Lightspeed Year One

CUCUMBER GRAVY

Susan Palwick

I wasn’t too happy when the knocking started on my door that morning. Nobody’s welcome out here except UPS and customers, and I wasn’t expecting any deliveries, and customers have to call first. New buyers have to be referred by people I know. That’s a rule. I check references, too. I don’t let anybody in who isn’t vouched for, and even so, it’s amazing I’ve never had cops out here. Some of my buyers ask why I didn’t go legit when the medical-marijuana bill passed four years ago, but that’s a no-brainer: I do not need the government crawling up my backside to regulate me, and I have a lot more customers this way, and I make a lot more money. Being legal would be nothing but a pain in the ass, even if I didn’t have to worry about keeping people from finding out about the space cucumbers.

As it happened, my latest bunch of cucumbers was due to start singing any minute, which meant the last thing I needed was somebody in the house. That’s another reason buyers have to call first: depending on what the cucumbers are up to, I tell people they have to wait, I can’t see them today.

So when the knocking started, I thought, shit, government, and my stomach tied up in a knot. I’d have pretended I wasn’t home, but you can get stranded motorists out here too, and the sooner you let them use your phone or whatever, the sooner they go away. So when I heard that knock and looked out and didn’t recognize who was there—some bearded guy pushing forty, about my age, in jeans and a plaid shirt and hiking boots, had tree-hugging liberal written all over him—I grabbed my gun and yelled through the door, “Who is it?” Since it was only one guy, that made cops less likely, but on the other hand his car was in front of the house, a nice little Toyota, which made mechanical failure less likely, too. Maybe he had to use the bathroom, in which case I’d tell him to use the desert. If he needed water I’d give him some, though. You always give people water, out here. You’d think people would know not to drive anywhere in this state without extra water in the car, but between the dumb college kids from Reno and the morons moving here from California, the average survival IQ in Nevada isn’t what it should be. This guy was too old to be in college, so I pegged him as Californian. Local folks only drive in the desert with four-wheel drive.

“Mr. Whitwell Smith?” he yelled through the door. “Welly?”

“Yeah?” Only buyers call me Welly: It’s a kind of code. I’m Whit to everybody else, not that I’ve talked to much of anybody else since Nancy Ann left. “Who wants to know?”

“My name’s Jim Humphreys.” The name didn’t mean anything to me. “I’m a friend of Sam Mortimer’s.”

That name did. Sam used to be one of my best customers, out here once a month spending big money, until he suddenly stopped coming altogether about six months ago. No call, nothing. I’d been wondering what happened to him, not that it’s any of my business. I’d almost started to think of Sam as a friend, I’d known him so long; we’d even gone skeet-shooting on my property a few times. “Yeah? You know Sam, you know you have to call before you come out here. Sam knows that.”

“I’ve been trying to call for three days, Mr. Smith. Your phone’s out of order.”

Shit. That was the first I knew of it. I hadn’t gotten any calls for three days, but that’s not unusual: You never know when business is going to be slow, and nobody else calls me. But it could still be a trick. “You wait just a minute,” I hollered through the door, and ran and picked up the phone. Dead. No dial tone. Nothing. Which meant I’d have to get telephone repair people out here, but that would have to wait until the latest batch of cucumbers was gone. In the meantime, I turned on my cell phone in case anybody was trying to reach me. I don’t like the cell phone; I don’t like having my conversations broadcast all over hell and gone for the government to spy on. But you have to have a cell phone for emergencies, just like you have to have water. If you miss a customer call, you could lose business.

“Okay,” I hollered, back at the door. “Thank you for telling me about the telephone, but I can’t see you today. We can make an appointment—”

“Mr. Smith, I drove seventy miles to get here, and this is an emergency. Please open the door.”

Emergency? Nobody’d ever used that line on me before. My crop isn’t addictive, which is one of the things I like about it. You don’t get strung-out dopeheads at your door who’d murder their own mothers for their next fix. Who needs that kind of trouble?

I checked my watch. The cucumbers were due to start singing in about thirty minutes, but sometimes they go off early. I’m never sure exactly when they’ve gotten here, which makes the timing tricky, and that means I wasn’t about to open the door. “If it’s an emergency, call 911, Mr. Humphreys. I’m not in that line of work.”

“Welly, please. Sam’s very sick. He has cancer. He had surgery four months ago and now he’s having chemo and it’s making him sicker than a dog, and the prescription stuff isn’t working for him. He says it isn’t strong enough. He says yours is the best. He sent me out here with two hundred and fifty dollars to buy some. Please don’t send me back to that poor man empty-handed.”

“Huh,” I said. I wasn’t surprised the government couldn’t grow good plants. They were probably growing oregano and charging pot prices for it; you can’t trust those people as far as you can throw them. I started with the best stock when I got into business fifteen years ago, and I’ve been refining it since then. Genetics was my favorite part of biology in high school.

I looked at my watch again. I could run and get a quarter bag and shove it through the door and pull this Humphreys’ cash in, and it would all be over in ten seconds. And if the cucumbers started up and he heard them, I’d tell him it was the TV. “You wait there,” I called out. “I’ll be right back.”

I ran and got a quarter bag and a paper lunch sack, and put the gun on a shelf near the door, where I could grab it fast if I had to, but Humphreys couldn’t reach inside and get it, and then I opened the door a crack, as far as the chain would allow. “Here,” I said. I held up the quarter bag so he could see it, and dropped it in the lunch sack. “You pass the money through, you get this.”

He held up a sheaf of bills and slipped them through. All singles and fives, Jesus, what had Sam been thinking? Come to think of it, a quarter bag wouldn’t get him very far, not given Sam’s smoking habits, but I was guessing he didn’t have much money left over, after the cancer. He’d probably been saving up since the chemo started, the poor bastard, and insurance wouldn’t pay for mine. I wondered if I should give him some extra for free—he’d been a very good customer for a long time—but in the meantime, I started counting the bills. Old habits.

While I was counting, Humphreys said drily, “Sam said you let him come into the house.” I could hear him more clearly now, with the door open, and something about his voice nagged at me. He had a little bit of an accent, English or Aussie maybe. Where had I heard a voice like that lately?

“I know Sam,” I said. “No offense.” I finished counting—it was all there—and then I handed the bag through. As I did, I got a good look at Humphreys’ face for the first time, and two things happened at once.

The first thing was that I recognized him from TV. You just don’t see many preachers with Aussie accents feeding bag ladies on the news, especially when the preacher has one deformed ear, the right one, all ugly and lumpy and crumpled up like a cauliflower. I hadn’t picked up on the ear before because I’d only gotten a side view of him when I looked out the window.

The second thing was that the cucumbers starting singing, all three of them at once: Wails and whistles and grunts, like a cross between a porno soundtrack and an orchestra of teakettles.

Humphreys’ eyes widened. “What—”

“It’s the TV,” I said, and tried to slam the door, but I couldn’t because he’d wedged his foot in there, and he was staring behind me, goggle-eyed. When I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw that one of the cucumbers had staggered out of the den, away from its friends and the nice warm heaters, and was hopping in pathetic circles around my living room, which makes it the first time in almost ten years that a cucumber’s moved from where I put it once it got into the house.

I was about to have a very bad day.

The space cucumbers started coming here a few months after Nancy Ann ran off. I don’t know why they picked this place—it’s just a ranch house out in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Reno and Gerlach, with nothing to look at but sagebrush and lizards and alkali dust, so flat that the mountains on the horizon seem like a mirage—and I never have figured out how they keep from attracting the attention of the air base in Stead. Those bastards are government, and I figure they have to have instruments that can tell if you throw a penny in the air, and the cucumbers have to come in some kind of ship, or come down through the atmosphere, anyway. And you see those air base planes and ’copters doing maneuvers out here all the time, so I don’t know why they’ve never picked up on what’s going on. I guess the cucumbers are smarter than they are. It’s not hard to be smarter than the government.

I call them space cucumbers because they look like a sea cucumber I saw once—or at least, they look more like that than like anything else. My parents took me on a trip to San Diego when I was a kid, and we went to the aquarium there. They had all kinds of animals, scary ones like sharks and smart ones like dolphins and whales who did tricks, but for some reason, the one I always remembered best was the sea cucumber. It was lying in a tank of water, in this kind of petting zoo they had, and you could reach in and touch it. It was brown and very, very soft, and if somebody had grabbed it and started cutting it into pieces, it couldn’t have fought back. It didn’t swim or do tricks. It didn’t do anything. It just sat there. The aquarium lady said it ate by filtering tiny bits of food out of the water. It was a really boring animal, and I never have known why it made such an impression on me. Probably because I couldn’t figure out how a creature like that could survive in the ocean with sharks and lobsters and stingrays. “I guess sharks don’t think they taste good,” the aquarium lady said, but you could tell she didn’t know either. That cucumber was a mystery.

Which is what mine are, too. They show up two or three at a time, every five or six weeks. I just open the door in the morning and there they are, waiting on my welcome mat. They’re much bigger than the sea cucumber in San Diego, about three feet tall and as thick around as a flagpole, and I can’t touch them because they’re wrapped in something like plastic. Like really thick shrink wrap. Or maybe that’s their skin, but I don’t think so: I think it’s some kind of spacesuit, and the animal’s the thing inside, the brown blobby cylindrical thing that hops along on nine stubby little legs, all clustered at the bottom of the cylinder, like tentacles. Hopping isn’t easy for them, you can tell—I don’t think it’s how they usually move around, wherever they come from—so I usually pick them up to carry them inside. Wherever they’re from, they’ve come a long way to get here, and I figure if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for them, why not? They’re always exactly air temperature, or the shrink wrap is, and they’re not as heavy as you’d expect from their size. I can just stick them under my arm, like pieces of firewood.

When the first ones came I was terrified, of course. The cucumbers would have been weird whenever they showed up, but Nancy Ann had just left, and I was out of my mind with grief and anger, smoking entirely too much of my own crop just to get to sleep at night. I felt like I was going crazy, and having space cucumbers on my welcome mat didn’t help. I didn’t know what they were or what they wanted. I didn’t know if they were going to kill me or take over the planet or poison the water supply, and I couldn’t ask anybody because that would have gotten the government involved, and even if I trusted the government I couldn’t have people tramping around my house and finding the plants and grow lights and sprinklers in the basement. I have one hell of a professional setup down there: no way I could argue personal use, even if possession weren’t still a felony for anybody without an approved medical condition.

The first time they showed up and hopped into the house, I just went weak in the knees and started babbling at them, trying to figure out what they wanted, trying to find some way to communicate. Didn’t work, of course. If they can talk or understand me when I talk, I haven’t found any way to tell, not in all these years. Maybe the singing’s some kind of language, like what whales have, but if so I haven’t figured it out yet, and they never respond in any way I can tell when I say things to them. That first visit, they all hopped over to my wood stove and stood around it, shaking, and the entire forty-eight hours until they started singing, I don’t think I slept a wink. I didn’t know what they were going to do. I didn’t dare shoot them because I didn’t want to give them an excuse to destroy the planet, and anyway I could tell even then they had some kind of suit on, and if I broke through it and whatever they were made of came out, who knew what kind of plague I’d start? I never have breached one of those suits.

They didn’t do anything that first time, of course, not until they started singing. When the noise started, I got into a duck-and-cover position under my coffee table because I thought they were going to attack me. And then when nothing happened and the singing stopped, I just crouched there, waiting, until about half an hour later the first one liquefied on me, and then within half an hour after that, the other two had gone gravy, too.

You know those gravy packets that come with some kinds of TV dinners? The plastic pouches you throw into boiling water and then pull out of the pot with tongs, so you can cut them open to pour the gravy out? I guess some people use microwaves, but I think boiling water works better. Anyway, that’s what the cucumbers look like when they liquefy: giant gravy pouches. There’s a big sploosh, and then all of a sudden where there used to be something that looked like an animal, there’s just brown mush. If you pick up the suit then, it’s like holding a bag of thick brown water, and frankly it’s pretty disgusting. The first time I saw it, I nearly got sick, and then I got even more scared, wondering what would happen next.

Nothing happened. Nothing’s ever happened, after they go gravy. I think they’re dead, then. As near as I can tell, they come here to die. Why they’d come here, I have no idea. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, but I’ve never come up with any idea that makes sense. The first few times it happened, I thought they’d just crashed here or gotten stranded, like motorists without water, and Earth had killed them somehow, or I had. But it’s been happening every five or six weeks for ten years, so now I think they come here deliberately. Maybe this is some kind of pilgrimage for them; maybe my house was built on some kind of alien shrine, like Area 51. I just don’t know. And I could be wrong, anyway. Maybe they aren’t dead at all. Maybe if I opened one of the suits up, they’d come back to life.

For a while I kept some of the cucumber-gravy bags stacked out where the newest ones could see them when they showed up; I thought maybe they’d show me somehow what to do with them. They never responded at all. It was like the gravy packets weren’t even there. Don’t ask me what kind of animal doesn’t recognize its own dead. Then I kept some of those first packets down in the basement, to see if they’d change over time, but they didn’t. The suits keep whatever’s inside from decomposing more, I guess.

Now I bury them. I’ve got forty acres here. I don’t know what I’ll do when my land gets filled in. Go out into the desert, I guess, and try to find places where people won’t see me, places that aren’t likely to get developed. Who knows what would happen if a backhoe sliced through one of those suits? None of the ones I’ve buried have ever gotten dug up by coyotes. I guess the cucumbers, dead or alive, are as invisible to coyotes as they are to the government. And as far as I know, the government hasn’t seen me digging, either. I don’t dig any time I can see or hear planes or ’copters, not that that’s any guarantee.

For a while at the beginning I thought maybe the cucumbers really were invisible, thought I was having hallucinations, losing it over Nancy Ann. I drove into Reno a bunch of times to use the Internet at the library—I won’t have a computer here because I don’t trust the government not to spy on what I’m looking up—and did research, trying to find out if anyone else was reporting space aliens who looked like sea cucumbers. Nothing. I keep checking, every six months or so, but if other people are getting visits, I’ve never found any sign of it. I’ve read about crop circles and UFO abductions and all kinds of damnfool things, but never anything about singing cucumbers in plastic suits who turn into mush.

After a few visits, I wasn’t scared of them anymore. They’re nothing if not predictable. Every five or six weeks I wake up and open the door and find a couple or three on my welcome mat. I’ve never seen any bright lights in the middle of the night, or heard anything; I just open the door and there they are. And they hop into the house, and forty-eight hours later, give or take an hour, they start singing. They sing for three to seven minutes, and within an hour after that, they go gravy.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if they’d never started coming. Would I still be living here? Would I have taken all the money I’ve made and moved to Hawaii, the way Nancy Ann and I always planned? Would I have taken that trip around the world I dreamed about when I was a kid? As it is, three or four times a year I take off for a week or two, always right after the latest cucumbers have gone gravy. I go someplace fancy, someplace that might as well be a different planet—New York or New Orleans or Bermuda—and I live it up. Good hotels, good food, high-class hookers. Those women like me. I tip well, and I treat them like human beings. They don’t have to worry that I’ll get ugly on them, and I don’t have to worry that they’ll break my heart. Works out for everybody. I could use Nevada hookers too, of course, the legal ones, and sometimes I do, but it feels less like a vacation that way.

I enjoy those trips. But I always come back home, because I always know another batch of cucumbers will be landing on my welcome mat.

I’ve learned what they like over the years, or I think I have. They like heat: They shake and shiver less the closer they are to the wood stove, or something else warm. I don’t like having them in my living room for anyone to see, so early on I covered up the windows in the den and got some heavy-duty space heaters in there, the most powerful ones I could find at Home Depot. I figure the cucumbers wouldn’t move close to things that made them shake less unless shaking less meant they were comfortable or happy, so I started paying attention to what else makes them shake. I feel itchy when they shake; it’s like watching someone about to sneeze. They’re happier on soft things than on the floor, so I used to cover the floor of the den with pillows, but then one time I had an old black-and-white polka-dot beanbag chair and the cucumber sitting on that shook less than the ones on the pillows did. I experimented, moving them around—I felt fine picking them up by then—and all of them seemed to like the beanbag chair better, although some of them shook a little more on it than others did. They seem to have individual tastes, although I can’t tell them apart to look at them.

So I went to Wal-Mart—no sense buying fancy when budget will do—and bought a bunch of beanbag chairs. One of them was a really ugly day-glo pink, and I found out the cucumbers liked that better than the other colors, so I went back to Wal-Mart, but they were out of pink ones. They had day-glo orange and yellow and green, so I got those. The cucumbers love those day-glo beanbags. They seem to have different favorite colors, so when they get here I have to spend some time moving them around to see which one likes which color. But all of them like the day-glo chairs better than anything else.

The walls are another thing. Most of my house is decorated with Penthouse Pets and some Playboy pictures. That started as revenge after Nancy Ann left, but I kept doing it, because it makes me happy. Those women are even more beautiful than the hookers I hire, who can’t always arrange perfect lighting. But the cucumbers hate those pictures. Once I held one up to my favorite Penthouse Pet, as a kind of joke, and that cuke started shaking like it was about to explode. I tried it with a few others: same thing. Maybe they think naked humans look repulsive, the way lots of people would think the cucumbers themselves do.

So I drove into the library and got out a bunch of art books and started showing them pictures. They don’t have eyes that I can tell, but if you hold a picture up to any place along the middle of the cucumber, it will respond. French painters, that’s how they voted. Especially Matisse and Monet. So now I’ve got Matisse and Monet posters all over the walls of the den. I think those pictures are about as exciting as watching paint dry, and they seriously clash with the day-glo beanbags, not that I’m Martha Stewart. But when I put the cucumbers in that room now, they hardly shake at all.

Of course, there’s always the chance I’m wrong about all of it. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that you can’t trust appearances, even in your own species. I loved Nancy Ann, and I thought she loved me. She was as beautiful as a Penthouse Pet, and she was smart and funny and taught me how to cook. I loved her even after she got religion; I loved her even after she started telling me that I was going to go to hell for cursing and growing pot and reading Penthouse, even when she said I was possessed by the devil. I figured she was saying all those mean things because she loved me too and didn’t want me to go to hell, and even though I didn’t believe in hell and never have, I tried to make her happy. I didn’t shut down my business, of course, because we needed the money if we were going to move to Hawaii, which was what Nancy Ann wanted. She had expensive tastes, anyway: Diamonds and perfume and a new sports car every couple of years. She cut down on some of that stuff after she got religion, I’ll give her that. She said showiness was the sin of pride. Since she seemed serious about it, I tried to curse less, and I canceled my Penthouse subscription for a while, and I even went to church with her a couple of times, to hear the Reverend Jebediah Wilkins bellow about Jesus and Satan and hellfire and how we had to tithe to the Lord if we wanted to be saved, hallelujah, while people nodded and moaned and said, “Oh yes, tell it brother,” all around us.

That church was the scariest thing I’ve ever seen, much worse than space cucumbers could ever be. But I tried to love Nancy Ann through all of it, I really did. And I thought she was trying to love me too. And then one day I came home from a trip to town, where I’d just bought her some of her favorite perfume, because it was her birthday and she deserved something nice on her birthday, even if it would have been pride any other time. And I found all her things gone and a note on the kitchen table saying she wouldn’t be back, because she’d found true love with Jebediah Wilkins. She said she’d be praying for me, oh yes she would, praying that I’d change my sinful ways before the Lord struck me down and I burned in hellfire forever.

So naturally I was not happy to have a preacher at my front door, staring at a space cucumber staggering in circles around my living room. The one time I’ve got unwanted company, and that’s when the cucumbers have to go and do something different. I wish I could say I handled the whole thing calmly, but I didn’t. I flat-out panicked. I’m not sure I’ve ever moved that fast before; I got the chain off the door and grabbed Humphreys and yanked him inside, and grabbed my gun off the shelf and aimed it at him. “The safety’s still on,” I said, raising my voice over the cucumbers’ singing, “but if you do anything funny, it won’t be, I’ll blow your head off, I swear to God—”

Humphreys held his hands up and tried to say something, but it came out as a squeak. He was shaking worse than the cucumbers ever have, and I knew the cucumber behind me was too, although I couldn’t turn around to look, because I had to keep an eye on Humphreys. Don’t ask me what I thought he was going to do: go to the government, or start raving about Satan and try to burn my house down. All I knew was that I couldn’t let him leave, once he’d seen the cucumber, and I’d never killed a man before and didn’t want to, but I had no idea how else I was going to get out of this one, except that Sam was expecting Humphreys back with the crop and if Humphreys didn’t come back Sam would call the police and—

You can see how clearly I was thinking. About all I could figure was that I was doomed. I couldn’t see any way out that didn’t involve a jail cell or worse.

Humphreys found his voice, then. “Please,” he said. “Welly, don’t shoot me. I don’t—I don’t—”

It occurred to me right then that if I could get that cucumber back into the den, where it belonged, maybe I could convince him he’d just been seeing things. And he’d just bought a quarter bag from me, which made him a felon too. He wouldn’t want his flock to know about that, except Sam. Preachers may be hypocrites, but most of them try to hide it. I had some leverage here.

I started calming down. The cucumber in the living room stopped singing, too, so it was a little easier to think. “Sit down,” I said. “Right there. With your back to the wall.” He did, just slid down that wall with his hands still up, and I said, “If you don’t move, you’ll be fine. Got it?” He nodded, his eyes still big, but he was watching me and the gun, not the cucumber. “Close your eyes,” I said, and he did—he was still shaking, you’d better believe it—and I backed up, keeping the gun on him, and scooped that crazy lost cucumber back under my arm so I could take it back into the den.

But it picked that very instant to go sploosh, and Humphreys’ eyes flew open at the extra noise—I guess he couldn’t help it—and he saw that bag of cucumber gravy, and he turned green and gulped and whatever he’d had to eat that day came back up, all over his lap and my carpet. While he was heaving I backed up quick and opened the door to the den and tossed the gravy bag inside, and slammed the door shut again. I don’t know if Humphreys saw that or not; he was busy reviewing the contents of his stomach. When he’d finished losing his breakfast he looked up at me, his face wet the way it gets after you’ve thrown up, and said, “I’m sorry. I really am sorry. I’ll clean it up. If you bring me some soap and water and some rags—”

“Never mind that,” I said. “I’ll clean it up myself. You just get out of here, Reverend. You get out of here and bring Sam his medicine. You didn’t see anything unusual, you hear me?”

He shook his head. “What was that?”

“It wasn’t anything.” One of the other cucumbers stopped singing, and I said, “You haven’t seen or heard anything. Go on home, now.” He just looked at me. The third cucumber shut up, so the house was very quiet, all of a sudden. I still had the gun trained on Humphreys; the safety was still on. I clicked it off and said, “Reverend, you need to go home now.”

He swallowed. He’d stopped shaking. When he spoke again, his voice was a lot calmer than it had been before. “Mr. Smith, I’ve been in front of guns before. The worst you can do to me is kill me. I have to know one thing: That—that creature I didn’t see, is it dangerous?”

“Something you didn’t see can’t be dangerous, Reverend. Go home.”

He shook his head again. “I wish that were true, but it’s not. What we pretend not to see is what harms us. And if anyone’s in danger—”

“Nobody’s in danger but you, Reverend.” I was starting to panic again. This guy wasn’t going to let himself be convinced that the cucumber had just been his imagination. “As far as I know, the creature you didn’t see isn’t dangerous to anybody. Now go home!”

He just looked at me. He looked very sad. “If it’s not dangerous, then why did you kill it?”

I lost it, then. Everything piled into my head in that one instant: how Nancy Ann had told me I was evil and how she’d left me even though I tried to make her happy, and all the work I’d done over the years to try to keep those cucumbers comfortable, to keep them from shaking. Jim Humphreys didn’t understand a single goddamn thing. “I didn’t kill it! It just died! That’s what they do! They die! That’s how they die! They’ve been coming here to die for ten years and you don’t know a single thing about it, but you think you know everything, don’t you? You think those creatures are the minions of Satan and you think I’m going to hell for taking care of them and for having pictures of naked women on the walls and for selling pot, and you think you can come in here and—”

“Welly!” he said. He sounded like I’d hit him over the head with one of those beanbag chairs. “Welly, if I thought you were going to hell for selling marijuana, why would I have come here to buy some for Sam?”

“How do I know? So you could preach to me about it! So you could preach to Sam and tell him he’s going to hell! He probably confessed that he’d been smoking because he’s dying and scared for his soul, because you people have your hooks in him just like you got them into my wife. I bet you smoke yourself, don’t you? I bet you stand up every Sunday and preach about how drugs are a sin and everybody has to give you their money so they’ll be saved, and then you come out here and spend that money on pot for yourself. All those fives and singles came from the collection plate, didn’t they? Little old ladies giving you their last dollar and then you turn around and spend it on—”

“It’s Sam’s money,” Jim Humphreys said. “The marijuana’s for him, Welly. You can call and ask him. I have a phone in the car.”

“I’m not done!” I said. “You just listen to me.” It felt awfully good to yell at him like that, to have a man on the floor in front of me and to be able to point a gun at him and tell him exactly what I thought of him and have him not be able to do anything about it. It felt better than anything had felt in a long time. “I know about you people! Don’t think I don’t! I know how you ministers act in the pulpit, trying to scare ordinary folks who are just trying to get by and do the best they can, and then you turn around and you run off with people’s wives after you’ve had the goddamned f*cking nerve to make all that noise about the devil! Your kind think they’re better than the rest of the world, don’t they? Don’t they, Reverend? You think you can tell me everything about who I am and how I should live my life, like you’ve got God in your pocket. Your people think that all they have to do to be saved is to put somebody else down—”

“My people,” said Jim Humphreys, very quietly, “believe in welcoming all strangers as Christ.” I squinted at him, because I couldn’t believe how calm he was, and he said, “Even strangers who aren’t human. I don’t think I need to tell you anything about that, Welly. I think you’ve been welcoming strangers as Christ for—what did you say? Ten years? And if you’re doing a better job with them than you’re doing with me, well, that’s because you think I’m not a stranger. You think you know who I am. But you’re wrong, Welly. I’m a stranger, too.”

I was ashamed, then, of how good I’d felt when I was yelling at him. And then I got angry again because he’d made me ashamed, which was what Nancy Ann and Jebediah had always tried to do. “High and mighty, aren’t you? I bet you think I’m the scum of the earth—”

“I think you’re scared,” he said. “I think that if I were in your place, I’d be scared too. And I think it must be awfully hard, having to watch things die like that for ten years, without being able to talk to anybody about it.”

I got a lump in my throat when he said that. It shocked me, because I hadn’t cried since Nancy Ann left, and I was damned if I was going to start in front of this preacher. “It’s not like that,” I said. “It’s not like I know them. They all look the same and they all die the same way, and I don’t know how to talk to them. This is where they come and I do the best for them I can, but I don’t get attached, Reverend. So don’t get all sentimental.”

He smiled, sitting there on the floor in his own puke. “All right. I won’t. But would you mind if I cleaned up the floor here?”

Kicking him out hadn’t worked. I might as well let him clean up his own mess. “Go on,” I said, and used the gun to wave him into the kitchen. “Bucket and rags are under the sink.” I watched while he filled the bucket with soapy water and carried it back into the living room and knelt down and cleaned up the mess. He did a good job; he was careful about it. When he was done he took everything back into the kitchen and rinsed it all out, and then he put a little clean water in the bucket and turned around and looked at me.

“Welly, I’d like to—may I visit your guests? May I see them?”

What the hell. He knew too much already; I wasn’t going to get anywhere by trying to keep it from him. And I was starting to be curious about what he’d think of them, frankly. And I guess I wanted him to see that I wasn’t just killing them. He’d struck a nerve there I didn’t even know I had.

I looked at my watch. We had twenty-five minutes before the others went gravy, max, if they hadn’t already. I didn’t know what had gotten into the one who ran into the living room. Maybe it was crazy or extra sick, or maybe the cucumbers were about to start pulling new tricks on me, in which case I couldn’t count on anything. “I don’t know if the others are still alive,” I said. “They may have gone gr—they may have died while we were out here. When they sing like that, it means they’re going to die pretty soon. So they may look like that other one, now. I’m just warning you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I think I’ll be fine now.” So I took him into the den. It was way too hot in there, with the space heaters, but that’s how the cucumbers like it. I still had the gun with me, just in case Humphreys tried to pull something. The other two cucumbers were still solid. I’d never taken a gun into the den before and I was a little worried about how they’d respond, if they’d start shaking again, but they didn’t even seem to notice.

Jim Humphreys had a plan, you could tell. He didn’t pay attention to anything in that room except those two solid cucumbers. He got down on his knees right away and started muttering and waving his hands over the water in the bucket. Then he dipped his hand in the water and used it to make a sign of the cross on each cucumber—which was awfully brave, really, since it had taken me months to be comfortable touching them, but I guess he’d seen that I was okay after picking that other one up—and mumbled some more. “Look at you,” I said. I didn’t know whether to be impressed or disgusted. “You talk about welcoming all strangers as Christ and here you are trying to do an exorcism—”

He looked up at me, looking shocked. “Oh, no!” Then he looked a little sheepish. “Emergency baptisms. Although it’s somewhat the same thing.” He rocked back on his heels and stood up and said, “Now what?”

I shrugged. “Now nothing. Now they have”—I checked my watch—”maybe fifteen minutes left.”

He looked at his watch, too. “May I wait here with them? Would that be all right?”

“I don’t see why not,” I said. He nodded and sat down on the floor, and I sat on the polka-dot beanbag chair. “All right, Reverend. You tell me this. If all strangers are Christ already, why do they have to be baptized?”

Humphreys smiled. “You should be a theologian. That’s a good question. Mainly because it’s what I know how to do, and it makes me feel better.”

“Huh! You think it’ll do them any good?”

“I have no idea. I don’t see how it can hurt them.” He looked around the room, then, up at the walls, and raised his eyebrows. “Matisse?”

“They like Matisse. Or I think they do. Don’t ask me, Reverend. I don’t know a damn thing. I do this and I do that, and I find chairs I think they like, and I say they’re dying, but I could be wrong about all of it. They’re not from around here. They’re not dogs or cats; they’re not the same kind of animal we are at all. I try to keep them still and happy, but maybe when they’re still that means they’re in pain. Maybe I’ve been torturing them all this time without meaning to. Maybe they’re invading Earth and I’m the one making it possible, and in another ten years all these dead aliens are going to come back to life and take over the world.”

He listened to me, his face still and serious. “Yes. It’s hard, isn’t it, not knowing if we’re doing the right thing? I don’t think any of us ever know, not really. We do the best we can, and we pray to do more good than harm, but we have to trust God to see it all, and to sort it all out, and to forgive us when we go wrong.”

I looked away from him. “I don’t believe in God. No offense.”

“None taken, Welly.”

“Good. What happened to your ear? I saw you on TV, feeding those bag ladies. That’s how I knew who you were, when I saw your ear.”

“It’s a birth defect. My family didn’t have enough money for plastic surgery.” He shrugged. “I used to keep my hair long to hide it, but it doesn’t bother me anymore. It’s a help in my work, frankly. People bring their scars to church. They bring the wounds they want healed, but they’re ashamed of them, too. If they can see mine, that makes it easier.”

“I’ll just bet,” I said. Nancy Ann had a little scar on the inside of her left thigh, high up. It was a birthmark, too, like Humphreys’ ear. It didn’t take Jebediah very long to see that one, did it?

The second cucumber went sploosh, just then, and Humphreys and I both jumped a little. Humphreys didn’t puke this time; he got back on his knees and made another sign of the cross and muttered some more. When he was done I picked up that gravy bag and put it in the corner with the other one, the one I’d tossed back into the den from the living room, and then Humphreys and I sat back down to wait for the third cucumber to go gravy. Five minutes, now.

“Why do you suppose they come here?” he asked me.

“Damned if I know. Maybe they’re sick and their people send them away so they won’t infect everybody else. Maybe they’re dead already when they get here, and Earth’s their eternal reward. Now that’s scary, isn’t it? Maybe when we die we’re all going to land on some alien’s doorstep, and we just have to hope they’ll have comfortable chairs for us and find out what kind of art we like.” My heaven will have Lay-Z-Boy recliners and Penthouse Pets, but I wasn’t going to tell Humphreys that.

He smiled. “In my father’s house are many mansions.”

“What?” But the last cucumber went sploosh, so I never did find out what Humphreys had been talking about. He did his little praying routine again, and I piled the third cucumber in the corner with the other two.

He looked at the gravy bags, and then at me. “How do you—what do you do with them? Afterwards?”

“I bury them. I’ve got these things all over my property.”

He nodded. “Do you need help?”

“If you’re as good with a shovel as you are with a pail, I could use the help, Reverend. Thank you.”

So we piled the gravy bags into my pickup, and I threw a tarp over them and loaded up a couple of shovels, and then I drove out to the next gravesite. I’ve been keeping track of where the cucumbers are, so I can pick a fresh place each time. I brought the gun with me, but that was in case we ran into snakes or something: I wasn’t worried about Humphreys anymore, not that way.

He was good with a shovel, strong and fast. He hadn’t always been a preacher, you could tell. He’d done manual labor someplace. Watching him dig, I started to get curious. When we stopped to take a break, I said, “So when were you in front of guns before?”

“In Africa.” He wiped the sweat off his face. “In Zaire, back during the eighties. A group of us were rebuilding a church. Mobutu’s thugs had burned it down because the clergy were speaking out against the government. And the soldiers came when we were rebuilding, and they lined us up against a wall and threatened to shoot us all. I still don’t know why they didn’t. They killed plenty of other people, before and after that.” His eyes got far away, then, and he said, “All the people I worked with there—they’re all dead now.”

“That’s not right,” I said.

“No.” He started digging again, and I let him. I know how working with your hands can help, when you’re upset about something. I re-roofed the house all by myself, after Nancy Ann left.

We got the cucumbers neatly buried, one to a grave, and Humphreys said a little prayer over each one, and then we got back into the truck to go back into the house. I was worried. I had to figure out what to do about him, and it would have been easier if he’d been easier to hate. “Reverend,” I said, “you were right before. I’m scared about what will happen if people find out about what’s been going on out here.”

“I’m not going to tell them,” he said. “This is under the seal of clerical confidentiality, Welly. I take that very seriously.”

I didn’t know if I could believe him or not. I wanted to, but that’s not the same thing. “I just hope I can trust you, Reverend.”

“I hope you’ll learn that you can. I can’t expect you to, yet. You’ve only known me a few hours. Earning trust takes longer than that.”

I grunted. That was a better answer than a lot of other people would have given. “Well, listen, you let me know when Sam dies.”

“He may not die, not for a long time. We have to hope the chemo will work. We have to hope he’ll be healed. But if he dies, certainly, I’ll call you.” Humphreys smiled. “He’ll be having a church service, I have to warn you.”

“Call me anyway.” We were back at the house. I stopped the truck and said, “You left that bag inside, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Wait here. I’ll get it for you. I’ll be right back out.”

The paper lunch sack was still sitting in the hallway, next to where Humphreys had gotten sick. It was wet from the soapy water he’d used. I threw the old sack away and got a fresh one, and then for good measure I threw another eighth into the plastic bag. I knew Sam would notice, and that kind of gesture’s good for business, if you don’t do it very often. I guess it was my way of gambling that he’d stay alive. And if he mentioned it to Humphreys, maybe the Reverend would be more likely to keep his mouth shut.

I took the sack back out and handed it to Humphreys. “I have something for you, too,” he said, and gave me his business card. “Call me if you ever want to talk, about anything at all. You can call me any time. Both my home number and the church number are on there.”

“Kind of you,” I said, although I was thinking, when hell freezes over. ”Thank you, Reverend.”

“You’re welcome, Welly.” He held out his hand, and I shook it, and then he got back into his car and drove away. I watched his car until it disappeared, and then I went back into the house. I almost threw the business card away, but something made me toss it into one of my kitchen drawers instead. Don’t ask me what. It wasn’t like I planned on calling him. It was just a superstitious thing, maybe like what he’d said about the emergency baptisms. Having his business card probably wasn’t going to help me, but it couldn’t hurt, either.

I was hot, from all that digging. I opened the fridge and got out a beer and drank it down in one gulp. Then I got my cell phone and took it into the living room, and sat back in my recliner and started dialing the phone company.





BLACK FIRE

Tanith Lee

Witness A (One)

I first see it as I’m driving back that night up the road—you can bet I pulled over. I thought it was a f*cking plane coming down. Like a plunge of flames right through the sky, as if the sky was tearing open from the top to the bottom. The car slams to a halt and I jump out—and I’m below the top of the hill, so I run the rest of the way and just as I get there, this . . . thing, whatever it was, it lands in the woods. Well, our house is around there, me and hers. Only a mouse-house—what she said—mid-terrace in the last street winds out the village.

I stand on the hill sort of frozen, sort of turned to stone, and I hold my breath, the way like you do, not knowing you’re not breathing.

So while I watch, all this fire-thing just storms into and through the trees and down and it hits the ground, and I think something’s crazy then, because there should be a God-awful great bang, yeah? And great columns of fire and crap. But there ain’t a sound. Not a bloody whisper.

And then I remember and I take that missing breath. But it’s so quiet. I think that’s what struck me anyhow, even while I run up the hill. There’s always some kind of noise out here; I mean, we’re not that far from the town. And there’s animals, too, foxes and things snuffling and screeching. And cars.

Only there isn’t a single sound now.

I don’t never drink when I drive. Not no more. I got pulled over a couple years ago, random check, and I was just over the limit: half a glass—well, a pint—of beer. But I won’t take any chance now. So nobody can say I imagined what I seen. Go on, you can test me, if you like. No. I see it. And I see what come after too.

Witness E (One)

He was late. He’s always late.

That’s what they says about dead people, don’t they? Well then he must be dead.

Oh, he’s got some bint where he works. Says he hasn’t. He’s got some—

Anyhow. I was washing my hair, and this blinding like . . . light sort of—I thought it was coming straight in the bleeding window—

I thought it was a bomb. You know—a dirty bomb like they always go on about? Terrorists. Why does everyone hate everyone?

So I runs out in the garden and I look and this big light—it’s like the sky’s falling and it’s all on fire—only the fire is . . . it isn’t red or nothing. It’s—I can’t describe it really.

Right in the wood.

I started to cry. I was really scared. And he weren’t there, the bugger.

But there’s no crash. Nothing. Just—silence. You know that thing someone said—hear a pin drop. Like that.

And my hair’s so wet—but I shakes it back, and I thought: I can go next door, but the other three houses there, as we come like out of the village, no one lives in them now.

And then I sees him. This guy. He’s walking out between the trees, i’nt he. Just walking.

Witness A (One)

F*cking car wouldn’t start, would it, when I goes back to it.

So I beats it up the f*cking hill again and belts down the other side toward the house. I mean, I’m thinking of her, aren’t I? Yeah?

I mean you do, don’t you?

Witness E (One)

It wasn’t just he was well fit. I mean he was fit. I can see that like. And like he’s really—he’s beautiful. And I’m standing there in my old jeans and an old bra and no slap on and my hair full of shampoo. But he’s got a sort of like, he’s sort of shining.

It’s like—what’s that stuff? Phosbros—is it?

He gleams.

Only he’s dark too. I don’t mean he’s a black guy. His skin is just kind of like summer tan, sort of like he’s caught the sun but over here. Not a real tan. And his hair is black but it’s so long, all down his back, it’s like silk.

And he has this face.

I don’t think much of them movie celebs, do you? But this guy, he’s like in films my mum used to watch before she went mad and ended up in Loonyville—I can’t think who.

But he comes out the wood and up to the garden, where the dustbin is, and the broken gate, and he looks at me.

I say, “D’you see that flaming thing come down?”

And he smiles at me.

Witness A (Two)

Coming home on that train . . . it’s always late and no trolly service; I dread the damn thing. But when I finally got to the station what do you think? The shit Volvo won’t start, will it?

So I walked.

Perfect ending to a perfect day, etc.

That’s when I saw those fireworks all showering down on everything.

I admit I stopped and stared. I mean, I was recollecting that factory—God, where was it?—that place where all the fireworks blew up. The only difference was, and I eventually figured it out, these fireworks were all in a mass, just dropping in one single area. They merely fell out of the sky. Glittering. The rather peculiar thing was, there were no colors. It was quite a naturally well-lit night—aside from the inevitable street lamp light-pollution—a half moon, and stars. And this fountain of fireworks looked somehow much darker. They were—the nearest I can get is something like black sequins, those kind of gowns sexy women wore in the forties of the last century.

Anyway, I started to walk again because even when the fountain hit the bloody houses on my street, which I could see from up there on the far side of the park, there wasn’t any thudding noise, no detonations.

You get so anxious now. It’s how they want to make you, isn’t it? All these warnings. I’d been thinking, ever since the trouble years ago, I ought to relocate, just work from home.

But it’s difficult. My partner. She likes the high life, frankly, and her own job (she’s a sort of PA) simply doesn’t cover the rent.

It took me an hour to get back on foot. I steeled myself and didn’t stop off at the King’s Arms. I thought she might be worried. Sometimes I can be such a bloody fool.

By the time I reached the house the pyrotechnics were long gone. It was just this incredibly silent night. I noted that, you see. It struck me, how dead quiet it was.

When I unlocked the door, there seemed to be no one about. That was unusual. She’s usually around. Even if she’s asleep in front of the TV with an empty vodka bottle. I called out, I remember . . . I called her name—Honey I’m home sort of rubbish.

But no answer.

I felt fed up. I was tired out and hungry. I admit, I felt unloved. Childish, stupid, but I’m trying to tell you the truth.

Then I thought I heard a noise upstairs. Had she gone up to bed early? (No care for me, get my own f*cking meal even though she’d been home all day.) Or was she ill? She gets migraines sometimes—or she says she . . . she said she did.

I went upstairs.

This I can’t really explain. I walked quietly. Maybe only because it really was so quiet. Not a sound. (Even when I’d passed the pub, now I come to think of it. Quiet as—well, is even a grave so quiet?)

Upstairs the dimmer was on, all the lights half doused.

Then I did hear something. Then I heard it again, through the bedroom door. Our bedroom. This cry.

You can’t mistake a cry like that.

Unless, of course, you never ever heard it before.

Witness A (One)

I runs the last bit. I’m getting really scared. Even though there’d been no bang nor nothing. I mean, the house lights were all out.

When I gets there I nearly has a heart attack because the front door is standing wide open.

No light—no, one in the lounge. I say lounge—size of a kitchen table—nowhere else though.

Upstairs, in the tiny little mouse room we called our bedroom, I hear a long wild wailing noise.

And I f*cking know that noise.

It’s her, fetching off, like they say.

It’s sex.

I thought, hang on maybe she’s just fixed herself, me not being there.

Then I know.

Then I run upstairs fast as I could. Sounded like an elephant to myself, in all the quiet.

When I pushed the door open, there they are. Her and him.

There they are.

Witness E (Two)

He rang the door bell. I think that was it . . . He must have done.

So I opened the door. It wasn’t that late. Anyway, I was bored.

The utter rubbish on TV. I’d been going to check the washing-machine because suddenly it seemed so silent that presumably it’d packed up, with all my gear in it, oh, and his favorite three shirts—unforgiveable!

I thought I’d seen a kind of flash in the sky earlier. But I’m always seeing things in the sky. Altogether, in the past two years, I’ve seen six unidentified flying objects. Everyone laughs at me. But I did.

Anyway, standing outside the door is this entirely gorgeous man. There is no other way to describe him. He looks like—oh, God knows. Too good to be true. No, I don’t remember what he was wearing.

Yes, I’d been drinking. I always mean to cut down, never do it when I’m at work. But sometimes, well. But not that much. I mean, I could see.

He was so beautiful.

And he said, “Here you are,” and he smiled this wonderful smile.

No, not charismatic, nothing so clichéd. You looked at him and—

I fell in love with him. On sight. I fell in love with him.

Can I stop now?

I need some water, please.

Witness E (Three)

We’d been going to go up to the ridge. There was supposed to be a meteor shower. He said so. We’re both very interested in that sort of thing—space, you know. He has a wonderful collection of meteor bits—dark fusion crust, really special.

We’d only been together a year. It was awful when he lost his job, but luckily I still have mine. Very luckily, as it turns out. I mean, it’s just boring office work, but I’ll still need a job, won’t I? Or not, for a bit, perhaps.

Anyway, we set off quite early, around sunset. It was lovely, the light sinking over the fields and the birds singing. I know the songs are only territorial, their way of saying Keep Out! to other birds. I never knew that till he explained it to me. I just thought they sang because they could do it so well.

The ridge is the highest open place for miles.

We sat down and looked at the dark coming, and then all the lights coming on all round, the two towns, and the city to the north, and the little villages. You can never go far here without seeing people, or signs of them.

It got dark then. The moon was already quite far over to the west, though still high enough to make the upper sky that deep night blue. Lots of stars.

We didn’t see anything for a long time. Then this thing just erupted out of the zenith.

He jumped up. We both did.

“It’s a fireball—” he shouted. “My God—it’s colossal—”

It seemed to be falling straight on us, but somehow neither of us could move.

Then I remember being aware of turning, as if I were being turned, not doing it myself—and our shadows peeling out jet black behind us and then realizing the meteor was rushing down to the south, in front of us, not directly on to our heads.

He started to run. He was running after it. He didn’t wait for me, or even call to me. I suppose he just thought I’d do exactly what he did, I’d be so desperate to see. But I was scared. You know. I mean, it was so big and blazing bright—and yet so dark. I didn’t know you could have fire like that, black fire—it must be a phenomenon associated with certain types of extra-terrestrial objects.

So he’d sprinted off, and the fireball went down on the land. And then—no shock wave, no sound—it just went out. Like a blown candle. Like that.

My legs had gone to jelly. I had to sit down. I thought he’d be all right; after all nothing had exploded or was burning. What a coward I was, and he was so brave. He’d really tell me off. Perhaps I could get up and follow him in a minute, pretend I’d fallen over something as I ran—

Then I noticed how completely quiet everything was. Nothing is ever that quiet. I’ve been out with him enough nights to know. Animals move about, there is the distant hum of traffic from the motorway, or a plane. Even trees sort of settle.

And even the quietest flick of breeze moves the leaves. And I could see the leaves on trees moving a little. So the silence was just for me, somehow I’d been closed in some sort of bubble of soundlessness—

Then I stood up.

And then he spoke to me. I mean him, the man. The—I mean him.

He said, “Are you here?”

I said, “Who are you? Where did you come from?”

And he smiled.

He was so wonderful to look at . . . long black hair. He wore—I can’t remember. Just ordinary clothes I expect. Because in fact he couldn’t have been at all what he seemed. It was a sort of illusion he could create, just the way they do it in SF movies, CGI—in Dr. Who, for instance. Because he must be an alien, a species from beyond this world.

I was terrified. But then he touched me.

No, I’m all right.

This isn’t my blood.

Witness A (Four)

I slung the door open and I ran straight at them. They were by the wall. No need to guess what he’d been doing with her—

She just looked sad. That was all. She didn’t even protest.

And he—well, must have slipped out the side door while I was seeing to her, mustn’t he? Bastard. He never even tried to stop me.

Is she going to be—?

Okay.

No.

All right.

Yes.

Witness E (Seven)

Of course I never want him near me again after what he did. Sure, we’ve been married three years. So what? Yes, I’ll press charges. Look at me.

I don’t remember. Yes, there was another bloke. A stranger—so? So what. I don’t remember. I must have done.

Dept. RUP/sub 3x6: ps

My profoundest apologies that the enc: document did not accompany the (coded) transcript of this report.

Here then, belatedly, it is.

(I have to add at this point that whether it will shed any light of logic on the recorded eyewitness reports already deciphered and in your hands, remains to be seen. Those of us here are frankly baffled.

I will refer to that again at the end of the enc: document.)

Docu 97/77/ Six. Six. Six.

On the night of the July 20 (see transcript) a number of emergency calls began to be relayed to this department. They involved urgent requests for all emergency services: police, paramedics and, in some cases, firefighters.

The peculiar feature of all these call-outs was the basic similarity of the claims of all the participants. Each seemed to involve an episode which, though variable, mentioned similar events and actions, and, significantly, one particular male person (as described in the transcripts): a youngish man, tall and slimly built, having very long dark hair and dark eyes. All the living victims—some were no longer alive, and even those who did not regard themselves as victimized—were in a range of states representing shock, paranoid rage, or extreme exhilaration. All reported a fundamentally similar scenario, despite other countless unlike details. However, the occurrences took place on the same evening, and across the length and breadth of England. While the times, too, varied (incidents began quite early in the evening, and continued to surface until midnight), it is evidentially impossible the same dark-haired man, the main “suspect”—we use this term for want of another—could have appeared in so many widely disseminated areas during so brief a time period.

I will add, so far, we have been entirely unable to trace him, in this country or elsewhere. This is partly due, no doubt, to the lack of any recoverable DNA, or other clue, left behind with the subjects of his . . . visits.

Also, although sightings of UFOs are not uncommon, on this particular night, no one, apart from the people directly involved, called in with any queries about a fiery falling object, whether thought to be a meteor, a spaceship, or a light aircraft. No unusual reports either of an electric storm or alarming fireworks display.

The enclosed transcript relays to you only a sample of the huge group of persons who were subsequently interviewed, initially by the police of the ambulance service, and later on by ourselves. It is a sample of the most typical reports. Of which, in total there are to date some six hundred and sixty-six.

This number may, of course, not arouse any disquiet in the mind of a modern atheist. Nevertheless I am afraid, in order to preserve for the victims, where feasible, a modicum of the anonymity the Law currently prescribes, we have (perhaps frivolously) labeled each and all of them not by an actual name, but by the letter A, in the case of males, and E, in the case of females. Plus a differentiating number—One, Two, etc.: You may soon be aware why the letters A and E alone have been selected. And we trust you will overlook any perceived levity on our part. A stands for the Biblical Adam, naturally. And E for Eve, his rib-created partner. As I have said, we have not, here, included every single eyewitness account, but rendered for your consideration the most predominantly recurrent statements; that is, those most representative from all the six hundred and sixty-six interviews we were able to garner. (Of those individuals resultantly dead, or in a condition likely to lead to death—both male and female—we do not yet have conclusive figures.) The ultimate consequences of this replicated event remain, so far, unpredictable.

We shall be very glad to receive your input on this matter. To accept it at apparent (religious?) face-value would seem, shall we say, grotesque. But to ignore so widespread a phenomenon likewise itself poses many problems.

Code seal and signature attached.

Appendage PSX:

My last thought is, I confess, is this really then what is meant by Science Fiction? Or, more disquietingly, was it always? I direct your attention to the final words of the final, included witness.

Witness A (Two)

I’m very sorry I did that to her. Yes, I know she won’t speak to me. I can’t see her. Yes. I’ve never done anything like that before.

I can’t describe it. Can’t you try to f*cking understand? She was lying on the bed with him. She was naked. He was—he was inside her. She was holding him in her arms—

I couldn’t handle it. You didn’t see. And there was this light in the room. Like a sort of bloody gilding. The whole scene looked like a pornographic oil painting from the Italian Renaissance.

I don’t remember what he looked like. Just another man. Some kid, twenties maybe. God knows.

He just moved away from her. There was something then.

He was—what? what?—sinuous, something sinuous about how he moved. That I do remember. He moved like a trained dancer, an athlete—no, like an animal. Like a big cat. A panther. Or a snake.

I know I hit her.

I’m sorry.

I never did anything like that before with anyone.

No, it wasn’t really because she’d f*cked him. It was what she said.

She said I can see inside you.

Witness E (Two)

Yes, I could, I could see all through him. Through everything. No, I can’t explain. I would if I could, wouldn’t I? I mean all this f*cking talk, this interrogation, when I’m covered in bruises, and I’m still pretty articulate, aren’t I? Okay? If not very pretty. Ha. Ha.

I don’t know now what it was.

It was as if I knew everything there was to know, the heights, the depths, yesterday, tomorrow, the beginning, the end-oh—

Shit.

I need the plastic thing—the bowl—it’s your fault, all these questions—get the f*cking sick bowl before I throw up all over—

Witness A (One)

She gets off of the bed and she says to me, I seen the stars.

That’s what she says.

She doesn’t mean—I don’t know what—I know what—

I don’t know what to do, do I? I turn to him like a f*cking dope, but somehow he’s not there no more. But there’s something. I can feel it too.

There’s this ringing in my head, and this terrific smell, a good smell—no, not good; can’t be, can it? But it’s clean, sweet—only it’s drowning me.

I suppose she called you. Or someone. That’s all I remember, mate. The lot. But I won’t forget none of it. And I ain’t been drinking, I told you. Test me.

Witness E (Three)

It was like looking through glass. You know, a glass case, perhaps? You can see everything so clearly, but you can’t touch it. If you try, you trigger the alarm.

But I do remember there was a tree. It was very tall, dark but golden, both at once. We were lying high up in it. And there was this beautiful scent—no, more of a taste, really . . .

Witness E (Twenty-Four)

He said to me, “You are here.” And then we made love. It was never like that before. Won’t ever be again. I saw into this huge light. Only it was black, a black light. And for a moment, just after my climax, I knew that I was God. I know this sounds insane, but I don’t think I’m insane. It was only for a moment.

Witness A (One)

I’m afraid of her, now. Don’t want to see her again. Don’t want to see any of you, neither. I wish you’d all f*ck off.

Witness E (Three)

When he came running back, the alien man—my lover—was gone. But I suppose it must have been obvious, to him. I mean, the man I lived with. I wasn’t in any tree at all, but lying there on the ridge, naked. I must have looked—well . . . I suppose it was obvious. It was to him. He began to shout and yell at me. He seemed to be speaking in another language. But I could see right through the universe, start to finish, even if it was behind glass. I’m such a coward normally; I’ve said, haven’t I? But when he ran at me his first blow never even touched me. I drove my knee into his stomach—no, let’s be truthful: into his genitals. And I ripped at his eyes. I am terribly sorry. I understand he may lose his right eye. But I knew he might have killed me otherwise, and frankly, I think you know that too, don’t you?

When I hurt him I felt nothing. Or rather, all I could feel was what I’d felt when the alien had sex with me. This incredible blissful opening to all things, in the most amazing way. And that lovely, delicious scent. I can still smell it. That taste of fresh cut apples.





THE ELEPHANTS OF POZNAN

Orson Scott Card

In the heart of old Poznan, the capital of Great Poland since ancient times, there is a public square called Rynek Glowny. The houses around it aren’t as lovely as those of Krakow, but they have been charmingly painted and there is a faded graciousness that wins the heart. The plaza came through World War II more or less intact, but the Communist government apparently could not bear the thought of so much wasted space. What use did it have? Public squares were for public demonstrations, and once the Communists had seized control on behalf of the people, public demonstrations would never be needed again. So out in the middle of the square they built a squat, ugly building in a brutally modern style. It sucked the life out of the place. You had to stand with your back to it in order to truly enjoy the square.

But we’d all seen the ugly building for so many years that we hardly noticed it anymore, except to apologize to visitors, ruefully remember the bad old days of Communism, and appreciate the irony that the occupants of such a tasteless building should include a restaurant, a bookshop, and an art gallery. And when the plague came and the city was so cruelly and suddenly emptied, those of us who could not let go of Poznan, who could not bear to eke out the last of our lives in the countryside, drifted to the old heart of the city and took up residence in the houses surrounding the square. As time passed, even the ugly building became part of the beauty of the place, for it had been part of the old crowded city now lost forever. Just as the toilets with little altars for the perusal of one’s excrement reminded us of the many decades of German overlordship, so this building was also a part of our past, and now, by its sheer persistence among us, a part of ourselves. If we could venerate the bones and other bodily parts of dead saints, couldn’t we also find holiness of a kind even in this vile thing? It was a relic of a time when we thought we were suffering, but to which we now would gladly return, just to hear schoolchildren again in the streets, just to see the flower shop once more selling the bright excesses of overcopious nature, spots of vivid color to show us that Poland was not, by nature, grey.

Into this square came the elephants, a group of males, making their way in what seemed a relentless silence, except that a trembling of the windows told us that they were speaking to each other in infrasound, low notes that the human ear could not hear, but the human hand could feel on glass. Of course we had all seen elephants for years on our forays out into the gardens of suburban Poznan—clans of females and their children following a matriarch, gangs of mature males hanging out to kill time until one of them went into musth and set off in search of the nearest estrous female. We speculated at first about where they came from, whether their forebears had escaped from a zoo or a circus during the plague. But soon we realized that their numbers were far too great to be accounted for that way. Too many different clans had been seen. On Radio Day we learned, from those few stations that still bothered, that the elephants had come down the Nile, swum the Suez, swarmed through Palestine and Syria and Armenia, crossed the Caucasus, and now fed in the lush wheat pastures of Ukraine, bathed in the streams of Belarus, and stood trumpeting on the shores of Estonia and Pomerania, calling out to some god of the sea, demanding passage to lands as yet unpossessed by the great stumpy feet, the probing noses, the piercing ivory, and the deep thrumming music of the new rulers of the world.

Why should they not rule it? We were only relics ourselves, we who had had the misfortune of surviving the plague. Out of every hundred thousand, only fifty or a hundred had survived. And as we scavenged in the ruins, as we bulldozed earth over the corpses we dragged from the areas where we meant to live, as we struggled to learn how to keep a generator or two running, a truck here and there, the radios we used only once a week, then once a month, then once a year, we gradually came to realize that there would be no more children. No one conceived. No one bore. The disease had sterilized us, almost all. There would be no recovery from this plague. Our extinction had not required a celestial missile to shatter the earth and darken the sky for a year; no other species shared our doom with us. We had been taken out surgically, precisely, thoroughly, a tumor removed with a delicate viral hand.

So we did not begrudge the elephants their possession of the fields and the forests. The males could knock down trees to show their strength; there was no owner to demand that animal control officers come and dispose of the rampaging beasts. The females could gather their children into barns and stables against the winter blast, and no owner would evict them; only the crumbling bones and strands of hairy flesh showed where horses and cattle had starved to death when their masters died too quickly to think of setting them free from their stalls and pens.

Why, though, had these males come into the city? There was nothing for them to eat. There was nothing for us to eat; when our bicycles gave out and we could cobble together no more makeshift carts, we would have to leave the city ourselves and live closer to the food that we gathered from untended fields. Why would the elephants bother with such a ruin? Curiosity, perhaps. Soon they would see that there was nothing here for them, and move on.

We found ourselves growing impatient as the hours passed, and the days, and still we kept encountering them on the city streets. Didn’t they understand that we lived in the heart of Poznan specifically because we wanted a human place? Didn’t they feel our resentment of their trespass? All the rest of Earth is yours; can you not leave undesecrated these crypts we built for ourselves in the days of our glory?

Gradually it dawned on us—dawned on me, actually, but the others realized I was right—that the elephants had come, not to explore Poznan, but to observe us. I would pedal my bicycle and glance down a cross street to see an elephant lumbering along on a parallel path; I would turn, and see him behind me, and feel that shuddering in my breastbone, in my forehead, that told me they were speaking to each other, and soon another elephant would be shadowing me, seeing where I went, watching what I did, following me home.

Why were they interested in us? Humans were no longer killing them for their ivory. The world was theirs. We were going to die—I, who was only seven years old when the plague came, am now past thirty, and many of the older survivors are already, if not at death’s door, then studying the travel brochures and making reservations, their Bibles open and their rosaries in hand. Were these males here as scientists, to watch the last of the humans, to study our deathways, to record the moment of our extinction so that the elephants would remember how we died with only a whimper, or less than that, a whisper, a sigh, a sidelong glance at God?

I had to know. For myself, for my own satisfaction. If I found the truth, whom else would I tell it to, and for what purpose? They would only die as I would die, taking memory with them into the fire, into the ash, into the dust. I couldn’t get any of the others to care about the questions that preyed upon me. What do the elephants want from us? Why do they follow us?

Leave it alone, Lukasz, they said to me. Isn’t it enough that they don’t bother us?

And I answered with the most perplexing question of all, to me at least. Why elephants? The other wild animals that roamed the open country were the ones one might expect to see: The packs of dogs gone wild, interbreeding back to mongrel wolfhood; the herds of cattle, breeding back to hardiness, and of horses, quick and free and uninterested in being tamed. The companions of man, the servants and slaves of man, now masterless, now free. Unshorn sheep. Unmilked goats. Sudden-leaping housecats. Scrawny wild chickens hiding from ever-vigilant hawks. Ill-tempered pigs rooting in the woods, the boars making short work of dogs that grew too bold. That was the wildlife of Europe. No other animals from Africa had made the journey north. Only the elephants, and not just from Africa—the elephants of India were roaming the Orient, and on the most recent Radio Day we learned, through messages relayed many times, that they had somehow crossed the Bering Strait and were now, in ever greater numbers, grazing the prairies of America, small-eared cousins to the great-canopied beasts that now shadowed us on the streets of Poznan. I pictured them swimming, or piling onto boats that some last human pilot guided for them onto the stygian shore.

They had inherited the Earth, and were bent on surveying their new domain.

So I took to spending my days in the library, reading all I could about elephants, and then about all the processes of life, all the passages of history, trying to understand not only them but ourselves, and what had happened to us, and what our cities might mean to them, our houses, our streets, our rusting cars, our collapsing bridges, our sorry cemetery mounds where winter brought fresh crops of human bone to the surface, white stubble on a fallow field. I write this now because I think I know the answers, or at least have found guesses that ring true to me, though I also know they might be nothing more than a man hungry for meanings inventing them where they don’t exist. Arguably, all meanings are invented anyway; and since I have no one to please but myself, and no one to read this who will care, except perhaps one, then I may write as I please, and think as I please, and reread this whenever I can bear it.

They made no effort to follow me inside the library. What good would it do them? Clever as they were with their inquisitive trunks, I could imagine them being deft enough to turn pages without tearing them. But what would the markings on the pages mean to them? Elephants sang their literature to each other in octaves we humans could not hear. Their science was the science of the temporal gland, the probing nose. They observed, but—or so I thought—did not experiment.

I did learn enough to warn the others before the first of the males went into musth. When you see one of them acting agitated, when his temporal glands pour out a steady black streak down his cheeks, when the other males are shy of him and give him room, then we must do the same, staying out of his way, not meeting his gaze. Let him pass. The city is his, wherever he wants to go. He won’t stay here long, in musth. He must go and find a female then, and they were all outside in the open fields. He would give his deep rumbling call and pour out his lusty scent into the air and dribble musky fluid onto the ground where every other elephant could smell it and know: This way passed a male bent on making babies. This way passed God, looking for the Holy Virgin.

So we studied each other, and avoided offending each other, and grew used to each other’s ways, the elephants and the fifty remaining residents of Poznan.

And then one day they began to push.

The males all gathered in the public square. We, too, gossiping to each other that something important was going to happen, gathered in our houses and leaned at our windows to watch.

They wandered aimlessly through the square, eleven of them—the twelve apostles, I thought, sans Iscariot—until noon made the smallest shadows. Then, as if of one mind, they surrounded the ugly old Communist building, facing it. When all were in place, they moved forward, slowly, each bull resting his massive brow against the miserable façade. Then, slowly, each began to tense his muscles, to shift his weight, to make little adjustments, to plant his feet, and then to push with greater and greater strength against the wall.

They’re trying to push it down, I realized. And so did the others, all of us calling out to each other in our high-pitched human voices.

They’re critics of architecture!

They’ve come to beautify Poznan!

We began to address the elephants with our calls, as if they were our football team, as if the plaza were a playing field. We cheered them, laughed in approval, shouted encouragement, placed meaningless bets about whether they could actually break through the walls.

Then, abruptly, I was no longer part of the playfulness. For without meaning to, I changed perspective suddenly, and saw us as the elephants must have seen us. This was Africa after all, and we were the primates perched in the trees, hooting and screeching at the giants, unaware of our own insignificance, or at least unbothered by it.

When I pulled my head back inside my window, I was filled with grief, though at that moment I could not have told you why. I thought at first it was because we humans were so diminished, reduced to chattering from safe perches. But then I realized that the human race had always been the same, had never risen, really, from our primate ways. No, what I was grieving for was that ugly old building, that relic of noble dreams gone sour. I had never lived under Communism, had only heard the stories of the Russian overlords and the Polish Communists who claimed to be fulfilling the will of the masses and perhaps, sometimes, believed their own propaganda—so my father told me, and I had no reason to doubt him. When the Communists decided what was good and what was bad, they acted as rigidly as any Puritan. Aesthetic concerns in architecture led to wasteful overspending of the labor of the working class; therefore, the ugliness of all new buildings was a badge of virtue. We human beings had reinvented ourselves, Homo sovieticus, Homo coprofabricus, or whatever the scientific name would be. A new species that never guessed how quickly it would be extinct.

The elephants would keep pushing until the walls came down—I knew that. Intransigence was built into the elephants’ shoulders the way screeching and chattering were built into the primate mouth. And even though the other humans were cheering them, egging them on, I was sad. No, wistful. If we had really wanted that ugly building taken down, we knew where the dynamite was kept, we could have blown it out of existence. Elephants are mighty and strong, as beasts go, but when it comes to destruction, their foreheads are no match for the explosives in the locked sheds at the construction sites of buildings that will never be finished.

We don’t need you to take it down, you meddlers, I wanted to say. We built it, we humans. It’s ours. What right have you to decide which artifacts should stand, and which should fall?

The fascination of it was irresistible, though. I couldn’t stay away from the window for long. I had to check, again, again, to see if they were making any progress, to see if some crack had appeared. The beasts had enormous patience, pushing and pushing until their shadows were swallowed up in the shade of the buildings as the sun headed out past Germany, past France, out to the Atlantic to be plunged steaming into the sea of night. That was the clock they lived by, these elephants; they had put in their day’s work, and now they wandered off, heading out of the city as they did most nights, to eat and drink and sleep in some more hospitable place.

The next morning they were back, earlier this time, and formed their circle much more quickly, and pushed again. The betting among us began in earnest, then. Would they succeed? Would they give up? How long till the first crack? How long till a wall fell? We had nothing of value to bet; or rather, we had everything, we had inherited the city from the dead, so that we could bet enormous sums of money and pay in cash or diamonds if we wanted to, but when we wagered we never bothered to carry such useless objects from one house to another. Enough to say who won and who lost. The only reason we had such wealth was because the dead had left it all behind. If they didn’t value it any more than that, what was it worth to us, except as counters in games of chance?

There was unguessed-at meaning in their pushing after all. For on the third day of the elephants’ pushing—still to no visible effect—Arek came home to Poznan. Arek, whom I had named for my father. Arek, who dashed my last hope. Arek, who killed my wife.

For years after the plague, no children were conceived. From Berlin, where one of the survivors was a doctor, we learned that when the plague was new and they were still trying to study it, the medical researchers determined that the virus rooted in the reproductive systems of men and women, specifically attacking their bodies where the human seed was made. This was not how the plague did its slaughtering, but it guaranteed that the few survivors would be sterile. The message left us in despair.

But I was young, and though I had seen more death before I turned ten than I would ordinarily have seen even if I devoted my whole life to watching American movies, my hope was still undashable. Or rather, my body’s hope, which in my teens was much stronger than my reason. As the people from the hinterlands and smaller towns came seeking human company, Poznan became a gathering place. In those days we lived on the outskirts of the city, in a place where we could actively farm, before we realized that farming was redundant with miles and miles of fields and gardens reseeding themselves faster than we could harvest them. So I was hoeing the turnips—the kind of task the adults gratefully left to my strong and flexible young arms and legs—when Hilde and her family came to town in a horse-drawn wagon.

It wasn’t Hilde herself that I saw at first, it was the miracle of seeing a family. At first, of course, we assumed they were a nonce family, clinging to each other because no one else in their area survived. But no, no, they looked like each other, that miracle of resemblance that told us all that they were genetically connected. And soon we learned that yes, they were a mother, a father, a daughter, all of whom had survived the plague. They knew it was wrong of them to grieve for the two sons and three daughters who died, for they had not lost everyone they loved, as all the rest of us had done. There was something in them that was stronger than the disease. And Hilde, a plump nordic blonde, soon became beautiful to all of us, because we knew that if any woman had a viable ovum left, it would be her.

She and her parents understood that her womb, if it was not barren, could not belong to her alone, and that her only hope of continuing our poor, weak species was to find a mate whose body still could spew forth living sperm. She had been sexually immature when the plague came, but now was womanly, ready to bear if bear she could. One man at a time would husband her, for three months; then a month of solitude, and then the next man’s turn to try. That way there would be no doubt of fatherhood if she conceived; he would be her husband, to father more children on her. She agreed to this because there was no other hope.

I was third to try, at fifteen a frightened child myself, approaching her like the temple priestess that she was, begging the god to choose me, to let life come into her from me. She was sweet and patient, and told no one how clumsy I was. I liked her, but did not yet love her, for she was still a stranger to me. I could mate with her, but not speak to her—or at least not be understood, for she came from a German-speaking area in the westernmost mountains, and had but little Polish—though more of Polish than I had of German.

The second month she had no period, and the third, and the fourth. She was kept away from me, from all men, until in the fifth month she asked for me. “You are half of this miracle,” she said in halting Polish, and from then on I was her companion. No more fieldwork for me—what if I was injured? What if I caught cold? Instead I stayed with her, taught her to speak Polish and learned to read German, more or less.

In the eighth month the doctor finally came from Berlin. He had never worked in obstetrics, but he was the best hope we had, and since no one in Berlin was pregnant, they understood what was at stake; even a half-Polish baby in Poznan was better than no more babies anywhere at all. We made him welcome; he taught us how to make beer.

The ninth month. Nothing happened. He spoke of inducing labor. We worked to get a room in the hospital powered up, the old equipment working, and he gave Hilde an ultrasound examination. He could not face us after that. “You counted wrong?” he offered, as a possibility.

No, we did not count wrong. We knew the last time she had sex with anyone—with me—and it was nine months and two weeks ago.

“The baby is not ready yet,” he said. “Weeks to go. Maybe many weeks. The limb-length tells me this. The development of the face and hands.”

And then the worst news. “But the head—it is very large. And strangely shaped. Not a known condition, though. I looked in the books. Not seen before, not exactly this. If it is still growing—and how can I tell, since it is already as big as an adult human head—this does not look happy for her. She cannot bear this child normally. I will have to cut the baby out.”

Cut it out now, her parents said. It has been nine months.

“No,” the doctor said. “If I cut now, I think that it will die. I think it has the lungs of a fetus of five months. I did not come here to abort a fetus. I came to deliver a baby.”

But our daughter . . .

Hilde agreed with the doctor. “If he has to cut me open anyway, there is no hurry. Wait until the baby himself thinks that he is ready.”

We knew now it would be a boy, and were not glad of it. A daughter would have been better, everyone knew that. Everyone but me—I was not ready to play Lot with a daughter of mine, and I was the only man proven to have viable sperm, so I thought it was better that I would have a son and then could wander with Hilde and the boy, through all the world if need be, searching for a place where another mating had happened, where there might be a girl for him. I could imagine that future happily.

Ten months. Eleven. No woman had carried a child for so long. She could not sit up in bed now, for still it grew, and the ultrasound looked stranger and stranger. Wide hips, and eyes far apart on a face appallingly broad. The ultrasound, with its grainy, black-and-white image, made it look like a monster. This was no baby. It would never live.

Worse, it was draining the life out of Hilde. Most of what she ate went across the placenta to feed this cancerous growth inside her. She grew wan of face, weak of muscle even as her belly grew more and more mountainous. I would sit beside her and when she was tired of the book I read, I would hold her hand and talk to her of walks along the streets of the city, of my visit to Krakow when I was six, before the plague; how my father took me along as he escorted a foreign author through the city; how we ate at a country restaurant and the foreigner could not eat the floury bread and the chewy noodles and the thick lard spread. She laughed. Or, as she grew weaker, smiled. And finally, near the end, just clung to my hand and let me babble. I wanted nothing more than to have Hilde. Forget the baby. It’s already dead to me, this monster. Just let me have Hilde, the time with her that a man should have with his wife, the life together in a little house, the coming home at night to her embrace, the going forth in the morning with her kiss on my lips and her blessing in my ears.

“I will take it now,” said the doctor. “Perhaps the next child will be normal. But she grows too weak to delay any longer.”

Her parents agreed. Hilde, also, gave consent at last. The doctor had taught me to be his nurse, and trained me by making me watch the bloody surgeries he did on hares and once on a sheep, so I would not faint at the blood when the time came to cut into my wife. For wife she was, at her insistence, married to me in a little ceremony just before she went under the anaesthetic. She knew, as did I, that the marriage was not permanent. Perhaps the community would give me one more try to make a normal child with her, but if that one, too, should fail, the rotation would begin again, three months of mating, a month fallow, until a father with truer seed was found.

What we did not understand was how very weak she had become. The human body was not designed to give itself so completely to the care of such a baby as this one. Somehow the baby was sending hormonal messages to her, the doctor said, telling her body not to bear, not to present; the cervix not to efface and open. Somehow it caused her body to drain itself, to make the muscles atrophy, the fat to disappear.

The doctor’s incision was not large enough at first. Nor with the second cut. Finally, with the third, her womb lay open like the belly of a dissected frog, and at last he lifted the little monster out. He handed it to me. Almost I tossed it aside. But it opened its eyes. Babies aren’t supposed to be able to do that, I know now. But it opened its eyes and looked at me. And I felt a powerful trembling, a vibration in my chest and arms. It was alive, whatever it was, and it was not in me, its father, to kill it. So I set it aside, where a couple of women washed it, and did the rituals that the doctor had prescribed—the drops into the eyes, the blood samples. I did not watch. I returned to Hilde.

I thought she was unconscious. But then the baby made a sound, and even though it was lower than a baby’s mewling ought to be, she knew it was his voice, and her eyes fluttered open. “Let me see,” she whispered. So I ran and took the baby from the women and brought it to her.

It was as large as a toddler, and I was loath to lay such a heavy burden on her chest. But Hilde insisted, reaching with her fingers because she could not raise her arms. I leaned over her, bearing as much of the baby’s weight as I could. He sought her breast and, when she found the strength to raise a hand and guide a nipple into his mouth, he sucked mightily. It hurt her, but her face spoke of ecstasy as well as pain. “Mama loves the baby,” her lips said silently.

She died as the doctor was still stitching her. He left the wound and tried to revive her, shoving the baby and me out of the way and pumping at her heart. Later, after the autopsy, he told me that her heart had been used up like all her other muscles. The child had ruled the mother, had demanded her life from her, and she had given it.

My Hilde. Till death parted us.

There was some debate on whether to feed the child, and then on whether to baptize it. In both cases, mercy and hope triumphed over fear and loathing. I wanted to oppose them, but Hilde had tried to feed the baby, and even after she was dead I did not wish to contradict her. They made me choose a name. I gave it my father’s name because I could not bear to give it mine. Arkadiusz. Arek.

He weighed nearly ten kilograms at birth.

At two months he walked.

At five months his babbling noises became speech. They taught him to call me papa. And I came to him because he was, after all, my own.

Hilde’s parents were gone by then. They blamed me—my bad seed—for their daughter’s death. In vain did the doctor tell them that what the plague had done to me it no doubt also did to her; they knew, in their hearts, that Hilde was normal, and I was the one with the seed of monstrosity. They could not bear to look at me or at Arek, either, the killers of their last child, their beautiful little girl.

Arek walked early because his wideset legs gave him such a sturdy platform, while crawling was near impossible for him. His massive neck was strong enough to hold his wide-faced, deep-skulled head. His hands were clever, his arms long and probing. He was a font of questions. He made me teach him how to read when he was not yet two.

The two strange apertures in his head, behind the eyes, before the ears, seeped with fluid now and then. He stank sometimes, and the stench came from there. At the time we did not know what to call these things, or what they meant, for the elephants had not yet come. The whole community liked Arek, as they must always like children; they played with him, answered his questions, watched over him. But beneath the love there was a constant gnawing pain. He was our hope, but he was no hope at all. Whatever his strange condition was, it might have made him quicker than a normal child, but we knew that it could not be healthy, that like most strange children he would no doubt die before his time. And definitely, mutant that he was, he must surely be as sterile as a mule.

And then the elephants came, great shadowy shapes out in the distant fields. We marveled. We wondered. They came nearer, day by day. And Arek became quite agitated. “I hear them,” he said.

Hear what? We heard nothing. They were too far off for us to hear.

“I hear them,” he said again. He touched his forehead. “I hear them here.” He touched his chest. “And here.”

The flow from the apertures in his head increased.

He took to wandering off. We had to watch him closely. In the middle of a reading lesson, he would stand up and face the distant elephants—or face the empty horizon where they might be—and listen, rapt. “I think I understand them,” Arek said. “Here’s a place with good water.”

All of Poland has good water now, I pointed out.

“No,” he said impatiently. “It’s what they said. And now they talk of one who died. They have the scent of him. The one who died.” He listened more; I still heard nothing. “And me,” he said. “They have the scent of me.”

Elephants care nothing for you, I said.

He turned to me, his eyes awash with tears. “Take that back,” he said.

Sit and do your lessons, Arek.

“What do I care what dead people say? I have no need of what they said!”

You’re five years old, Arek. I know better than you what you need to know.

“Your father had to know all this,” he said. “But what is it to me? What good has reading done for you?”

I tried to hold him, but at five years old he was too strong. He ran from the room. He ran out into the field. He ran toward the elephants.

I followed him as best I could. Others joined me, calling out Arek’s name. He was not swift, and we could have caught him if we were willing to tackle him like rugby players. But our goal was only to keep him safe, and so we jogged alongside him, his short and heavy legs lumbering forward, ever closer to the elephants. A matriarch and her clan, with several babies of varying sizes. We tried to stop him then, to hold him back, but by then the matriarch had noticed us, and as she approached, Arek screamed and tried more violently to get away, to run to her. She trumpeted at us, and finally, tentatively, in fear of her we set him down.

She let him embrace her trunk; he clambered upward, over her great impassive brow, and sprawled his body across the top of her head. Her trunk reached up to him; I feared that she would sweep him from her head like lint. Instead she touched the leaking aperture on his right cheek, then brought the tip of her trunk down to her mouth. To smell and taste it.

That was when I realized: The matriarch, too, had an aperture between eye and ear, a leaking stinkhole. When I did my reading, I learned that it was the temporal gland. The elephants had it, and so did my son.

Neither Hilde nor I was elephantine. Nor was there any logical way, given the little science that I knew, for me to explain how a gland that only elephants had should suddenly show up on a human child. It wasn’t just the temporal glands, either. As he sat perched atop the matriarch, I could see how closely his brow resembled hers. No great flapping ears, no abnormality of nose, and his eyes were still binocular, not side-aimed like the elephant’s. Yet there was no mistaking how his forehead was a smaller echo of her own.

He has been waiting for them, I murmured.

And then I thought, but did not say: They came in search of him.

He would not go home with me. One by one the others drifted back to our village, some returning to bring me food and offer food to Arek. But he was busy riding on the matriarch, and playing with the babies, always under the watchful gaze of the mothers, so that no harm would come to him. He made a game of running up the trunks and turning somersaults onto an elephant’s back. He swung on tusks. He rode them like horses, he climbed them like trees, and he listened to them like gods.

After two days they moved on. I tried to follow. The matriarch picked me up and put me back. Three times she did it before I finally acquiesced. Arek was their child now. They had adopted him, he had adopted them. Whatever music they were making, he heard it and loved it. The pied piper had come to lead away our only son, our strange inhuman child, the only hope we had.

From that day I did not see him, until the twelfth bull elephant arrived with Arek astride his neck.

Full-grown Arek—just a little taller, I estimated, than his father, but built like a tractor, with massive legs and arms, and a neck that made his enormous head look almost natural. “Father!” he cried. “Father!” He had not seen me at the window. I wanted to hide from him. He must be fifteen now. The age I was when I met Hilde. I had put him from my mind and heart, as I had already done with my parents, my baby sister, whom I had left behind unburied when I was too hungry to wait any longer for them to wake again, for God to raise them up from their sickbeds. Of all those I had lost, why was he the one that could return? For a moment I hated him, though I knew that it was not his fault.

He was their child anyway, not mine. I could see that now. Anyone could see it. His skin was even filthy grey like theirs.

He didn’t see me. He slid down the brow and trunk of the bull he was riding and watched as his steed—his companion? His master?—took its place in the circle that pushed against the walls of the ugly building. He walked around them, a wide circle, looking up at the windows on the opposite side of the square. But it was not by sight that he found me. It was when he was directly under my window, looking the other way, that he stopped, and turned, and looked up at me, and smiled. “Father,” he said. “I have seen the world!”

I did not want him to call me father. Those were his fathers, those bull elephants. Not me. I was the bearer of the seed, its depositor, but the seed itself had been planted in both Hilde and me by the plague. Born in Africa and carried to the world on airplanes, virulent and devastating, the plague was no accident of nature. Paranoid as it sounded even to myself, I had the evidence of Arek’s elephantinism to bolster what I knew but could not prove. Somehow in the kettle of the temporal gland, the elephants created this new version of man, and sent the seed out into the world, carried by a virus. They had judged us, these beasts, and found us wanting. Perhaps the decision was born as grieving elephants gathered around the corpses of their kinfolk, slain and shorn of their tusks. Perhaps the decision came from the shrinking land and the drying earth. Perhaps it was their plan all along, from the time they made us until they finally were done with us.

For in the darkness of the library, as I moved along the table, keeping my yellowing books always in the slant of light from the window, I had conjured up a picture of the world. The elephants, the true gods of antiquity. They had reached the limit of what they could do with their prehensile noses. What was needed now was hands, so virus by virus, seed by seed, they swept away one species and replaced it with another, building and improving and correcting their mistakes. There was plenty of the primate left in us, the baboon, the chimpanzee. But more and more of the elephant as well, the kindness, the utter lack of warfare, the benevolent society of women, the lonely wandering harmless helpful men, and the absolute sanctity of the children of the tribe. Primate and elephant, always at war within us. We could see the kinship between us and the apes, but failed to see how the high-breasted elephant could possibly also be our kind.

Only now, with Arek, could the convergence at last be seen. They had made at last an elephant with hands, a clever toolmaker who could hear the voices of the gods.

I thought of the bulldancers of Crete, and then of Arek running up the trunks of elephants and somersaulting on their heads. The mastodons and mammoths were all gone, and the elephants were south of the Mediterranean; but they were not forgotten. In human memory, we were supposed to dance with joy upon the horns and head of a great loving beast, our father, our maker. Our prophets were the ones who heard the voice of God, not in the tempest, but in the silent thrumming, the still small voice of infrasound, carried through stone and earth as easily as through the air. On the mountain they heard the voice of God, teaching us how to subdue the primate and become the sons of God, the giants in the earth. For the sons of God did marry the daughters of men. We remembered that God was above us, but thought that meant he was above the sky. And so my speculation and imagining led me to this mad twisting of the scripture of my childhood—and no less of the science and history in the library. What were the neanderthals? Why did they disappear? Was there a plague one day, carried wherever the new-made Cro-Magnon wandered? And did the Neanderthals understand what their woolly mammoth deities had done to them? Here was their ironic vengeance: It was the new, godmade men, the chosen people, who hunted the mammoths and the mastodons to extinction, who bowed the elephants of India to slavery and turned the elephants of Africa into a vast wandering ivory orchard. We men of Cro-magnon descent, we thought we were the pinnacle. But when God told us to be perfect, as he was perfect, we failed him, and he had to try again. This time it was no flood that swept our souls away. And any rainbow we might see would be a lie.

I spoke of this to no one—I needed human company too much to give them reason to think me mad. Elephants as gods? As God himself? Sacrilege. Heresy. Madness. Evil. Nor was I sure of it myself; indeed, most days, most hours of the day, I mocked my own ideas. But I write them here, because they might be true, and if someday these words are read, and I was right, then you’ll hear my warning: You who read this, you are not the last and best, any more than we were. There is always another step higher up the ladder, and a helpful trunk to lift you upward on your way, or dash you to the ground if you should fail.

Arek called me father, and I was not his father. But he came from Hilde’s body; she gave her life to give him breath, and loved him, ugly and misshapen as he was, as she held him to her empty breasts while her heart pushed the last few liters of blood through her worn-out body. Not a drop of pap came from her into his mouth. He had already sucked her dry. But for that moment she loved him. And for her sake—and for his, at first, I will be honest here—I tried to treat him well, to teach him and provide for him and protect him as best I could. But at five years of age they took him and he was raised by elephants. In what sense now was he my son?

“Father,” he said to me again. “Don’t be afraid. It’s only me, your boy Arek.”

I’m not afraid, I almost said.

But he would know it was a lie. He could smell a lie on me. Silence was my refuge.

I left my room and went down the stairs to the level of the street. I came blinking into the sunlight. He held out a hand to me. His legs were even stockier now; whenever he stood still, he looked as planted as a pair of old trees. He was taller than I am, and I am tall. “Father,” he said. “I want them to meet you. I told them all the things you taught me.”

They already know me, I wanted to say. They’ve been following me for years. They know when and where I eat and sleep and pee. They know all they want to know of me, and I want nothing at all from them, so . . .

So I followed him anyway, feeling my hand in his, the firm kind grasp, the springy rolling rhythm of his walk. I knew that he could keep walking forever on those legs. He led me to the new elephant, the one he had arrived with. He bade me stand there as the trunk took samples of my scent for tasting, as one great eye looked down on me, the all-seeing eye. Not a word did I say. Not a question did I ask.

Until I felt the thrumming, strong now, so powerful that it took my breath away, it shook my chest so strongly.

“Did you hear him, Father?” asked my son.

I nodded.

“But did you understand?”

I shook my head.

“He says you understand,” said Arek, puzzled. “But you say that you don’t.”

At last I spoke: I understand nothing.

The elephant thrummed out again.

“You understand but do not know you understand,” said Arek. “You’re not a prophet.”

The elephant had made me tremble, but it was Arek’s word that made me stumble. Not a prophet. And you are, my son?

“I am,” said Arek, “because I hear what he says and can turn it into language for the rest of you. I thought you could understand him, too, because he said you could.”

The elephant was right. I did understand. My mad guesses were right, or somewhat right, or at least not utterly wrong. But I said nothing of this to Arek.

“But now I see you do understand,” said Arek, nodding, content.

His temporal glands were dripping, the fluid falling onto his naked chest. He wore trousers, though. Old polyester ones, the kind that cannot rot or fade, the kind that will outlast the end of the universe. He saw me looking, and again supposed that I had understood something.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ve had it before. Only lightly, though. And it did me no good.” He smiled ruefully. “I’ve seen the world, but none like me.”

Had what before?

“The dripping time. The madness.”

Musth, I said.

“Yes,” he answered. He touched the stream of fluid on his cheek, then streaked it on my cheek. “It takes a special woman to bear my child.”

What if there isn’t one?

“There is,” he said. “That’s why I came here.”

There’s no one here like you.

“Not yet,” he said. “And besides, I had this gift to give you.”

What gift?

He gestured, as if I should have understood all along. The building that the elephants were pushing at. “You always told me how much you hated this building. How ugly it was. I wanted to give you something when I came again, but I couldn’t think of anything I could do for you. Except for this.”

At his words, the elephants grunted and bellowed, and now it was clear that all their pushing before had been preliminary to this, as they braced themselves and rammed, all at once, again and again. Now the building shuddered. Now the façade cracked. Now the walls buckled.

Quickly Arek drew me back, out of danger. The elephants, too, retreated, as the walls caved in, the roof collapsed. Dust blew out of the place like smoke, blinding me for a moment, till tears could clear my vision.

No silence now, no infrasound. The bulls gave voice, a great triumphant fanfare.

And now the families came: the matriarch, the other females, their babies, their children. Into the square, now unobstructed except for the rubble pile, they came by the dozens. There must be three clans here, I thought. Four. Five. Trumpeting. Triumphant.

All this, because they knocked down a building?

No. The fall of the building was the gift to the father. It was the signal for the real festivities to begin.

“I made them bring her here,” said Arek. “You’re my family, and these are my friends.” He indicated the people leaning out of the windows over the square. “Isn’t that what weddings are for?”

The elephants made way for one last arrival. An Indian elephant lumbered into the square, trunk upraised, trumpeting. It progressed in stately fashion to the place where Arek and I were standing. On its back sat Arek’s bride-to-be. At first glance she was human, boldly and charmingly nude. But under the shock of thick, straight hair her head was, if anything, larger than Arek’s, and her legs were set so wide that she seemed to straddle the elephant’s neck the way a woman of my species might bestride a horse. Down the forehead and the trunk of the beast she slid, pausing only to stand playfully upon the tusks, then jump lightly to the ground. Those legs, those hips—she clearly had the strength to carry a baby as large as Arek had been for the entire year. But wide as her body was, could such a head pass through the birth canal?

Because she was naked, the answer was before my eyes. The entrance to her birth canal was not between her thighs, but in a pouch of skin that drooped from the base of her abdomen; the opening was in front of the pubis. No longer would the pelvic circle limit the size of a baby’s head. She would not have to be cut open to give birth.

Arek held out his hand. She smiled at him. And in that smile, she became almost human to me. It was the shy smile of the bride, the smile that Hilde had given me when she was pregnant, before we knew it was no human child she carried.

“She’s in heat,” said Arek. “And I’m . . . in musth. You have no idea how crazy it makes me.”

He didn’t sound crazy, or act it, either. Instead he had the poise of a king, the easy confidence of an elephant. At the touch of her hand, his temporal glands gave forth such a flow that I could hear the fluid dripping onto the stones of the plaza. But otherwise he betrayed no eagerness.

“I don’t know how it’s done,” said Arek. “Marriage, I mean. They said I should marry as humans do. With words.”

I remembered the words that had been said for me and Hilde. As best I could, I said them now. The girl did not understand. Her eyes, I saw now, had the epicanthic fold—how far had they brought her? Was she the only one? Were there only these two in all the world? Is that how close they came to the edge of killing us all, of ending the whole experiment?

I said the words, and she shaped the answers. But I could tell that it didn’t matter to her, or to him either, that she understood not a bit of the Polish words she had to say. Below the level of audible speech, they had another kind of language. For I could see how her forehead thrummed with a tone too low for my ears to hear. But he could hear. Not words, I assumed. But communication nonetheless. The thing with speech, they’d work that out. It would still be useful to them, when communication needed to be precise. But for matters of the heart, they had the language of the elephants. The language of the gods. The adamic tongue. The idiom God had used one time to say, Multiply and replenish the earth, and subdue it. We did the first; we did the last. Now, perhaps, this new couple in their new garden, would learn the replenishing part as well. Only a few of us lingering beasts, of us the dust of the earth, would remain, and not for long. Then the whole world would be their garden.

Today they’re gone. Out of Poznan, the elephants and their new creatures, the son and daughter of the gods. My Arek and his wife, whose name he never spoke aloud to us. No doubt he has some deep and rumbling name for her that I could never hear. They will have many children. They must watch them carefully. Or perhaps this time it will be different. No stone crashed against a brother’s head this time. No murder in the world. Only the peace of the elephants.

They’re gone, and the rejoicing is over—for we did rejoice, because even though we know, we all know, that Arek and his bride are not of our kind, they still carry the only portion of our seed that will remain alive in the earth; better to live on in them than to die utterly, without casting seed at all.

They’re gone, and now each day I go out into the square and work amid the wreckage of the building. Propping up the old façade, leaning it against a makeshift wall. Before I die, I’ll have it standing again, or at least enough of it so that the square looks right. Already I have much of one wall restored, and sometimes the others come and help me, when they see I’m struggling with a section of wall too heavy or awkward for a man to raise alone.

It may have been an ugly thing, that Communist monstrosity, but it was built by humans, in a human place, and they had no right to knock it down.