A Lot Like Christmas

by Connie Willis

  There was a sudden sound, and Sharon whirled around and looked back at the door, but it still stood half open, with the lily at its foot and the manger behind.

  The sound scraped again, closer, and she caught the crunch of footsteps and then a sharp wheeze.

  “It’s the donkey,” she said, and it plodded up to her as if it were glad to see her.

  She reached under it for its reins, which were nothing but a ragged rope, and it took a step toward her and blared in her ear, “Haw!” and then a wheeze that was practically a laugh.

  She laughed, too, and patted his neck. “Don’t wander off again,” she said, leading him over to Joseph, who was waiting where she’d left them. “Stay on the path.” She scrambled on up to the top of the slope, suddenly certain the path would be there, too.

  It wasn’t, but it didn’t matter. Because there to the southwest was Jerusalem, distant and white in the starlight, lit by a hundred hearthfires, a thousand oil lamps, and beyond it, slightly to the west, three stars low in the sky, so close they were almost touching.

  They came up beside her, leading the donkey. “Bott lom,” she said, pointing. “There, where the star is.”

  Joseph was fumbling in his sash again, holding out the little leather bag.

  “No,” she said, pushing it back to him. “You’ll need it for the inn in Bethlehem.”

  He put the bag back reluctantly, and she wished suddenly she had something to give them. Frankincense. Or myrrh.

  “Hunh-haw,” the donkey brayed, and started down the hill. Joseph lunged after him, grabbing for the rope, and Mary followed them, her head ducked.

  “Be careful,” Sharon said. “Watch out for King Herod.” She raised her hand in a wave, the sleeve of her choir robe billowing out in the warm breeze like a wing, but they didn’t see her. They went on down the hill, Mary with her hand on the donkey for steadiness, Joseph a little ahead. When they were nearly at the bottom, Joseph stopped and pointed at the ground and led the donkey off at an angle out of her sight, and Sharon knew they’d found the path.

  She stood there for a minute, enjoying the scented breeze, looking at the almost-star, and then went back down the slope, skidding on the rocks and loose dirt, and took the Easter lily out of the door and shut it. She pushed the cabinet back into position, took the blanket out from under the door, switched off the light, and went out into the darkened sanctuary.

  There was no one there. She went and got the chalice, stuck it into the wide sleeve of her robe, and looked out into the hall. There was no one there, either. She went into the adult Sunday school room and put the chalice back into the display case and then went downstairs.

  “Where have you been?” Reverend Farrison said. Two uniformed policemen came out of the nursery, carrying flashlights.

  Sharon unzipped her choir robe and took it off. “I checked the Communion silver,” she said. “None of it’s missing.” She went into the choir room and hung up her robe.

  “We looked in there,” Reverend Farrison said, following her in. “You weren’t there.”

  “I thought I heard somebody at the door,” she said.

  By the end of the second verse of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” Mary and Joseph were only three-fourths of the way to the front of the sanctuary.

  “At this rate, they won’t make it to Bethlehem by Easter,” Dee whispered. “Can’t they get a move on?”

  “They’ll get there,” Sharon whispered, watching them. They paced slowly, unperturbedly, up the aisle, their eyes on the chancel. “ ‘How silently, how silently,’ ” Sharon sang, “ ‘the wondrous gift is given.’ ”

  They went past the second pew from the front and out of the choir’s sight. The innkeeper came to the top of the chancel steps with his lantern, determinedly solemn.

  “ ‘So God imparts to human hearts,

  The blessings of his heaven.’ ”

  “Where did they go?” Virginia whispered, craning her neck to try and see them. “Did they sneak out the back way or something?”

  Mary and Joseph reappeared, walking slowly, sedately, toward the palm trees and the manger. The innkeeper came down the steps, trying hard to look like he wasn’t waiting for them, like he wasn’t overjoyed to see them.

  “ ‘No ear may hear his coming,

  But in this world of sin…’ ”

  At the back of the sanctuary, the shepherds assembled, clanking their staffs, and Miriam handed the wise men their jewelry box and perfume bottles. Elizabeth adjusted her tinsel halo.

  “ ‘Where meek souls will receive him still,

  The dear Christ enters in.’ ”

  Joseph and Mary came to the center and stopped. Joseph stepped in front of Mary and knocked on an imaginary door, and the innkeeper came forward, grinning from ear to ear, to open it.

  I’d always said that if and when the aliens actually landed, it would be a letdown. I mean, after War of the Worlds, Close Encounters, and E.T., there was no way they could live up to the image in the public’s mind, good or bad.

  I’d also said that they would look nothing like the aliens of the movies, and that they would not have come to A) kill us, B) take over our planet and enslave us, C) save us from ourselves à la The Day the Earth Stood Still, or D) have sex with Earthwomen. I mean, I realize it’s hard to find someone nice, but would aliens really come thousands of light-years just to get a date? Plus, it seemed just as likely they’d be attracted to warthogs. Or yucca. Or air-conditioning units.

  I’ve also always thought A) and B) were highly unlikely, since imperialist invader types would probably be too busy invading their next-door neighbors and being invaded by other invader types to have time to go after an out-of-the-way place like Earth, although you never know. I mean, look at Iraq. And as to C), I’m wary of people or aliens who say they’ve come to save you, as witness Reverend Thresher. And it seemed to me that aliens who were capable of building the spaceships necessary to cross all those light-years would necessarily have complex civilizations and therefore more complicated motives for coming than merely incinerating Washington or phoning home.

  What had never occurred to me was that the aliens would arrive and we still wouldn’t know what those motives were after almost nine months of talking to them.

  Now, I’m not talking about an arrival where the UFO swoops down in the Southwest in the middle of nowhere, mutilates a few cows, makes a crop circle or two, abducts an extremely unreliable and unintelligent-sounding person, probes them in embarrassing places, and takes off again. I’d never believed the aliens would do that, either, and they didn’t, although they did land in the Southwest, sort of.

  They landed their spaceship in Denver, in the middle of the DU campus, and marched—well, actually “marched” is the wrong word; the Altairi’s method of locomotion is somewhere between a glide and a waddle—straight up to the front door of University Hall in classic “Take me to your leader” fashion.

  And that was it. They (there were six of them) didn’t say, “Take us to your leader!” or “One small step for aliens, one giant leap for alienkind,” or even “Earthmen, hand over your females.” Or your planet. They just stood there.

  And stood there. Police cars surrounded them, lights flashing. TV news crews and reporters pointed cameras at them. F-16s roared overhead, snapping pictures of their spaceship and trying to determine whether A) it had a force field or B) weaponry or C) they could blow it up (they couldn’t). Half the city fled to the mountains in terror, creating an enormous traffic jam on I-70, and the other half drove by the campus to see what was going on, creating an enormous traffic jam on Evans.

  The aliens, who by now had been dubbed the Altairi because an astronomy professor at DU had announced they were from the star Altair in the constellation Aquila (they weren’t), didn’t react to any of this, which apparently convinced the president of DU they weren’t going to blow up the place à la Independence Day. He came out and welcomed them to Earth and to DU.

  The
y continued to stand there. The mayor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Denver. The governor came and welcomed them to Earth and to Colorado, assured everyone it was perfectly safe to visit the state, and implied the Altairi were just the latest in a long line of tourists who had come from all over to see the magnificent Rockies, though that seemed unlikely since they were facing the other way, and they didn’t turn around, even when the governor walked past them to point at Pikes Peak. They just stood there, facing University Hall.

  They continued to stand there for the next three weeks, through an endless series of welcoming speeches by scientists, State Department officials, foreign dignitaries, and church and business leaders, and an assortment of weather, including a late April snowstorm that broke branches and power lines. If it hadn’t been for the expressions on their faces, everybody would have assumed the Altairi were plants.

  But no plant ever glared like that. It was a look of utter, withering disapproval. The first time I saw it in person, I thought, Oh, my God, it’s Aunt Judith.

  She was actually my father’s aunt, and she used to come over once a month or so, dressed in a suit, a hat, and white gloves, and sit on the edge of a chair and glare at us, a glare which drove my mother into paroxysms of cleaning and baking whenever she found out Aunt Judith was coming. Not that Aunt Judith criticized Mom’s housekeeping or her cooking. She didn’t. She didn’t even make a face when she sipped the coffee Mom served her or draw a white-gloved finger along the mantelpiece, looking for dust. She didn’t have to. Sitting there in stony silence while my mother desperately tried to make conversation, her entire manner indicated disapproval. It was perfectly clear from that glare of hers that she considered us untidy, ill-mannered, ignorant, and utterly beneath contempt.

  Since she never said what it was that displeased her (except for the occasional “Properly brought-up children do not speak unless spoken to”), my mother frantically polished silverware, baked petits fours, wrestled my sister Tracy and me into starched pinafores and patent-leather shoes and ordered us to thank Aunt Judith nicely for our birthday presents—a card with a dollar bill in it—and scrubbed and dusted the entire house to within an inch of its life. She even redecorated the entire living room, but nothing did any good. Aunt Judith still radiated disdain.

  It would wilt even the strongest person. My mother frequently had to lie down with a cold cloth on her forehead after a visit from Aunt Judith, and the Altairi had the same effect on the dignitaries and scientists and politicians who came to see them. After the first time, the governor refused to meet with them again, and the President, whose polls were already in the low twenties and who couldn’t afford any more pictures of irate citizens, refused to meet with them at all.

  Instead he appointed a bipartisan commission, consisting of representatives from the Pentagon, the State Department, Homeland Security, the House, the Senate, and FEMA, to study them and find a way to communicate with them, and then, after that was a bust, a second commission consisting of experts in astronomy, anthropology, exobiology, and communications, and then a third, consisting of whoever they were able to recruit and who had anything resembling a theory about the Altairi or how to communicate with them, which is where I come in. I’d written a series of newspaper columns on aliens both before and after the Altairi arrived. (I’d also written columns on tourists, texting while driving, the traffic on I-70, the difficulty of finding any nice men to date, and Aunt Judith.)

  I was recruited in late November to replace one of the language experts, who quit “to spend more time with his wife and family.” I was picked by the chair of the commission, Dr. Morthman, who clearly didn’t realize that my columns were humorous, but it didn’t matter, since he had no intention of listening to me, or to anyone else on the commission, which at that point consisted of three linguists, two anthropologists, a cosmologist, a meteorologist, a botanist (in case they were plants after all), experts in primate, avian, and insect behavior (in case they were one of the above), an Egyptologist (in case they turned out to have built the Pyramids), an animal psychic, an Air Force colonel, a JAG lawyer, an expert in foreign customs, an expert in nonverbal communications, a weapons expert, Dr. Morthman (who, as far as I could see, wasn’t an expert in anything), and, because of our proximity to Colorado Springs, the head of the One True Way Maxichurch, Reverend Thresher, who was convinced the Altairi were a herald of the End Times. “There is a reason God had them land here,” he said. I wanted to ask him why, if that was the case, they hadn’t landed in Colorado Springs instead, but he wasn’t a good listener, either.

  The only progress these people and their predecessors had made by the time I joined the commission was to get the Altairi to follow them various places, like in out of the weather and into the various labs that had been set up in University Hall for studying them, although when I saw the videotapes, it wasn’t at all clear they were responding to anything the commission said or did. It looked to me like following Dr. Morthman and the others was their own idea, particularly since at nine o’clock every night they turned and glided/waddled back outside and disappeared into their ship.

  The first time they did that, everyone panicked, thinking they were leaving. “Aliens Depart. Are They Fed Up?” the evening news logo read, a conclusion which I felt was due to their effect on people rather than any solid evidence. I mean, they could have gone home to watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, but even after they reemerged the next morning, the theory persisted that there was some sort of deadline, that if we didn’t succeed in communicating with them within a fixed amount of time, the planet would be reduced to ash. Aunt Judith had always made me feel exactly the same way, that if I didn’t measure up, I was toast.

  But I never did measure up, and nothing in particular happened, except she stopped sending me birthday cards with a dollar in them, and I figured if the Altairi hadn’t obliterated us after a few conversations with Reverend Thresher (he was constantly reading them passages from Scripture and trying to convert them), they weren’t going to.

  But it didn’t look like they were going to tell us what they were doing here, either. The commission had tried speaking to them in nearly every language, including Farsi, Navajo code-talk, and Cockney slang. They had played them music, drummed, written out greetings, given them several PowerPoint presentations, text-messaged them, and shown them the Rosetta Stone. They’d also tried Ameslan and pantomime, though it was obvious the Altairi could hear. Whenever someone spoke to them or offered them a gift (or prayed over them), their expression of disapproval deepened to one of utter contempt. Just like Aunt Judith.

  By the time I joined the commission, it had reached the same state of desperation my mother had when she redecorated the living room, and had decided to try to impress the Altairi by taking them to see the sights of Denver and Colorado, in the hope they’d react favorably.

  “It won’t work,” I said. “My mother put up new drapes and wallpaper, and it didn’t have any effect at all,” but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.

  We took them to the Denver Museum of Art and Rocky Mountain National Park and the Garden of the Gods and a Broncos game. They just stood there, sending out waves of disapproval.

  Dr. Morthman was undeterred. “Tomorrow we’ll take them to the Denver Zoo.”

  “Is that a good idea?” I asked. “I mean, I’d hate to give them ideas,” but Dr. Morthman didn’t listen.

  Luckily, the Altairi didn’t react to anything at the zoo, or to the Christmas lights at Civic Center, or to the Nutcracker ballet. And then we went to the mall.

  By that point, the commission had dwindled down to seventeen people (two of the linguists and the animal psychic had quit), but it was still a large enough group of observers that the Altairi ran the risk of being trampled in the crowd. Most of the members, however, had stopped going on the field trips, saying they were “pursuing alternate lines of research” that didn’t require direct observation, which meant they couldn’t stand to be glared at the whole way there a
nd back in the van. So the day we went to the mall, there were only Dr. Morthman, the aroma expert Dr. Wakamura, Reverend Thresher, and me. We didn’t even have any press with us. When the Altairi’d first arrived, they were all over the TV networks and CNN, but after a few weeks of the aliens doing nothing, the networks had shifted to showing more exciting scenes from Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Men in Black II, and then completely lost interest and gone back to Paris Hilton and stranded whales. The only photographer with us was Leo, the teenager Dr. Morthman had hired to videotape our outings, and as soon as we got inside the mall, he said, “Do you think it’d be okay if I ducked out to buy my girlfriend’s Christmas present before we start filming? I mean, face it, they’re just going to stand there.”

  He was right. The Altairi glide-waddled the length of several stores and then stopped, glaring impartially at the Sharper Image and Gap window displays and the crowds who stopped to gawk at the six of them and who then, intimidated by their expressions, averted their eyes and hurried on.

  The mall was jammed with couples loaded down with shopping bags, parents pushing strollers, children, and a mob of middle-school girls in green choir robes apparently waiting to sing. The malls invited school and church choirs to come and perform this time of year in the food court. The girls were giggling and chattering; a toddler was shrieking, “I don’t want to!”; Julie Andrews was singing “Joy to the World” on the piped-in Muzak; and Reverend Thresher was pointing at the panty-, bra-, and wing-clad mannequins in the window of Victoria’s Secret and saying, “Look at that! Sinful!”

  “This way,” Dr. Morthman, ahead of the Altairi, said, waving his arm like the leader of a wagon train, “I want them to see Santa Claus,” and I stepped to the side to get around a trio of teenage boys walking side by side who’d cut me off from the Altairi.

  There was a sudden gasp, and the mall went quiet except for the Muzak. “What—?” Dr. Morthman said sharply, and I pushed past the teenage boys to see what had happened.