Analog SFF, May 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Why should we have assumed it would be like something we'd design?

  The track passed near the Farallons at 10:17 pm, July 3, 2003.

  I'd never asked Tara the date she was found swimming amidst the wreckage of that party boat. I knew it was summer of ‘03. That always seemed close enough.

  "My God,” I muttered at the windshield, “I'm sleeping with the pilot!"

  And then, as traffic moved a few feet, I made myself back off. I didn't know Tara was the pilot. All I had was a series of improbable coincidences, which were not without other explanations. More probable than that she was an alien starpilot.

  And still, I knew she was the pilot as surely as I knew every curve of her body—a knowledge that could not have come of lesser intimacy.

  Amnesia?

  God!

  Even Em had said, the day I met Tara, that total loss of memory happened only in bad fiction! She said Tara had blocks she had to overcome, which made sense—until now.

  My beloved Tara took her last name from the label the hospital gave her—the Farallon woman—and chose her first name herself.

  Tara.

  Terra.

  With full memory of everything she'd lost, she took the name of my world!

  The problem was how to tell her I knew without sending her running.

  The problem was how to get her into Black Box without telling anyone who she was.

  The problem was how to put her in a position to use the equipment in the ship, if it still worked, to contact her people so she could go home. Much as I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her, I loved her too much to keep her here if there was a way she could go home—her home.

  The problem, if anyone so much as suspected who she was, was to convince Sandy—and Roy—that she couldn't tell us anything; that it stood to reason that any starfaring culture would have a prohibition against interfering with the natural growth of a primitive world. To convince people that by her standards we were techno-aborigines.

  I thought of all the exotic ways she—and her face and body—were different, but nothing that couldn't be a result of mixing the varied genetics of Earth.

  Would intelligent lifeon other worlds develop so close to the way it had on Earth?

  I had no way to know. It made engineering sense that intelligent, tool-creating beings would evolve toward bipeds with opposable thumbs and stereoscopic vision, but there were a lot of ways such a being could look.

  I zombied my way through the day.

  I checked the bits and pieces of descent trajectory radar tracks one more time.

  There it was.

  A minuscule, barely detectable, abnormality at the point where ballistics might splash an uncontrolled escape capsule in or near the Farallons, and another one farther on that could put a controlled escape capsule anywhere from west of the Farallons to well past the coastline, depending on how much power, control, and range you assumed.

  I looked at the images we'd gotten from scans of the black boxes we assume had something to do with the controls, and decided they were massive circuit architecture on a scale so much smaller than anything we've achieved that we couldn't read the circuits.

  And . . . I wondered whether anyone—like Roy—might have had the same thought, long ago, and looked. If so, they found nothing, or kept it secret and let Tara live her life on Earth. Maybe they wanted to see what she'd do on our world. If Roy looked, he might not take the chance that while we could keep the ship secret, there was no way to keep things secret if a pilot was identified . . . but . . . I had no way to know. For sure, I wasn't about to reveal her!

  I called Em and asked the date Tara was found. I said I wanted to buy her a birthstone ring. Since she didn't know her real birthday, the day she was found would have to do.

  Em said, “It was July 3, 2003. 10:37 pm. Buy her a nice ruby. That's the July birthstone.” She rattled off the names of several stores that had “good stuff.” She wears very little jewelry, always in excellent taste, but keeps up on the best stores because sometimes it's important to her patients.

  I called Security. Roy was on-site and could see me at four forty-five.

  In his office, I said, “Roy, remember me asking you whether you could clear Tara Farallon?"

  He leaned back in his chair and nodded.

  "I've been thinking—” I hesitated, almost ready to not ask the question, couldn't think of a way out now that I started, and continued, “Tara works in circuit size reduction."

  "Brilliant work, Jack."

  "Yeah, Roy. I've listened to Tara thinking out loud about her problems. I think she could help us with the black boxes. There's no point suggesting it unless you think she can be cleared."

  Roy leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk, and rested his bearded chin in his hands. “I think so. We'll have to go on her record since she was found. She's clean, but it will take special approval from a lot higher than me. I'll need a request from Sandy. Why don't you ask her?"

  I caught up with Sandy in the parking lot and explained.

  "Sure,” she said, pausing at her ancient BMW. “She can't tell us less than we already don't know. I'll talk to Roy. You haven't said anything to her, have you?"

  "God, no!"

  "Don't. Better any invitation comes through the usual channels."

  * * * *

  The “usual channels” take time, so I resigned myself to patience. I'd done all I could—all I dared—for now. Still, I felt impatience to get home, as if I could pick up the phone and tell Tara all about it.

  Sure.

  I didn't rush, and stopped at a shop Em recommended to buy Tara a lovely ruby birthstone ring.

  I walked into my house and found Tara in the kitchen, wearing a midnight blue silk robe, unbelted, which swirled and flowed around her body as she came toward me. “Surprised?” she asked, practically dancing.

  "Uh—yeah.” If she was erotic nude, in that robe—oh, God!

  She said, laughing, “I decided I'm spending too much of my life with my head stuck in a computer, tilting at the windmills of the mysteries of the universe, when I haven't seen all of this world. I really ought to find out what the rest of it's like. I decided that there must be some clothes, somewhere, that I enjoy wearing, so I went shopping.” She swirled into my arms and everything was silk and Tara and a smother of kisses.

  I almost said, “We've been shopping together—” when she let me up for air, and then heard what she was really saying. “You didn't go to work today?"

  "Nope. I called in and told them I needed three months off. They said no, so I resigned. They screamed, so I told them I'd give them another three weeks if they gave me this week off. Then I called AMD, where they fell all over themselves offering twice as much as Intel's been paying me, with time off whenever I want it. I told them they'd hear from my agent, and called Joan Pierce. She said she'd be delighted to represent me and was sure she could get me much better than AMD offered. God, Jack! You can't imagine how weird it feels to discover you're a hot property! Then I went shopping. All day! It was fun! I found this. Like it?” She danced out of my arms and struck a deliberately bad imitation of a Cosmopolitan cover pose.

  "Like it?” I got my breath back. “I love it, Tara."

  One more piece of the puzzle fell into place—maybe. I'd always wondered about her aversion to clothing. I wondered still more when I realized she didn't have amnesia at all—just a head full of memories she couldn't share with anyone on this world, in a language that would be animal sounds to us. If her people were a space-living, not just a space-going race, there might be no need for clothing. On a spaceship or station you could control temperature for constant comfort, so why waste space or mass on clothing or use energy to clean it? Who in our sexually uptight culture would expect that?

  She was saying, “I'll have to wear something under this when we entertain. I tried belting it, but it doesn't stay closed."

  "Uh, yeah, I noticed,” I said, weakly.

  "Come tak
e off your clothes while I finish dinner. I bought wine. They said this one was exceptional. Maybe I'll get drunk tonight. I suppose I ought to find out what that's like.” She pulled off my already loosened tie and started on my shirt buttons.

  I said, “Drunk is fun at night. No fun in the morning."

  "If I have a hangover, you can go to work and let me suffer in solitude. Em told me that's better than inflicting your moans on someone else."

  I sat with my back to a glorious sunset, sipping an astonishingly fine St. Francis Merlot, watching Tara and the robe finish dinner. I was struck, as never before, by the pure alienness of her, realizing all the little clues I'd overlooked and absorbing their meaning.

  What woman of this world, knowing the cost of silk and the difficulty of getting grease stains out of it, would wear that robe while cooking without an apron? And something about the way she moved, or the way the robe moved on her body, or maybe it was a sense that she and the robe were two very separate things that happened to be in proximity but didn't quite mesh . . . I don't know. I was so conscious of who and what she was that maybe I was seeing things.

  After half a glass of merlot, I picked up the phone, called Sandy, and asked for the rest of the week off and a three-month leave of absence starting in four weeks. She approved the request in a manner that said she wished I'd resign and reduce her budget.

  Tara placed a steak in burgundy mushroom sauce before me. She kissed me, thanking me for making that phone call as words never could.

  After dinner I gave her the ruby ring, and we made love for hours.

  * * * *

  Tara meant it literally when she said she wanted to “see the rest of the world and find out what it's like.” It was strange, at first, watching the alienness of her take in my world and make it part of her, but after a while it seemed perfectly natural and normal. Or, perhaps, as she absorbed the cultures of Earth she became less alien, less strange . . . and still, the strangeness of her that I found so wonderful didn't change at all.

  She had a gift for traveling economically, discovering, among other things, the “courier flight,” used by businesses that want confidential papers or contracts to get halfway around the world overnight. The deal is that the courier company buys the ticket, but a person has to go with the papers, which, officially, are their luggage. You pay a little for the privilege of being the person. A few days or weeks later, you take another courier flight home, meantime being free to go anywhere within range of your destination. There were fewer courier flights now, with all the security regs and the inroads of budget airlines, but they were available if you knew where to look. There was rarely a need for two people to go to the same destination, but Tara had a gift for finding a cheap ticket on the same flight, which worked almost as well as two courier tickets to the same place.

  She'd read every book about traveling cheap ever printed and knew every hostel at every destination. Some were places I'd never have stayed by my choice. That didn't matter, when they were her choice.

  We saw standard and nonstandard tourist attractions, places few tourists ever heard of, museums, arcane libraries, visited assorted institutes of science and research, and met professional colleagues we knew only from phone conversations, their books, or papers in professional journals.

  And beaches—!

  If there was a beach, Tara knew about it—especially if it was a nude beach. She was happiest on those, or where she could be topless. On the French Rivera, she convinced me to try wearing a thong. I spent several days feeling twice as naked as I ever did on a nude beach before getting used to it and internalizing that this was perfectly normal—here.

  Tara tried the clothing of every land we visited, and found a few things she sort of liked.

  We made love every day, often in the strangest places. It wasn't that she was a danger-freak who wanted to do it in elevators or anything like that, just that when the opportunity arose and we felt the urge, we did, as naturally as breathing—and it was wonderful.

  It wasn't all courier flights. Sometimes we'd be gone a month or two.

  She kept in touch with Joan Pierce's negotiations on her behalf.

  I checked in at Black Box by encrypted e-mail, realizing by my lengthy absences how little was being learned and how little progress was made. I began to wonder whether there was any point to staying with it, and realized that something in me demanded that I had to.

  Tara mentioned—once, casually—that Joan could get me a lot better than I had now, if I'd let her.

  Three months became four, then five, six, and seven. I was glad I could take leaves from my visible jobs and had inherited enough for independent semi-wealth. I wondered how Tara had saved enough to cover her end of the expenses, even with courier flights, hostels, and other economies.

  One warm evening on a Tahiti beach, Tara's cell phone rang. She said, “Oh, hi, Joan,” listened for ten minutes, and said, “Good. Do it.” She put the phone away. After a moment she said, very softly, “Got what I wanted. Time to go back to work, Jack, my love."

  "What was it you wanted, Tara dearest?” She'd never said anything specific except wanting “a good place to work and enough money."

  She put a finger to her lips. “After I have a signed contract, love. Let's see how soon we can get a flight."

  * * * *

  We landed in Oakland late Friday evening, had a lovely night at my place, and spent the weekend at the Red and White Beach.

  Monday morning, while we stowed our camping gear in my old Mercedes, Tara said, “I'll be gone for a while. I'll call when it's final."

  I went back to Black Box, wondering whether “what she wanted” would take her away from the Bay Area, away from me. I decided—almost—that if it did, the hell with Black Box. I'd call Joan Pierce and ask her to find me something where Tara was.

  Black Box seemed more alien than Tara had ever been—not the ship itself, but the project. It was as secret as ever, but minus another half-dozen people who'd left without being replaced. If this kept up, the only research would be done by janitors.

  I tried to tell myself that nothing new had been learned while I was gone because I wasn't there, and knew better.

  I spent my first day back prowling through the carefully restored wreckage, not needing to look at the neat labels telling what we thought each part was, the larger red notices posted where parts had been removed for study in someone's lab, or the anachronistic lights we'd taped to the overhead so we could see what we were doing.

  I tried to visualize Tara in this ship.

  It wasn't a large space for a woman to live.

  One very small cabin had two seats and a table on a human or humanoid scale.

  A second tiny cabin, aft, had a small bunk for one, a bathroom clearly meant for humans or humanoids, and what appeared to be a kitchen, though we hadn't found a trace of food. What was left of the control room—what we assumed filled that function—was clearly designed by and for beings of human or humanoid scale. The piloting seat would be perfect for Tara, the controls the right distance for her arm-reach.

  In an apparent cargo area, we'd found sealed containers we couldn't open. Imaging suggested they were filled with circuitry. We hadn't gotten a go-ahead to cut one open, lest we destroy something of immense value, like a cure for cancer or some damn thing, so one section of the project spent its days trying to decide what was the lock and how it opened.

  Aft of that, a much larger section, about half the ship, was filled with solid plastic, a molecular combination we'd identified without gaining the slightest clue how it could be fuel. From positioning and proximity to the drive—what we assumed was the drive—it had to be fuel.

  And the drive, where I spent my days—a set of cubes and ellipsoids, some connected, some not. The tail of the ship was seared and fragmented, evidence, we thought, that some crucial part of the drive had blown. I could close my eyes and feel how it worked, but when I opened my eyes I couldn't put it on paper or explain it to anyone—and
I couldn't make it work.

  We couldn't make anything on the ship work, even the toilet.

  I stared at the drive for a while, willing my mind to make sense of it, and made the rounds of the labs, talking to old friends about what they were doing and sharing their frustration at learning so little. I gave them the same answer we've always used to justify our existence: “The real benefit has been stuff we've come up with while trying to explain this thing."

  That was true. Our Bird has made us push out the frontiers of what we know in strange and different ways, paths we'd never have taken without it.

  Before going home, I stood at the rail outside my lab, looking down at the ship for almost an hour. From the outside, it didn't look nearly as good as inside. It had been plucked from the ocean floor in one major piece and a bunch of stray scraps, half of which eventually proved to be part of the wreck. They found no human or humanoid remains.

  It looked like some kid's model spaceship that his big brother had repaired with Scotch tape, chewing gum, and super glue. And yet, that scarred, ripped, and crumpled thing once traveled between stars carrying humans, or beings of human scale.

  We were sure of that.

  When I got home—God, how empty it was without Tara!—her voice was on my answering machine. “Got the first part, love. Starburst Systems. Lots of freedom and a piece of the action. Joan's an awesome negotiator! I'll see you when I get the second part. Soon, with a little luck. Lots of kisses—you know where. Bye, love."

  Starburst was a hi-tech startup working on sub-nano circuit architecture, recently founded by Mack Blumenstein, Tammie Li Jones, and Mel Fong, old friends who once worked at Black Box. I felt a rush of warm nostalgia for the oddest, most creative trio I've ever known, followed by equally warm pleasure that Tara would be working for people who'd understand her genius no matter what direction it took. I wondered where they'd found the kind of money Tara wanted.

  I stayed up past midnight, hoping she'd call.