant the same thing. But she couldn’t be sure.
&n
bsp; Valya looked around. Everyone was eating or sitting in an exhausted stupor...except for Zachary Stewart and his daughter and a few others, busily talking just far enough away that they could not be heard. Dale Scott was there, too.
They were watching her, of course, and especially watching Camilla.
“Have you told anyone about these Builders? Commander Stewart, perhaps?”
“Oh, he knows.” She seemed quite certain, though Valya noted that she did not actually answer the question.
“Who are they? Will we meet them? Are they watching over us, helping us? What do they look like?” In spite of herself, Valya grew excited. This was a game she could enjoy...
But Camilla was suddenly done playing or talking. She shook her head, as if to clear it, then stood up...somewhat wobbly, as if her legs had gone to sleep. “Not here,” she said.
And, without waiting for Valya, she headed for the Temple opening.
With a backward glance at Stewart and his party, who were now arguing with Dale, Valya painfully got to her feet, grabbed her bag, and gave chase as best she could.
Out in the twilight of the habitat, she saw Camilla fifty meters away, gesturing for her to come. She caught up with her and, after a brief exchange, wound up following her to the wall of the habitat opposite the Temple opening—literally behind the structure.
“Do you have a destination in mind?” Valya asked. “Or do you just want to take a walk?” She could easily understand the need...if, as claimed, the girl had been dead. Of course, Valya reminded herself, her body was new; it wasn’t really as if Camilla had to shake off a year or two of cold sleep in a coffin....
Physical issues aside, however, Camilla might well feel a spiritual need to walk, run, explore, to reconnect with her hereditary hunter-gatherer impulses....
“I don’t really know,” Camilla told her. “But I have a...picture in my mind of a place against this wall.” She stopped and glanced backward. “The Temple will be farther away.” She turned down-habitat again, resuming her march.
Valya discovered that she was a little out of breath, and that her legs were weak...yet the exercise felt good. She was moving...granted, it reminded her of a joke Dale Scott was fond of repeating (as he was fond of repeating every witticism in his repertoire), about a country woman whose young son had spent his hard-earned chore money on a merry-go-round: “Well, you’ve spent your money and enjoyed your ride...but where have you gone?”
She was going nowhere but, for the moment, enjoying the ride.
“I’m sorry to keep asking this question, but I hope you understand,” Valya said. “How are you feeling?”
Even in the dim light, Valya could detect a grown-up change of expression on Camilla’s face. It was almost...reflective. “Somewhere between troubled and giddy.” Then she looked directly at her. “I hope you understand.”
Valya then told Camilla, “You are very well spoken,” and the girl smiled and said, “As are you.” Not You, too.
She even followed up with a question of her own. “You can talk to everyone and you look like you belong. How do you do that?”
So, even in their brief time together, the girl had spotted Valya’s little working trick, the one that gave her so much success as a translator: Whenever she spoke another language, she acted it as well.
“When I was in secondary school, thirteen or fourteen years old, I noticed how, in moving from one language to another, speakers used different gestures, posture, and facial expressions. There was, in my school, a theater instructor named Grigory. He was very young and very handsome.”
“Did you fall in love with him?” That was another question beyond Camilla’s age.
“No,” she said. “He was not likely to fall in love with me.” Not because of age, but sexual preference...Valya did not want to discuss that with Camilla. Things were strange enough!
“But Grigory was so pleased that any student had even noticed, much less bothered to ask about it, that he gave me a master class in the value of these cues to the actor’s art. He told me, ‘Valyochka, voice isn’t just words and volume, voice is where sounds originate in your mouth.’
“Of course, I had no idea what he was talking about. Then he said, ‘Valyochka, you’ve watched many American and British films.’ You don’t know this, but almost every student in Russia studies English from the first year in school.”
Camilla had only nodded, again, the gesture of a much older person.
“Part of that education was watching all these movies, and Grigory had done this, too. ‘Valyochka,’ he said, ‘watch one of each again, and this time notice: British English originates in the front of the mouth, American English toward the back. If you speak American English, and wish to sound convincing, not only must you emulate the pitch and eliminate your accent and know the words by heart...you must locate the words in the right place in your mouth.’ Then he smiled—I still remember this—and said, ‘There’s a reason they call a language a ‘tongue.’”
Caught up in her own storytelling—her biggest weakness, aside from unsuitable men, was enjoying the sound of her own voice in any of her languages—Valya didn’t realize that Camilla had stopped two meters back.
“Are we where you wanted to go?” she asked the girl.
Camilla said “Yes,” but her body language and gestures lagged, a sign to Valya that the girl was unsure.
“And what are we to find here?” They were close to the wall of the habitat...which to Valya looked like the rocky face of a canyon rising to the sky. It was shadowed, of course, and relatively smooth...but even in the dim light she could make out different-colored striations.
There were bushes and trees growing here, too, making it difficult to see whether the place where wall met floor looked artificial, or had been cleverly engineered to look “natural.”
Camilla was ignoring the wall and the trees, however. She was walking slowly parallel to the wall, eyes on the ground, like a child at the beach in search of shells. “Are you looking for something?” Valya said.
More uncertainty now. “I...think so.” She stopped. “Here.”
They were standing in an open patch of dirt indistinguishable from that around it, except for the fact that it seemed flat, with a suggesting of circularity. As if there were some kind of plate two meters across embedded in the ground.
“I see,” Valya said, lying only slightly. “And what happens now?”
Camilla smiled. “Now I want to see inside your purse.” She reached toward it.
Valya hesitated. For some reason, she didn’t want to hand over her purse—which was odd, because back on Earth, she would have been happy to show a girl what she carried.
But, as every breath and sight reminded her...she was not on Earth. “Why?” she said. “It’s just ordinary stuff.”
“I’m not entirely sure.” But Camilla still held out her hand. “But I just know I need something other than the clothes we’re wearing...”
She handed over the purse and watched as Camilla opened it and—with a fair amount of reverence, she had to admit—began taking out the items within. Phone. Package of Kleenex. Badges. A pack of chewing gum.
“Ah!” Camilla said, clutching a Chanel lipstick. She handed the other items and the bag back to Valya, then stepped into the center of the “plate” and placed the lipstick there.
“What’s going to happen?” Valya said.
“Something,” Camilla said.
Valya suddenly felt a vibration through her feet and sandals, an electric tingle that lasted less than a second. She smelled something unusual, even by Keanu standards: like plastic burning.
The dirt in the plate rippled once.
The light in the entire habitat flickered several times, bathing the scene in a strange strobelike effect.
Most human beings, in times of great stress or confusion, revert to their milk language.
Not Valya Makarova. When she saw that there were now two lipsticks instead of one, she found herself echoing her
former lover, Dale Scott: “Oh, holy shit.”
Camilla seemed equally surprised. Hesitantly, she reached out for the “new” lipstick. “It’s warm,” she said. She handed it to Valya.
“Shouldn’t you keep the new one?”
“My mother told me I couldn’t wear lipstick until I was twelve.”
Valya wanted to laugh. This girl had died and been reborn on another planet! She had just taken part in some type of alien techno-magic! Yet she still remembered some argument with her mother! For an instant, Valya wished she could become mother to a daughter—just to know that one of her parental strictures would sustain itself across time and space, and through death!
“I’m sure that if your mother were here, she would allow you to have it. Besides”—Valya knew there was a risk to this, but felt it was time to confront the subject—“you’ve been dead for two years, right?”
“I’m not sure. Uncle Lucas said so.”
“When did you die?”
Now the girl looked troubled and sad, and Valya felt she had made a mistake. “It was late in February. I had been in the hospital since before Christmas.”
“The year was...”
“End of 2017. Beginning of 2018.”
“And you were...”
“Nine.”
“That was almost two years ago, Camilla. By my calculations, you are going on eleven. And you may wear lipstick. But let me test it first.” Valya kept her tone light, but she was not sure that this Chanel knockoff would be lipstick.
She opened it and screwed it into position...noting that it seemed to have been used to the same degree as her original. It looked and smelled the same—odd to have a whiff of that waxy fragrance here.
She applied it, rolled her lips. “Perfect,” she announced, and presented the lipstick to Camilla, who almost squealed with delight.
Valya knelt to examine the strange circle of dirt, which still showed frozen ripples, like Arctic snow. The original lipstick rested in a bowl-like depression perhaps three centimeters across. Wondering if what she had witnessed was less duplication than transference, she plucked it out, opened it, tested it.
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