Simon was the first to get out of the water. He stood naked on the bank, letting the air dry him, and watched as Catareen and the boy emerged. Catareen naked was all sinew, with thin, strong arms and legs, tiny breast-buds, and a small, compact rise of bony, squarish pelvis. Who was the sculptor? Giacometti. She looked like a sculpture by Giacometti.
She stood a moment in the shallows as the boy scrambled up the bank and got back into his robe. She turned and looked out at the water. Simon understood that she took intense pleasure in this: the water and the darkening land. He knew she was reluctant to leave it. He watched her. She was a thin black shape against the pond and the sky. She was, he thought, happy. She was suddenly and unexpectedly happy, or whatever she would call it if Nadians had a term for happiness.
“Beautiful,” he said. He was not entirely sure what he meant by the word at that particular moment. It seemed almost like a new greeting he and Catareen had agreed to exchange—a variation of common language, newly encoded.
She turned back at the sound of his voice. She was startled and shy. There was something about her at that moment. He could not describe it. There was perhaps no term for it in human language. He could not give it a name.
He said instead, “How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!”
Catareen looked at him. A silence passed.
Luke said to Simon, “You smell slightly better now.”
“Thanks,” Simon said. He started getting dressed again.
Presently Catareen got out of the water, got dressed, and slipped away to hunt. She returned soon after with a pair of small, leggy creatures none of them could identify. Simon cooked them.
“I think we must be in western Kansas by now,” Luke said as Simon poked the skinned haunches on the Winnebago’s radiation pack. “We could reach Denver by late tomorrow.”
“By midafternoon, I’d say,” Simon answered.
What he thought but did not say: he wouldn’t have minded driving on and on. There was something hypnotic about it, something deeply agreeable. Just driving.
Luke said, “Denver has gotten to be a sort of giant shantytown. It’s probably a little like it was almost three hundred years ago. Except the people three hundred years ago didn’t live in abandoned malls and franchise joints.”
“The Christians don’t run Denver, as far as I’ve heard.”
“No, Denver’s basically secular. Some goddess cults, and a big Buddha town on the east side. Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, is small potatoes there.”
“Did you say you believe in all that?”
“Yep.”
“As part of the con.”
“Started out that way. I went along with it so they’d keep feeding me. I said the prayers, I did the daily devotions. I meditated in the pathetic little shrine they’d built in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Just scamming. Then I understood that it’s true.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m totally serious. Something happened one day. I don’t know how to describe it. Something arrived. It’s like, okay, say you walked out of your house every day and shouted, ‘Oh, come to me, Great Heffalump,’ just to please somebody, just because it’s the local custom, because your crazy old aunt won’t take her medicine unless you call for the Heffalump every morning, and then one day this big hairy thing with a trunk and antlers comes lumbering up and says, ‘I’m the Great Heffalump, what do you want?’ What’re you going to do? You don’t believe in him, you don’t like him, you don’t want him, but there he is.”
“I’m not sure if I believe you.”
“I don’t need you to believe me. Hey, are those groundhogs just about done?”
“I don’t think they’re groundhogs.”
“Whatever they are. I’m starving, I don’t mind if they’re on the rare side.”
Simon served the irradiated creatures. Catareen sat between him and the boy, quietly consuming her share of the hunt. After they’d eaten, she buried the remains, and the boy went to bed in the back of the Winnebago. Simon stayed outside a while with Catareen. They sat together on the grassy rise. The wind made a low rustling sound, and the stars shone hard in the deep black sky. The pond put out minute ghostly sparks that could have been reflections of the stars.
Simon said, “Do you miss Nadia?”
“No.”
“It’s your home. It’s where you come from.”
“Nothing there.”
He hesitated over how to respond. There was something there. There was something everywhere. True, the people of Earth had hoped for more from their first (and possibly only) contact with an inhabited planet. All those zillions spent getting there, the decades of effort, and what do they find? A people who in ten thousand years had failed to come up with a written language. Who lived in huts made of dried mud and pulled one another around in wooden carts. Where were the golden cities, the shamans and scientists? Where were the great discoveries, the cures, the art?
He said, “It’s a rough place, I hear.”
“Nothing for me.”
“You know,” he said, “maybe there’s no real point in you being so mysterious about your past. Doesn’t it seem just the tiniest bit unnecessary?”
She sat beside him in the dark. She exhaled the little song.
After an interval, he said, “So. Do you have any questions about me?”
“No.”
“Are all Nadians like this?”
“Like how?”
The wind blew across his face. It had a dry green smell.
He said, “Do you mind listening to me? Do I bore you when I talk?”
“No. I like.”
“Nice of you to say so.”
Silence, and the breath song.
He said, “It’s just that I seem to have a few questions. For a biological.”
“Ask.”
“I know a lot of it may not apply. The whole human-versus-Nadian question, I mean.”
“Ask.”
“Okay. Dreams. Can I ask you something about dreams?”
“Yes.”
“I have these little flickers when I sleep. There are sounds and images. They don’t seem exactly random, but they don’t hold together, either. I can’t really tell if they’re dreams at all or just my circuits discharging. As I understand it, biologicals have dreams that involve whole stories. Mysterious stories, often oblique, but coherent and full of meaning. True?”
“No,” she said.
“Would it be painful for you to give me a little more detail?”
“Not whole stories. Change.”
“You mean, as you’re dreaming? The stories change as they progress?”
“Yes.”
“But don’t you wake up feeling like you’ve seen something important? Even if its meaning isn’t clear. Don’t you feel in the morning like something has been explained to you as you slept?”
“No.”
“Well. Okay. Let’s try another subject. The voice I’m speaking in right now, what you know as my voice, and by extension my, shall we say, personality, is programmed. Cadences, vocabulary, modulation, slang, all of it designed by Emory Lowell to make me seem more human. Plus, of course, these involuntary fits of poetry. What’s in my brain is different. I listen to myself speak—I’m listening to myself right now—and it’s strange to me. It doesn’t match what I hear inside my head. The impulses are my own, I make a decision to say this or say that, but the expression is beyond my control. I suspect that if you could somehow see inside my head, if you could see the circuitry going through the motions, you’d recoil. You’d understand that I’m mechanical. And heartless.”
“I am same,” she said.
“What you say doesn’t match what’s in your head?”
“Yes.”
“Of course it doesn’t. You’re speaking a foreign language.”
“In my language.”
“You mean, back on Nadia, you felt this di
vide between who you appeared to be and who you knew yourself to be?”
“Yes.”
“Sweet of you to say so.”
“True.”
They sat for a while in silence. Simon felt the withdrawal of her, which had become familiar, though this time it seemed deeper, as if she had removed her attention more thoroughly than ever before. He thought for a moment that she had actually gone away, but he looked over and saw her there, unaltered.
He wanted her to be again as she’d been in the pond. He wanted her to be a dark shape cut out of the darkening sky, turning shyly to face him when he said the word “beautiful.” But that moment had passed, and she was this again, stolid as an abandoned suitcase.
He said, “Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems.”
“I sleep now.”
“I’m going to stay out here a little while longer.”
“Yes.”
“Good night.”
She rose soundlessly. He heard the soft click of the Winnebago’s door as she went inside.
By midmorning of the following day, Luke had fallen ill. He was flushed and feverish. He insisted that he wasn’t as sick as he appeared to be. He insisted on riding in his usual place between Simon and Catareen until he was suddenly compelled to tell Simon to stop the Winnebago immediately so he could get out and vomit, after which Catareen insisted that the regurgitated bits of meat had to be buried. Simon bore it patiently. The child and the Nadian were only doing what was required of them. Still, he thought he recalled a situation similar to this one, from a vid—the image of a man on a journey, bearing up patiently as a child and a woman caused delays for which they could not reasonably be held accountable but which the man found irksome nevertheless.
Catareen put Luke to bed on Simon’s bedshelf. Once the boy had been settled, they drove on.
Simon said, “There was probably something in that water after all.”
“Yes,” Catareen answered.
“Are you a little queasy, too?”
“Yes.”
“I shouldn’t have let you go in. Either of you.”
“No fault.”
“It’s easy to forget,” Simon said, “that none of this is as pure as it looks. I don’t like to think what all is in these creatures we’re eating. Or what kinds of genetic mutations are going on in the deer that look so lovely out there on the horizon at sunset.”
A silence passed. They drove through the heat and the light. Then she said, “Simon?”
She had never spoken his name before. He had not been entirely sure she knew it.
“Yeah?”
“Stroth.”
“More specific, please.”
“This.”
“This is, shall we say, strothful, right now?”
“Yes.”
She sat as she always did, placid as a lawn ornament, hands folded in her lap.
“We seem to be sick from swimming in tainted water. We have radioactive groundhog breath. We have no idea what’s going to happen to us. This is what you mean by ‘stroth’?”
“I mean we.”
A low crackle shot through his circuitry, a quick electrical whir.
“I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy. To touch my person to someone else’s is about as much as I can stand,” he said.
“Yes.”
He said, “We’ll be in Denver in a few hours. Have you given any thought to what you want to do when we get there?”
“To do?”
“You know. Destination attained. I’ll find out what, if anything, June 21 means. Luke will probably get some sort of scam going within the first ten minutes. What are you thinking of for yourself?”
“Die in Denver,” she said.
“That’s what you said before. Would you mind telling me what exactly you mean by that?”
“Die in Denver.”
“I have to admit that I just don’t follow you here. We seem to be having one of those Earthling/Nadian moments. Could you be a little more specific?”
Silence. The soft, breathy song.
“Okay,” he said. “End of discussion. Your plan is to die in Denver. You could probably also get a job as a waitress, if dying doesn’t work out.”
She was gone, though. She had removed herself to that lizard-eyed nowhere she seemed to call home.
Denver revealed itself toward the end of the afternoon. It was first a silver shimmer on the horizon, then an intimation of silvered spires and towers, then a great tumble of buildings laid out across the flatness, under the cascade of white summer sun.
Catareen said, “Luke will want to see. I get.”
“Don’t you think we should let him sleep?”
“I go. I see.”
He stopped the Winnebago. She got out and returned soon with Luke, whose face was still flushed and whose eyes had a pink, unhealthy cast.
Still, he positioned himself eagerly between Simon and Catareen. He said, “There it is.”
“There it is,” Simon answered.
“Is something wrong?” Luke asked him.
“No. What would be wrong?”
“Just wondered.”
“You shouldn’t be up,” Simon said. “You’re still sick.”
“I’m getting better,” Luke said. “I just picked up a little something nasty in that water. Or maybe it was whatever that thing was we ate. Anyway, I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. Catareen should have let you sleep.”
He noticed that the boy and Catareen exchanged looks of recognition. They seemed to believe they shared some knowledge about him. When had that started? He said nothing, however. He drove on.
Denver when they reached it proved to be a series of broad avenues teeming with humans and Nadians. The air sparked with their various invisible purposes. They crossed the streets and strode along the sidewalks, past the windows of small enterprises that had been carved out of the old stores and restaurants. Empty skyscrapers towered overhead, their windows cracked or shattered. Some citizens were on foot. Some piloted hoverpods, most of them old and dented. Some rode horses. Luke said, “The horse is making a comeback here. They’re more reliable than hoverpods. They can go more places.”
They inched their way along through the traffic. Luke pointed out a store that had once, according to its faded gilt sign, been called Banana Republic and was now a saloon, a barbershop, and a haberdasher’s. In front of the store, a group of Nadian settlers were loading a horse-drawn cart with sacks of what appeared to be some kind of seeds.
Simon leaned out the window and asked the drivers of several vehicles if they’d ever heard of Emory Lowell. He received only shrugs and baffled looks. Luke said, “Just keep going straight. If Gaya’s in her usual spot, she’ll know.”
“Gaya?”
“A bit of local color. She was a friend of my mother’s. Her turf is up ahead.”
Presently they approached a gaunt, elderly woman who stood on a corner speaking volubly and offering passersby what appeared to be a small white bowl.
Luke said, “There she is. Pull over.”
Simon pulled to the curb as best he could, given the crowds. Luke scrambled over Catareen’s lap and leaned out the window.
“Hey, Gaya,” he said.
The woman halted her imprecations and looked at Luke with an expression of fearful irritation. She appeared to be someone who did not associate the calling of her own name with the arrival of good news. She wore a Mylar jumpsuit and an ancient leopard-skin hat. Loops and waggles of dark, wiry hair shot out from under the hat like punctuation marks in an unknown language.
“It’s Blitzen,” Luke said.
Gaya ambled suspiciously up to the Winnebago’s window. She squinted, as if Luke himself emitted a painful light.
“You’ve grown,” she said.
“As people do. You know Emory Lowell?”
“I’ve heard the name, yes.”
“Do you know where he lives?”
“Right around here somewhere.”
“What are you selling?”
Gaya looked gravely at the bowl. “Blitzen,” she said, “this belongs in a museum. It’s only by the remotest chance that I’ve come into possession of it, and if it wasn’t for my medical bills I’d never consider selling—”
“How much?” Luke asked.
“Now, I’ve been asking twenty yen, which is of course an almost ludicrously low price, but since you and I—”
“Give her twenty yen,” Luke said to Simon.
Simon dug into his pocket for the money. Gaya said, “Hey, I can take a few yen off for you. I mean, considering—”
“No, twenty is more than reasonable,” Luke answered. “Simon, have you got it?”
Simon produced a twenty from his pocket. The boy snatched it out of his hand. He said, “So. Could you give us directions to Emory Lowell’s?”
Gaya answered, “Straight for ten or eleven blocks, then right for about five miles. Turn left at the Gentle Giant Mall. Drive until you see a pair of blue spruce trees, one on each side of the road. Then park your truck and walk to the west.”
“Thanks. Here’s the twenty.”
Gaya took the money and handed Luke the bowl. She said wanly, “How’s your mother?”
“Couldn’t tell you. If she passes through here, tell her you saw me. Tell her I’m all right.”
“I’ll do that.”
Simon pulled away from the curb and accelerated. Luke sat with the bowl in his lap. “Junk,” he said.
“It looks old,” Simon said.
“If it got down to Gaya’s level, it’s junk. Believe me.”
“What is commonest and cheapest and nearest and easiest is Me,” Simon said.