Above the nighttime thunderstorm, the stars twinkled, a lifetime too far away. The two at the bar had long ago stopped looking at them, waiting for their call to come in.
The bartender hoisted out the bourbon bottle, sploshed some into a couple of glasses, then sprinkled a generous dose of cilantro into the glass. If that's what they wanted, he figured, that's what they get. Business was slow at this time of the year, especially in cool weather. To a bartender there was no such thing as absurd, although these two nose-lickers were pushing the limit. But he knew they'd be gone in a couple of hours, as usual.
There was a moment's silence, as the two slurped their drinks. "He never puts the damn cilantro into the glass first," Jack hiccupped. "He'll be first to the slaughter!"
"Kind of pointless, turning this damn planet into a ring of pebbles," Jim pointed out, "when we're stuck here." He fondled an egg-sized object that looked like a beach stone. It was a command unit, but it reminded him of a childhood toy he’d had on the volcano-ridden home world of the hgkpphtitrw, and he began to cry. He was sure he'd never hear the wind in the craters again.
"For crissakes," Jack licked at the cilantro and bourbon, closest thing Earth had to the sacred food of his people. "Stop crying. If you want, we'll open that bar on the beach, like you wanted." Above him, a slow fan moved damp air. A wet drunk stumbled in, fell over a chair, and was quickly escorted back into the rain.
Personally, Jack thought it was a stupid idea. Not, maybe, as stupid as Jim's attempt to revive and market the strigil. The Roman bath tool had reminded the alien of hgkpphtitrw bathing rites, and he'd assumed earth people would welcome the scraping of water off their ugly skins. Wrong. Wrong to the tune of much of what money they'd had at the time, before they sold another lot of their diamonds.
Eventually, he had realized Jim hadn't his horsepower in the cranial area, so he was inclined to humor his friend/niece/grandfather, if only for kinship's sake. He tried to thpddf at the thought, but the human form wasn't equipped for it.
Jim raised his teary eyes from the drink, wishing he could uswaqjI, but the frail and absurd human body was a couple of penises and a heel-horn short of being able to do that. He fanned an ear instead.
"Thanks, Mr. Daniels," he whispered. "I'd like that." He raised his glass in shaky hands. "To our own little exclave of hgkpphtitrw." He farted happily (the hgkpphtitrw talk through their anuses).
"Give me the rock," Jack whispered. or tried to; he was quite drunk by now."
"You don't trust me? I'm not the one ready to blow up Earth."
"Not with sixteen drinks and a planet-wrecker. Bad combo."
"You're just as drunk!"
"You promised I could open a bar on the beach east of Panama City." A hiccup.
Jim looked at the smooth bit of stone. "I've never opened it."
"That's why we and billions of humans are still inhabiting this swamp. The rock." But Jim stubbornly put it into his pocket. "Maybe this year we'll be called back home," he said.
Jack ignored him. So many years had gone by, and every year there seemed less hope that politics in the empire would end their exile. At least their spaceship was still safely in the waters of Lake Ontario. The newer versions of side-scanning sonar were finding old shipwrecks, but the Professor Nothing (the closest translation into human terms) was hidden under the mud. It was also invisible to magnetic detection.
At least, Jack thought, there wasn’t a sign of the humans who called themselves “alien hunters." That group of nutbars had actually discovered a bit of the truth, and were going around trying to locate humans who were controlled by aliens. So far as Jack knew, only one had been found, but he also knew that not all the other nine aliens were in communication with the rest. Some were just too cautious.
The rain picked up outside, tap-dancing on the roof of a white Buick, illegally idling for a moment on the street.
Jim looked at the bartender. "Another of the same. Cilantro first, okay?"
The bartender nodded. Outside, in the dark, the eastern sky was starting to lighten a bit as the clouds blew out over Lake Ontario. The two looked at their drinks, sighed, and tried to keep their minds on opening a little bar where strange hairless apes learned to love a new drink made of Wild Turkey and cilantro and you could watch pelicans riding the sea winds.
****
Toronto
The home of a member of The Philip Group
Four Days before Button Day
Not quite fifty years ago a bunch of ghost-happy Torontonians decided to call up a ghost called Philip.
It was a lark. Nobody knew any dead guy named Philip. They just made up a name and asked him to communicate with them by rapping on the table. Well, to their astonishment, he did: they’d not found a ghost but created one. This posed, of course, some interesting questions, not a few of which were theological, but it provided a good time for all the humans, and perhaps even for Philip-the-ghost, who may or may not have existed even when he existed, if you follow.
Jump forward a long time. To yet another group of people who have more time on their hands than is good for them. A heady mix of eight men and women who would have been better off in a bridge club, were it not that too many of them had a tendency to cheat, sometimes at bridge, too.
Oh, they’d read the book, Conjuring Philip, and passed it among themselves. There didn’t, they figured, seem to be any problems, other than the general spookiness of the concept. Other than rapping on the table, Philip had behaved like a gentleman. No poltergeistish chucking around of the crockery nor any attempts to purchase a soul (assuming a Toronto soul had much net worth these days.)
For a couple of years they'd had a good, if inconclusive time with Ouija boards, without once getting anything rapping except Karn, cracking his toe bones.
It was Pag who brought up the subject of calling up the spirit of someone who’d been a real person, once upon a time. "After all," she explained to the others, "a real ghost will be able to provide details of some historical event, and we could check it out in some book."
Kyle was opposed. "Look. There are no ghosts, so we're going to get a fake ghost anyway, and I really don't want to be disappointed again by some rapping Cleopatra bragging about her marriage to Napoleon." He was sure that the source of rapping communication was in the people around the table, and if this whole project went on a few months or more, he’d be happy and might even figure out a way to get Janet into his bed. That wasn’t as long a shot as he figured, what with Janet being less than satisfied with the guy she was currently married to, but Kyle didn’t know that at the time.
But Kyle lost that argument anyway. Karn figured out with a little cross-examination that none of the group knew ratshit about Canadian history, and suggested they just pick “an important Canadian historical person.”
"Too bad Tom's not here with us," Janet laughed. "He could talk to the ghost of anybody if we let him." Tom Barrents had been one of their earliest members, a professor at the university who'd helped set up the "rules" of their little society. A couple of months later he was talking to dead people and telling the rest that there was a conspiracy to cover up the truth. A brain scan had shown nothing wrong, so the doctors put it down as another mystery of the mind, and put him on some medication that made him mumble and smile a lot. He'd eventually ditched the meds, accused them all of being creatures from another planet and gone off to hide in the woods. A couple of years later, he was back, a lot thinner, and taking his meds like a good boy, but now he had a hard time with any sentence that had a subordinate clause in it, so he wasn’t nearly as interesting being stupid as he was when he was crazy.
"Or Darkh," Karn noted. "Just in case we actually call up a ghost." There was general laughter. The guy from Kitchener was a big ghost hunter and friend of Janet’s, but there was something about him that didn’t work in groups. Somehow he made any group he was in a bit dysfunctional, although no one could say why. Janet did make a mental note to tell Darkh about their experimen
t when she met him again.
Pag suggested contacting Pierre Trudeau, but Hap said that one of them might have absorbed some information from a parent, so they’d be better off looking up someone none of them knew much about, but someone they could check on. After a bit of discussion and a lot of booze, they settled on Louis Riel.
“Who?” asked Pag, after she’d agreed.
“Out west, somewhere,” Kyle said. “Métis guy. Led a rebellion with Gabriel Dumont against the government of Canada and what's-his-face, John A. MacDonald.”
“MacDonald?” asked Pag, to show she wasn’t completely lost in Canadian History. “Is he the guy that built the railway?”
“That’s the one. They even named the MacDonald-Cartier freeway – the 401 – after him, or at least one half of it.”
“Which half?” asked Karn, smiling.
“Whatever half’s closest to Scotland, I expect,” Janet said. “He was always a good Scot before anything else.”
"And Louis Riel?” asked Pag. “What happened to him?”
“Hung,” said Janet.
“Hanged, too,” added Karn.
"Sure. We could do Louis Riel," Janet agreed.
"Nah," Kyle said, changing his mind. "There's too much of him in the books. Too easy to get it out of someone's subconscious."
“Then what about that Dumont guy, Riel’s friend?" Pag asked.
"Died of old age."
“Let's do Dumont, then," Karn said.
There was a long silence, then Pag suggested, “Sounds good. Let’s get at it.”
“Next meeting,” Kyle said. “We can devote the whole meeting to it. Just nobody look up any information on this guy so we can’t influence the ghost.” There was general agreement.
“We’re not ready to go yet, are we?” Pag was facing a lonesome home and a sick cat.
“Not yet.” Karn got up. “I’ll mix us some more drinks, unless anyone objects.”
No one objected. They talked movies for an hour.
****
Waterloo, Ontario
Downtown
Four Days before Button Day
The rain bounced off the concrete sidewalk outside the Starbucks in downtown Waterloo. A couple of kids riding bikes dodged an old guy pushing a rollator, one of those walkers on wheels that decrepit people use to find their way to the grave, given enough time. One kid, a male of about ten, dropped a McDonalds cup, probably accidentally, beside the old guy. The old fart nudged the kid’s bike just a bit sideways, where it nicked a bit of paint off a parked Aston-Martin before the kid regained control. “Fuck you, you fucking old bastard!” the kid yelled, but the old guy ambled on. Darkh Blood, sitting at a table in the Great Coffee Snobbitorium, watched without comment. That was the state of life today, he thought. The place was almost empty, and the afternoon was growing late. The scene ended, and the actors wandered off his stage.
When people asked, he informed them that his last name, “Blood," was properly pronounced to rhyme with “rude," that it was Estonian and meant kindling wood. This was not correct; the name was in fact pronounced to rhyme with “hood” or “good," and was from a Romanian dialect that meant “serious." But who cared.
Across the street, a bible book and gift shop looked like it was awaiting the second coming. A clerk, the only person inside, was reading something or other. It had better be the bible, Darkh thought, considering the security camera, one of several the store had to prevent rampant theft, that was pointing in her general direction.
The upper floors of the building the bible store was in were old yellow brick, with the architecture that in 1900 had made the building and street indistinguishable from that in dozens of other Ontario towns. The street-level façade had been renovated at some time to host large glass windows in aluminum frames, a change which currently made the store architecturally indistinguishable from its neighbours and from stores in dozens of other Ontario towns. A paucity of imagination or bravery that came packaged with the province’s merchants had been successfully carried on for generations in Waterloo. The Starbucks was, however, an architectural contrast, having been built to match a few thousand similar Starbucks spread across North America like hogweed.
Outside, the rain fell, as if God wanted to wash away the mediocrity and desolation of the lives of the people of Waterloo, a city whose government was meeting to propose a rather expensive renovation of the downtown, most of which would involve tearing up the asphalt street and paving it with a ghastly yellow brick. The brick would reflect badly in the blank glass walls of the insurance building that took up most of the streetscape on the west side. A few years before there had been a row of stores that didn’t attract enough attention, so they had been replaced by a seven-storey office complex. The complex paid a lot more taxes, but at street level, except for the Starbucks, all a person could see would be his own reflection in the featureless glass, and that of the bible store across the street. It made one wonder if he should dash across and buy a bible, in a desperate attempt to find meaning in it all.
The guy that founded Starbucks as a plague had come back from Europe with the notion that people needed a “third place.” A place that wasn’t the workplace nor home, but a neutral area where a fellow could meet with friends and talk a while over a cup of coffee priced so high that it must taste just great, and talk about life, politics, the universe, and their increasingly insignificant others.
There were eight people in the Starbucks and none of them were talking to each other. One was reading a book, four were poking away at laptops, and the others either had donated their brains to science, were contemplating string theory, or had escaped to Mars and were ambling down Desolation Road.
None, thank God, were paying any attention to Darkh Blood, who was worrying a now-lukewarm Coffee Magnifico and trying to find something new in the daily news. A trembling feeling in his left testicle told him it was listening time. Why he should be a Listener was something he’d never found out, but thirty years of experience had shown him that nothing he could do would change it, or help him escape it. The guy with the book came over and sat down across the table, setting a mug of tea onto Darkh’s paper, covering a story about an oil spill in Toronto harbour.
“My daughter-in-law isn’t speaking to me,” the man started. “I must have said something that I don’t remember saying. Maybe she imagined it when she was drunk – she gets drunk whenever she visits us. Then she wants to talk about my son, who’s still trying to find another job. He’s a good kid, well, maybe not a kid any more, but the places he finds to work at don’t appreciate him, I guess. So she works at the hospital, because they need the money for the one granddaughter, who’s autistic and has a skin condition that none of the doctors….”
Darkh nodded, his large, sad, brown eyes focused on the stranger. This was a regular occurrence – maybe twice a week – for Darkh, and he’d learned a decade or two before that anything he did would just prolong the situation. If he slipped away with an excuse, he’d find two of the whining leeches after him in an hour. So he pretended to sip on his cold coffee and pretended to listen to the familiar litany of mental and physical complains.
The guy started talking about his sister, the mayor, and for a moment Darkh listened. His mind had just wandered onto an erotic fantasy about the girl behind the counter when he caught the word, “Soviet." His focus returned instantly. He’d learned that asking questions was a bad move, so he tried to piece together what the stupid ass across the table had been saying.
“I mean,” the guy whined, “she still gets fifty bucks a month from somewhere in Russia and there’s nothing she can do for them now. The Soviet Union’s been gone for over twenty years. But does she send it back or buy us a lunch sometime with the money? Not on your life.”
Abruptly, as they all did, he stopped, realizing he’d been telling things to a complete stranger, apologized, and was about to get up in confusion. "Ghosts," Darkh said to him. "Vampires, aliens, poltergeists. Zombies.
Any of those?"
The man hesitated. "I think two of my wife's uncles are under the control of alien beings," he offered, looking at the floor.
"What makes you think so?" Darkh's gaze was steady.
"We visited them. They used to be great people. Now they keep asking questions they should know the answer to, and they really don't want to see us." the man whispered. "My wife's still upset, and it's been a long time."
"Give me their names," Darkh said. "I'll pass them on to someone who knows what to do." Darkh turned back to his newspaper. The guy wrote onto a napkin, then left the restaurant as quickly as he could, still confused.
For the last year Darkh been using his early retirement to look for evidence of the supernatural, and that included asking the talkers he was forced to endure about such things. Several times there'd been a lead for ghosts, but the ghosts must have been on vacation when Darkh showed up. His girlfriend had told him to keep busy to keep sane in retirement, especially at 43, so that's what he was trying to do.
There was, Darkh knew, very little likelihood that anything could come of the alien lead; but he wanted something to pass on to Clyde Books. Clyde hunted aliens like Darkh hunted ghosts and had passed on a couple of tips that had sounded good at the time, anyway. This time he could return the favor.
****
Chapter 2: September 14
This day is sunny, and warmer than the previous day. A few of the leaves on the aspens are beginning to get their autumn colors – at least on this part of planet Earth.
Three Days before Button Day
Further In Along the Galactic Arm
The palace and the plaza in front of it.
"Damn!" thought the King of the Galactic Empire (or at least one corner of it). "This just isn't going to work." He reached under his royal robe, unscrewed his penis, and set it into the glass of stale soup beside his throne. The glass now held the penis, a set of fangs, and one royal ear. The King of the Galactic Empire contemplated his toes; he didn't like them, either.