Beyond the Veil of Stars

by Robert Reed

  Dad was looking at the boy, eyes smiling. And when their eyes met he asked, “Did you see anything that night, son?”

  “No.” The boy squirmed and put on a sour face. “I fell asleep early and heard nothing.”

  “Too bad,” Cornell offered.

  Then the boy looked at him. “You ever see an alien ship?”

  Cornell was able to say, “Yes,” with a quiet, unprideful voice.

  “How many times?”

  “Three.”

  It was fun, this taste of celebrity.

  “Did you see the aliens? How’d they look?”

  No, no aliens. He wished he could have, sure—how many had been in his dreams?—but their ships were the best he could claim. Once it was a golden light in the distance, swift and eerily silent. Another time was just last year, a house-sized something crossing the highway ahead of them. Pete had stopped and shaken Dad awake, and the three of them had watched it slide away at treetop level, vanishing behind some hill. The whole sighting took maybe thirty seconds, and it had been infuriating because it was so real and quick and matter-of-fact, nothing particularly mysterious and not one useful photograph of the thing.

  The boy nodded soberly, understanding unfairness. He hadn’t even heard the dogs barking the other night, and it was his father who’d found the circle. He’d come in before breakfast, scared enough to shake. Never before had he seen his old man acting scared, and he sounded pleased to admit it now.

  Cornell looked at the glass circle, black and shiny, and at his own father. Dad was taking photographs while Pete worked the videocamera, panning back and forth.

  “What about the third time?”

  Cornell wasn’t listening.

  “You said three times. What’s the third?”

  The men paused. Or they didn’t pause, but merely slowed for a moment. Sound had a way of traveling on these circles, reflecting off the glass and always feeling close. Dad gave Cornell a glance, more curious than concerned. “I saw one up close,” Cornell allowed, “but that was long ago. I was little—”

  “How close?”

  “Twenty feet, maybe.”

  “Goddamn.” The boy shivered and grinned to himself.

  The men set their cameras down and began working with sensors, writing numbers into the notebooks.

  “So,” said the boy, “do you always help?”

  “If I’m not in school.” Cornell put another glass shard into a Ziploc, then asked, “Do you help your dad?”

  “Walking the beans. Crap like that, sure.”

  He couldn’t imagine living on a farm. It could sound fun, except most farmers seemed to be in bad moods. There wasn’t enough rain, and they were in debt. They’d tell strangers about equipment troubles and weed troubles and generally make it seem like a stupid way to live.

  “So what do the aliens want?” asked the boy. “To study us?”

  “They’ve got to be,” Cornell replied.

  “I’d like to meet them. You know?”

  What remained to be done? Nothing, except to hunt for anything odd about this circle. Cornell started walking, his head down, feet sliding across the glass. He could see himself in it, his image too tall and the sky beyond colored a brilliant gray.

  “So what’s your mom think about this stuff?”

  An invisible hand closed on his chest, then his throat.

  “Does she help, too?” The boy asked his questions, then sensed something was wrong. He glanced at the men—Dad over the Geiger counter and Pete placing a sensor at the circle’s center—and then curiosity made him ask, “Where’s your mom? Back home?”

  Cornell said, “No,” with care.

  The boy blinked and asked, “Where then?”

  “She’s dead.”

  That shut him up, his mouth down to a dot.

  “She died long ago,” Cornell lied; he was thinking how Dad said lies were permissible when they protected someone. “In an accident, long ago. In a car crash.” He was talking faster, unable to stop himself. “It’s just me and Dad now. Which is fine. We do okay by ourselves.”

  A brief pause, then he added:

  “She’s in a better place.”

  He spoke loudly, for emphasis, and the words echoed off the glassy ground, rising into the sky.

  2

  There was guilt, reliable and deep, whenever Cornell thought of his mother. She wasn’t a vivid part of his life, and he felt it was his fault that he didn’t think of her often enough or with suitable intensity. He was some color of traitor, selfish and shallow. Some nights he cried about it in secret. Sometimes he feared Dad would see inside his head, identifying his considerable failures. Guilt, then shame. That was the normal course. And from there he’d drift into practiced memories of Mom. His apology to her was to make her live in his mind, and years of practice served to make Pamela Novak feel genuine, if only now and again. If only for as long as he concentrated with all of his ability.

  She had been pretty, and probably still was. Cornell could recall bits and pieces of her by himself. She was in their little kitchen, in the master bedroom, or watching TV with a little pillow pulled to her chest. Once—he couldn’t recall the circumstance—Dad was driving them somewhere, unlikely as that seemed; and Mom turned and looked into the back, asking, “What are you doing, Corny?” Corny. Only she called him that. “What trouble is finding you, Corny?”

  In memory she had a sly knowing smile, cutting through a four-year-old’s tiny capacity to mislead.

  “Put it down,” she had warned him. “Don’t play with that.”

  She seemed perpetually tired in his memories, particularly in the eyes. A small woman, nonetheless he remembered her as being gigantic. Her voice was strong and certain; light brown hair was kept long; and her skin was tanned, even in winter.

  “That’s your mother,” Dad would laugh. “Tanning beds and the creams, even when I lectured her about the effects of ultraviolet. But you know your mom. She’d act as if biology didn’t apply to her.”

  Except he didn’t know Mom. Not in any substantial way. There were photographs in several half-filled albums, plus some holiday videos. There had been more videos, but Dad had wiped them clean by accident. “Besides,” he would add, “she avoided cameras. Not that she was shy, of course. I think she was vain, and she hated every picture of herself.”

  Vain. Only recently had Cornell understood that comment. In the photographs she stood with hands on hips, the face daring the lens to focus on her. Vanity? Pretty women can be critical self-judges, he was learning; but once trapped, Mom had done her best to shine. Indeed, she dominated every shot, even if she was on the periphery. Even Pete, stocky and strong, looked insubstantial beside Pamela Novak, his hands behind his back and his perpetual four-day beard almost black—Cornell remembered the picture—and she not quite smiling, staring up at Cornell with an amused quality in those tired unshy eyes.

  Dad loved her. He said so every day, if only with some distant watery look. He fell in love with her when they met, and Cornell knew the story by heart, perhaps better than he knew much of his own past. It was back in the 1980s, long before circles and the upswing in sightings, and some rancher in the west reported odd lights and a landing site. This was before Pete, and somehow Dad had driven that far on his own, finding the right ranch amid miles of grass. But the rancher proved unreliable, as a witness and as a person. He smelled of bourbon and made obvious lies whenever Dad’s attentions wavered. He hadn’t just seen the ship. He’d seen the pilots, too. Little men, he said. Dressed in silver, naturally. He and the pilots had waved at one another, like neighbors…the rancher showing Dad what he meant, his drunken red face grinning the whole time and the story one big joke, nothing more.

  The landing site looked like someone had burned diesel fuel and grass, the ground stinking of fuel. All very sloppy, Dad conceded, and he would have left at once except for the girl. There was a daughter, seventeen and bright and pretty, and she took an interest in the work. She’d read about D
ad in the paper, and she won his undying confidence by admitting that her father might be stretching the truth more than a little bit.

  Years later, Dad admitted to being shy in the girl’s presence, and that left to his own capacities, he would have done nothing. He would have left the ranch and forgotten her. But Pam befriended him, then helped collect samples of the burned grass and the unburned tractor juice. “Some memories don’t fade,” he liked to say. “Years make them more real, as if they’ve got threads connected to you, and distance and time just make the threads tighten. You can’t stop feeling their tug. Which is how I feel about your mother. I’ll be doing something, or nothing, and suddenly I’ll see that ranch and your mother, a red bandanna tied around her hair and the black ashes sticking to her hands, to her cheeks, and I can see where she knelt, helping me dig at the burned earth. She calls me sir, making me feel old. And she tells me about her father and living here and how when she’s done with high school she’s going places. ‘The ends of the world,’ she says. ‘No more schools.’ She tells me how she doesn’t do well with book learning. And I’m thinking: No, but you’re smart. Which she is. Some people’s brains work so well, son, that you can hear them working. You feel asleep and stupid beside them, and that’s how your mother is.”

  At the end of the day, done with work, Dad prepared to say good-bye. But the rancher, thank God, invented some fresh lies, grinning as he reported, “I’ve done more than wave at them. You’re a good fellow, I can tell you…I talked to the little shits. What’s the word? Telepathy. Yeah, we telepathied, and I learned plenty. Want to hear?”

  Dad stayed for dinner, listening to the impossible stories, taking indifferent notes and eating most of an entire frozen dinner. Pam had cooked it. “She was never a chef in the making, let me tell you.” Laughter, then he turned serious. “Her father fell asleep before eight, just after we met the Venusian princess, and I was embarrassed as well as thankful. It was easy to leave, I thought. I told Pam that I wanted to drive partway home that night. And she looked at me. Staring, you know?” A pause. “Sometimes I’m not very bright. Particularly about everything that’s obvious.”

  Dad had excused himself, using the bathroom before embarking. When he came into the living room he found the rancher sleeping, a blanket thrown over him and the bottle set outside bumping range. He called out, “Thank you,” and stepped outside, into the darkness. There wasn’t any moon, just country stars glittering overhead, and he nearly kicked Pam, who was sitting on her packed suitcase, waiting at his car. It took him an age to realize what she wanted. And not even Cornell had heard the entire story, Dad alluding to troubles between her and her father. Beatings, and maybe worse things. “Take me to the interstate?” she asked Dad. “I can hitch from there.” All she wanted was a ride, he had believed; and for the first twenty miles she kept saying, “I’m taking charge of my life. Now I’m my own person, and I always will be.”

  Dad fell in love during that ride. In the empty country, nothing around them but darkness and belching steers, he heard something magical in that voice. They were married several weeks later. Her father threatened to have Dad thrown in jail; then, learning that there was money at home, he began asking for loans. The miserable man died a couple years later, just after Cornell was born. The banks took what remained of the ranch. Sometimes when he told the story, Dad would gaze off into the distance, eyes becoming simple and wet. Once, for no clear reason, he told Cornell, “Go anywhere people live, and you see order. Regularity. You see streets and houses and fields, everything laid out just so, and do you know why? It’s because everyone owns a special hurt, chaotic at its heart, and that’s why we dress up the world like we do. We struggle to make it predictable and sensible. And fair. To diminish the hurt, if only a little bit.”

  How that fit into the story, Cornell didn’t know. They were talking about Mom, not humanity; but maybe he would understand someday, when he was older, having acquired his own special hurt, just as his father promised.

  They celebrated Mom’s birthdays and the wedding anniversaries, and every holiday dinner included a place set for her. Pete frowned on that business, claiming it went overboard. But to Cornell it seemed natural, even lovely. Who could say when Mom would come home? If it happened to be Christmas Eve, then they’d be ready, their loyalty proven, that scene imagined and reimagined by Cornell for most of his conscious life.

  Mom had a house key. At least she’d had it when she was abducted. Recruited. Whatever the term. That’s one reason Dad wouldn’t think of moving away. Pam needed a landmark, a familiar place that would cushion her homecoming.

  “She’ll need help,” Cornell had heard many times. “Help and a lot of understanding.”

  Riding home that day, Cornell imagined Christmas Eve, coloring it with a boy’s unflinching sentimentality. He and Dad were sitting at the dining room table, the little turkey steaming as they began to cut…and suddenly there was a sound at the front door. Click-click-click. They raced through the living room, finding Mom pushing her way inside. In the daydream, she smiled weakly, but happily. She said, “Oh, thank God,” and then, “Hello, darlings.” Excited, but composed, too. “Corny, look at you!” She engulfed him, kissing his head and eyes, then weeping…and this despite Dad’s assertion that she wasn’t a crying sort of person. Yet tears seemed mandatory from everyone. The three of them hugged and wept, then Mom took her place at the table, accepting the cooling turkey and the canned corn, rolls and instant potatoes, eating the indifferent food in fast gulps while telling them again and again how wonderful it felt to be home.

  Sometimes Cornell pictured her in the clothes she wore in the old photos, nothing changed. Other times, letting his imagination expand, he saw her wearing odd one-piece jumpsuits made from glossy, otherworldly fabrics, deep pockets crammed full of gifts from around the galaxy. And she looked older, didn’t she? Tanned by alien suns, and most definitely wiser.

  He saw her sitting in their living room, on the old sofa with the photo of Jupiter above her and a pillow in her lap, and she was telling them what had happened during these last years. Dad liked to warn him that abducted people had few recollections of their adventures, at least outside hypnosis; aliens had skills besides star drives and radar evasion. But in his daydream she had perfect recall. Cornell asked what she saw. And she was grinning, pausing for a moment before beginning her enormous story.

  Cornell’s mind couldn’t produce more than a faltering narrative. Much of his imagery was borrowed from Dad’s speculations and from science fiction. Starships streaked across moon-rich skies; humanoids moved in tight, disciplined lines; the sounds of strange music and machinery punctuated an orange-lit landscape. Yet none of it felt real. Even as his imaginary mother spoke at length, describing rivers running upstream or a ringed world with five suns…even then it was as if some barrier existed between those places and him. She spoke of miracles, and what could he rightly comprehend? All he knew was that his mother was home, finally and forever; and she’d witnessed things too great for the likes of him. She had walked with gods, very nearly; how could anyone appreciate such wonders?

  He couldn’t. And maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe comprehension would have too great of a cost, requiring him to lose his humanity…yet Mom hadn’t lost hers, in his daydream, home again and crying again, mopping her big eyes with the frilly edges of the old pillow.

  Pete and his wife—Cornell called her Mrs. Pete—moved in next door not long after Mom arrived. They were in most of the family pictures, Mom pregnant and then Cornell as a baby, then as a toddler. Pete was thin back then, at least through the waist. And Mrs. Pete, as if following some cosmic sense of balance, had been chubby twelve years ago, losing weight as her husband gained. They lived in a chubby four-bedroom house. They’d planned to have children, except later they learned that children were impossible. “It’s not Elaine’s fault, or anyone’s,” Pete had told Dad. “You can’t blame anyone.” Which made Cornell think it was Mrs. Pete’s fault Pete would take
the blame if it was his.

  Pete had known Mom pretty well, and he spoke of her if Cornell asked, though he wasn’t as willing as Dad. And no, he wasn’t present when she vanished. When she was abducted. Pete didn’t help with the work until afterward. But sure, he remembered Pam. A lovely young lady, obviously intelligent. Anyone who met her knew she was the smarter Novak; and Dad always took that barb well, shrugging and admitting, “She was, she is,” or sometimes, “They knew quality, didn’t they?”

  They. Whoever they were, thought Cornell. Dad spoke of the aliens in concrete terms, making assumptions and reasoning from those starting points. It was his basic assumption that they were compassionate and wise; lifeforms, he argued, had to evolve just as an individual life evolves. Humans were children, incapable of making complex decisions for themselves. So why hadn’t we destroyed our world? Because the aliens had protected us from ourselves in subtle ways. The aliens, he maintained, were free of disease and age and every color of misery. Hundreds and thousands of species were scattered through the galaxy, members of a great fraternity of civilized states; they were watching us, studying our lives, busily making ready for the day of First Contact.

  “It’ll happen in your lifetime.” Dad spoke with ominous certainty. “Why do you think the world is at peace now? Not everywhere, but mostly. Because we’re maturing, Cornell. More and more democratic states in the U.N. And why? Because democracy is the highest political state. And soon the galactic community will make an overture, initiating its first careful contacts, and you’ll witness it. I’m absolutely convinced.”

  Yet part of Cornell couldn’t believe in the nourishing aliens. He had no mother because aliens had taken her. If terrorists had kidnapped her, wouldn’t anger be reasonable? There was a gaping, unfair void in his life. It wasn’t right that he had to wait for someone who might never return. Abductions weren’t suppose to last more than a day or two; Dad’s own books claimed as much. Why would compassionate entities steal someone for years? But Dad seemed to anticipate these doubts, telling him, “She’s being trained. Probably for some great purpose, I should think. Or maybe they’ve got her in suspended animation, not stealing a minute of her life.”