by Neil Clarke
He handed her a business card. “So you can get in touch,” he said.
She glanced at it. It said “Henry,” with a phone number. No logo, no agency, no last name. She put it in a pocket.
“I have to get out here,” he said when the bus rolled to a halt a hundred yards from the dome. “It’s been nice meeting you, Avery.”
“Take your bug with you,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“The bug you left somewhere in this cab.”
“There’s no bug,” he said seriously.
Since the bus was probably wired like a studio, she shrugged and resolved not to scratch anywhere embarrassing till she had a chance to search. As she closed the door behind Henry, the soldiers removed the roadblock and she eased the bus forward.
It was almost evening, but floodlights came on as she approached the dome. She pulled the bus parallel to the wall and lowered the wheelchair lift. One of the hexagonal panels slid aside, revealing a stocky, dark-haired young man in black glasses, surrounded by packing crates of the same pearly substance as the dome. Avery started forward to help with loading, but he said tensely, “Stay where you are.” She obeyed. He pushed the first crate forward and it moved as if on wheels, though Avery could see none. It was slightly too wide for the lift, so the man put his hands on either side and pushed in. The crate reconfigured itself, growing taller and narrower till it fit onto the platform. Avery activated the power lift.
He wouldn’t let Avery touch any of the crates, but insisted on stowing them himself at the back of the bus, where a private bedroom suite had once accommodated a touring celebrity singer. When the last crate was on, he came forward and said, “We can go now.”
“What about the other passenger?” Avery said.
“He’s here.”
She realized that the alien must have been in one of the crates—or, for all she knew, was one of the crates. “Okay,” she said. “Where to?”
“Anywhere,” he said, and turned to go back into the bedroom.
Since she had no instructions to the contrary, Avery decided to head south. As she pulled out of the park, there was no police escort, no helicopter overhead, no obvious trailing car. The terms of this journey had been carefully negotiated at the highest levels, she knew. Their security was to be secrecy; no one was to know where they were. Avery’s instructions from Frank had stressed that, aside from getting the alien safely where he wanted to go, insuring his privacy was her top priority. She was not to pry into his business or allow anyone else to do so.
Rush hour traffic delayed them a long time. At first, Avery concentrated on putting as much distance as she could between the bus and Washington. It was past ten by the time she turned off the main roads. She activated the GPS to try and find a route, but all the screen showed was snow. She tried her phone, and the result was the same. Not even the radio worked. One of those crates must have contained a jamming device; the bus was a rolling electronic dead zone. She smiled. So much for Henry’s bugs.
It was quiet and peaceful driving through the night. A nearly full moon rode in the clear autumn sky, and woods closed in around them. Once, when she had first taken up driving in order to escape her memories, she had played a game of heading randomly down roads she had never seen, getting deliberately lost. Now she played it again, not caring where she ended up. She had never been good at keeping to the main roads.
By 3:00 she was tired, and when she saw the entrance to a state park, she turned and pulled into the empty parking lot. In the quiet after the engine shut off, she walked back through the kitchen and sitting area to see if there were any objections from her passengers. She listened at the closed door, but heard nothing and concluded they were asleep. As she was turning away, the door jerked open and the translator said, “What do you want?”
He was still fully dressed, exactly as she had seen him before, except without the glasses, his eyes were a little bloodshot, as if he hadn’t closed them. “I’ve pulled over to get some sleep,” she said. “It’s not safe to keep driving without rest.”
“Oh. All right,” he said, and closed the door.
Shrugging, she went forward. There was a fold-down bunk that had once served the previous owner’s entourage, and she now prepared to use it. She brushed her teeth in the tiny bathroom, pulled a sleeping bag from her backpack, and settled in.
Morning sun woke her. When she opened her eyes, it was flooding in the windows. At the kitchen table a yard away from her, the translator was sitting, staring out the window. By daylight, she saw that he had a square face the color of teak and closely trimmed black beard. She guessed that he might be Latino, and in his twenties.
“Morning,” she said. He turned to stare at her, but said nothing. Not practiced in social graces, she thought. “I’m Avery,” she said.
Still he didn’t reply. “It’s customary to tell me your name now,” she said. “Oh. Lionel,” he answered.
“Pleased to meet you.”
He said nothing, so she got up and went into the bathroom. When she came out, he was still staring fixedly out the window. She started making coffee. “Want some?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“Coffee.”
“I ought to try it,” he said reluctantly.
“Well, don’t let me force you,” she said.
“Why would you do that?” He was studying her, apprehensive.
“I wouldn’t. I was being sarcastic. Like a joke. Never mind.”
“Oh.”
He got up restlessly and started opening the cupboards. Frank had stocked them with all the necessities, even a few luxuries. But Lionel didn’t seem to find what he was looking for.
“Are you hungry?” Avery guessed.
“What do you mean?”
Avery searched for another way to word the question. “Would you like me to fix you some breakfast?”
He looked utterly stumped.
“Never mind. Just sit down and I’ll make you something.”
He sat down, gripping the edge of the table tensely. “That’s a tree,” he said, looking out the window.
“Right. It’s a whole lot of trees.”
“I ought to go out.”
She didn’t make the mistake of joking again. It was like talking to a person raised by wolves. Or aliens.
When she set a plate of eggs and bacon down in front of him, he sniffed it suspiciously. “That’s food?”
“Yes, it’s good. Try it.”
He watched her eat for a few moments, then gingerly tried a bite of scrambled eggs. His expression showed distaste, but he resolutely forced himself to swallow. But when he tried the bacon, he couldn’t bear it. “It bit my mouth,” he said.
“You’re probably not used to the salt. What do you normally eat?”
He reached in a pocket and took out some brown pellets that looked like dog kibble. Avery made a face of disgust. “What is that, people chow?”
“It’s perfectly adapted to our nutritional needs,” Lionel said. “Try it.”
She was about to say “no thanks,” but he was clearly making an effort to try new things, so she took a pellet and popped it in her mouth. It wasn’t terrible—chewy rather than crunchy—but tasteless. “I think I’ll stick to our food,” she said.
He looked gloomy. “I need to learn to eat yours.”
“Why? Research?”
He nodded. “I have to find out how the feral humans live.”
So, Avery reflected, she was dealing with someone raised as a pet, who was now being released into the wild. For whatever reason.
“So where do you want to go today?” Avery said, sipping coffee.
He gave an indifferent gesture.
“You’re heading for St. Louis?”
“Oh, I just picked that name off a map. It seemed to be in the center.”
“That it is.” She had lived there once; it was so incorrigibly in the center there was no edge to it. “Do you want to go by any particular route?
”
He shrugged.
“How much time do you have?”
“As long as it takes.”
“Okay. The scenic route, then.”
She got up to clean the dishes, telling Lionel that this was a good time for him to go out, if he wanted to. It took him a while to summon his resolve. She watched out the kitchen window as he approached a tree as if to have a conversation with it. He felt its bark, smelled its leaves, and returned unhappy and distracted.
Avery followed the same random-choice method of navigation as the previous night, but always trending west. Soon they came to the first ridge of mountains. People from western states talked as if the Appalachians weren’t real mountains, but they were—rugged and impenetrable ridges like walls erected to bar people from the land of milk and honey. In the mountains, all the roads ran northeast and southwest through the valleys between the crumpled land, with only the brave roads daring to climb up and pierce the ranges. The autumn leaves were at their height, russet and gold against the brilliant sky. All day long Lionel sat staring out the window.
That night she found a half-deserted campground outside a small town. She refilled the water tanks, hooked up the electricity, then came back in. “You’re all set,” she told Lionel. “If it’s all right with you, I’m heading into town.”
“Okay,” he said.
It felt good to stretch her legs walking along the highway shoulder. The air was chill but bracing. The town was a tired, half-abandoned place, but she found a bar and settled down with a beer and a burger. She couldn’t help watching the patrons around her—worn-down, elderly people just managing to hang on. What would an alien think of America if she brought him here?
Remembering that she was away from the interference field, she thumbed on her phone—and immediately realized that the ping would give away her location to the spooks. But since she’d already done it, she dialed her brother’s number and left a voicemail congratulating him on the concert she was missing. “Everything’s fine with me,” she said, then added mischievously, “I met a nice young man named Henry. I think he’s sweet on me. Bye.”
Heading back through the night, she became aware that someone was following her. The highway was too dark to see who it was, but when she stopped, the footsteps behind her stopped, too. At last a car passed, and she wheeled around to see what the headlights showed.
“Lionel!” she shouted. He didn’t answer, just stood there, so she walked back toward him. “Did you follow me?”
He was standing with hands in pockets, hunched against the cold. Defensively, he said, “I wanted to see what you would do when I wasn’t around.”
“It’s none of your business what I do off duty. Listen, respecting privacy goes both ways. If you want me to respect yours, you’ve got to respect mine, okay?”
He looked cold and miserable, so she said, “Come on, let’s get back before you freeze solid.”
They walked side by side in silence, gravel crunching underfoot. At last he said stiffly, “I’d like to re-negotiate our contract.”
“Oh, yeah? What part of the contract?”
“The part about privacy. I . . .” He searched for words. “We should have asked for more than a driver. We need a translator.”
At least he’d realized it. He might speak perfect English, but he was not fluent in Human.
“My contract is with your . . . employer. Is this what he wants?”
“Who?”
“The other passenger. I don’t know what to call him. ‘The alien’ isn’t polite. What’s his name?”
“They don’t have names. They don’t have a language.”
Astonished, Avery said, “Then how do you communicate?”
He glowered at her. She held up her hands. “Sorry. No offense intended. I’m just trying to find out what he wants.”
“They don’t want things,” he muttered, gazing fixedly at the moonlit road. “At least, not like you do. They’re not . . . awake. Aware. Not like people are.”
This made so little sense to Avery, she wondered if he were having trouble with the language. “I don’t understand,” she said. “You mean they’re not . . . sentient?”
“They’re not conscious,” he said. “There’s a difference.”
“But they have technology. They built those domes, or brought them here, or whatever the hell they did. They have an advanced civilization.”
“I didn’t say they aren’t smart. They’re smarter than people are. They’re just not conscious.”
Avery shook her head. “I’m sorry, I just can’t imagine it.”
“Yes, you can,” Lionel said impatiently. “People function unconsciously all the time. You’re not aware that you’re keeping your balance right now—you just do it automatically. You don’t have to be aware to walk, or breathe. In fact, the more skillful you are at something, the less aware you are. Being aware would just degrade their skill.”
They had come to the campground entrance. Behind the dark pine trees, Avery could see the bus, holding its unknowable passenger. For a moment the bus seemed to stare back with blank eyes. She made herself focus on the practical. “So how can I know what he wants?”
“I’m telling you.”
She refrained from asking, “And how do you know?” because he’d already refused to answer that. The new privacy rules were to be selective, then. But she already knew more about the aliens than anyone else on Earth, except the translators. Not that she understood.
I’m sorry, I can’t keep calling him ‘him,’ or ‘the alien,’” Avery said the next morning over breakfast. “I have to give him a name. I’m going to call him ‘Mr. Burbage.’ If he doesn’t know, he won’t mind.”
Lionel didn’t look any more disturbed than usual. She took that as consent.
“So where are we going today?” she asked.
He pressed his lips together in concentration. “I need to go to a place where I can acquire knowledge.”
Since this could encompass anything from a brothel to a university, Avery said, “You’ve got to be more specific. What kind of knowledge?”
“Knowledge about you.”
“Me?”
“No, you humans. How you work.”
Humans. For that, she would have to find a bigger town.
As she cruised down a county road, Avery thought about Blake. Once, he had told her that to play an instrument truly well, you had to lose all awareness of what you were doing, and rely entirely on the muscle memory in your fingers. “You are so in the present, there is no room for self,” Blake said. “No ego, no doubt, no introspection.”
She envied him the ability to achieve such a state. She had tried to play the saxophone, but had never gotten good enough to experience what Blake described. Only playing video games could she concentrate intensely enough to lose self-awareness. It was strange, how addictive it was to escape the prison of her skull and forget she had a self. Mystics and meditators strove to achieve such a state.
A motion in the corner of her eye made her slam on the brakes and swerve. A startled deer pirouetted, flipped its tail, and leaped away. She continued on more slowly, searching for a sign to see where she was. She could not remember having driven the last miles, or whether she had passed any turns. Smiling grimly, she realized that driving was her skill, something she knew so well that she could do it unconsciously. She had even reacted to a threat before knowing what it was. Her reflexes were faster than her conscious mind.
Were the aliens like that all the time? In a perpetual state of flow, like virtuoso musicians or Zen monks in samadhi? What would be the point of achieving such supreme skill, if the price was never knowing it was you doing it?
Around noon, they came to a town nestled in a steep valley on a rushing river. Driving down the main street, she spied a quaint, cupolaed building with a “Municipal Library” sign out front. Farther on, at the edge of town, an abandoned car lot offered a grass-pocked parking lot, so she turned in. “Come on, Lionel,” she
called out. “I’ve found a place for you to acquire knowledge.”
They walked back into town together. The library was quiet and empty except for an old man reading a magazine. The selection of books was sparse, but there was a row of computers. “You know how to use these?” Avery said in a low voice.
“Not this kind,” Lionel said. “They’re very . . . primitive.”
They sat down together, and Avery explained how to work the mouse and get on the internet, how to search and scroll. “I’ve got it,” he said. “You can go now.”
Shrugging, she left him to his research. She strolled down the main street, stopped in a drugstore, then found a café that offered fried egg sandwiches on Wonder Bread, a luxury from her childhood. With lunch and a cup of coffee, she settled down to wait, sorting email on her phone.
Some time later, she became aware of the television behind the counter. It was tuned to one of those daytime exposé shows hosted by a shrill woman who spoke in a tone of breathless indignation. “Coming up,” she said, “Slaves or traitors? Who are these alien translators?”
Avery realized that some part of her brain must have been listening and alerted her conscious mind to pay attention, just as it had reacted to the deer. She had a threat detection system she was not even aware of.
In the story that followed, a correspondent revealed that she had been unable to match any of the translators with missing children recorded in the past twenty years. The host treated this as suspicious information that someone ought to be looking into. Then came a panel of experts to discuss what they knew of the translators, which was nothing.
“Turncoats,” commented one of the men at the counter watching the show. “Why would anyone betray his own race?”
“They’re not even human,” said another, “just made to look that way. They’re clones or robots or something.”
“The government won’t do anything. They’re just letting those aliens sit there.”
Avery got up to pay her bill. The woman at the cash register said, “You connected with that big tour bus parked out at Fenniman’s?”
She had forgotten that in a town like this, everyone knew instantly what was out of the ordinary.
