The blaze is as short as it is fierce. A minute later it’s gone, and so is the man. All that’s left is a pile of ash. Whatever he used to kill himself belongs to a technology more advanced than anything I’ve encountered.
Yet somehow he’s connected to ancient Egypt. The clue gives me small comfort. I still don’t know who or what these creatures are and why they want me dead.
FIVE
Four days later I wait for Teri and Matt to visit my new home. For obvious reasons, I rented it in a hurry. The place is closer to town and lacks the security system my original home had. But since the system proved useless in the last attack, I don’t fret over its absence.
I have learned little about my assailant since he burned to death. I was able to retrace his steps and find his Gatling gun, and from there I was able to follow his path back to a van parked at the end of a road that lay about three miles from my home. A search of the van turned up nothing: no ID, fake or otherwise, no money, no hotel keys, no maps, not even a round of ammunition. Yet it’s clear the van was a rental, and I’ve passed its license plates on to the same FBI agents and detectives that are working on the IIC mystery.
I feel the two mysteries must be connected. They entered my life at the same time—the same day—a remarkable coincidence, and I have never believed in coincidences. So far everything Lisa Fetch and Jeff Stephens told me about IIC has proven to be accurate. Although my sources have been unable to discover how the firm excels in the market, they have uncovered proof linking it to other investment companies. It appears IIC and its partners are quietly accumulating a trillion dollars without anyone knowing about it.
Lisa had spoken of the disappearance of an old boyfriend, Randy Clifford, who vanished into thin air while hacking into IIC’s computer system. My friends in the FBI have been able to determine that a certain “Marko” visited him the night he vanished. Marko is known to the FBI to be a highly paid hit man with Mob connections. My people tell me his price is high for the best of assassins—a million even. It seems he can charge so much because he has the ability to make his “marks” disappear without a trace. I can only assume that’s how he earned his nickname.
I plan to visit Marko soon.
After all the noise on my property, I had to act fast to keep the local police and a stream of higher authorities from investigating too closely. I managed to keep my privacy the old-fashioned way—by paying exorbitant bribes through my East Coast attorneys. The money has worked so well, not a single person in town has asked why my house just happened to explode.
But even people who have been paid to remain silent inevitably talk, and I fear such talk will get back to Teri and Matt. But since I never gave them my address in the countryside, they have no reason to connect me to the rumors going around town about the “house that got hit by the meteor.”
I sort of like that rumor.
I wonder who started it?
My new home is a single story, a spacious rectangle, also located in the woods but hidden in the trees, with no view of a lake. It already possesses a lead-lined vault, which I have stocked with enough weapons to repel a small army. By coincidence, I now own a Gatling gun that is identical to the one that destroyed my original home.
Sigh. That was one toy I could not bear to let the police take.
Teri and Matt arrive on time, at three, on a Tuesday afternoon. We have a late lunch of swordfish, which I grill out back beside my Olympic-size pool. Now that I no longer have a lake to leap into, I enjoy the pool. Swimming is my favorite exercise. Naturally, my liver and leg wounds have totally healed. I don’t feel so much as a twinge when I do my hundred laps each morning.
I have told Teri and Matt to bring their bathing suits, and it turns out Matt is every bit the athlete his girlfriend is. He could never compete against me, of course, but I note how hard he has to swim to get out of breath. He is competitive when it comes to Teri. The two race before we eat, and he makes a point of winning each lap. Teri sees it all as good fun, but I notice he doesn’t. The guy does not like to lose.
I soon find that to be true when it comes to arguments.
Teri’s eyes often stray to his well-muscled body, and I must say I find myself looking at him longer, and more often, than I should. There are no two ways about it—the guy is hot.
I’m careful not to let Teri catch me looking.
After we swim and eat, Teri tries talking Matt into singing a new song he’s working on. He refuses; he won’t play without an instrument. But when I just so happen to find a guitar in my closet, he has no excuse. He tunes the instrument with his feet in the water but then stops.
“I didn’t know you played,” he says to me.
“I dabble.”
“This guitar is tuned perfectly. You have a good ear.”
“Thanks. What’s your song called?”
“‘Mystery Mind.’ But it’s rough.”
“It’s fantastic,” Teri mutters.
Matt strums a few chords and begins to sing:
You’ve moved through time,
And left behind the masses in your wake,
You loved me then, you love me now,
You’re always there to take
A diamond is an easy find, compared to what
I’m calling mine,
The ages leave the smallest clue,
To roads untouched, but never true
Where to find this mystery mind? The Gods
confide in you.
I need your answer. Call my name. Abandon
guilt, Abandon shame,
And when you take my outstretched hand, by simple
nod or love’s command,
I’ll wrap you in eternal flame, our hearts to fuse,
one and the same
I tire of my shattered pace,
I reach to feel love’s one true face,
I fear I failed to take heed of your first and final signs
Walk with me, at least pretend,
To hell’s back door around the bend,
We’ll crush the darkness as it sleeps,
And leave the waking world to mend
Where to find this mystery mind? The Gods
confide in you.
I need your answer. Call my name. Abandon
guilt, Abandon shame,
And when you take my outstretched hand, by simple
nod or love’s command,
I’ll wrap you in eternal flame, our hearts to fuse,
one and the same
When Matt finishes, Teri applauds and gives him a kiss. I see how much he looks to her for approval. But I can only gaze in silent amazement. I feel the song is about me, for I often feel trapped in an endless mystery of time, in Krishna’s own mind.
“Awesome,” Teri exclaims. “I love how you changed around the second chorus. You didn’t just repeat the first round.”
“I changed it while driving here,” he says, before turning to me. “What did you think? You can tell me the truth. I know it’s rough.”
“I think it should be played on every radio in the country.”
“Me too,” Teri adds.
“Get off it,” Matt snorts.
“I’m serious.” I suddenly stand. “I know people in New York and LA. At three of the majors: Atlantic, Sony, Geffen. I bet I could get you an audition with that one song.”
I make the offer knowing I’ve already vowed not to help them with their lives. So much for vows—I’m much too impulsive to take them seriously.
“Why should they audition me?” he asks.
“Because I know them,” I reply.
“How?” he persists.
“I’ve got money. Money opens every door. Look, I’m not trying to trample on your male pride. I can only help you get your foot in the door. Your song still has to knock them over.”
“Would he have to record it first?” Teri asks.
“It wouldn’t hurt to walk in with a demo of what we just heard. But it’s not necessary. You’ve got charisma,
Matt. They’ll see it. If I was you, I’d let me make a few calls and then get on a plane tomorrow.”
He shakes his head. “The song is brand-new. I can’t go into a major label with it. It needs work.”
“You have a dozen songs you’ve worked to death,” Teri says. “Take Alisa up on her offer.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Teri gets impatient. “What’s there to think about?”
He gives her a look. “Lots of things.”
I hold up a hand to stop the argument from happening. “Just tell me when you feel ready,” I say.
Matt continues to fiddle with the guitar. I can tell he loves it. Later, I’ll have to figure out a way to give it to him. While he strums the instrument, I ask Teri to take a walk with me. The official reason is to explain her job responsibilities, but I can feel she wants to talk. We hike through the nearby woods. They feel so peaceful, yet I keep alert, listening for the slightest sound that would tell me we are being followed.
“I don’t know why he cut you off like that,” Teri says after we’ve hiked maybe a quarter of a mile. “I hope you didn’t feel he was being rude.”
“Not at all. He wants to make it on his own. I respect that.”
“Matt’s a hard one to do favors for. He’s super independent.”
“So are you.”
She blushes. “What makes you say that?”
“No one’s helping you pay for college.”
“I was lucky to get my track scholarship.”
“It wasn’t luck that allowed you to win so many races in high school. You worked your butt off.”
“I did, but . . .” She doesn’t finish.
“What?”
“Running comes easier to me than most people. It must be my genes. Sometimes I wonder if I could run in the Olympics.”
“The metric mile? The fifteen hundred meters?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about it.”
Teri stops walking as she struggles to find the words. “I train mostly on the track because the coach expects it. And I’m good at running intervals. I know it’s a quick way to build strength. But I feel at home when I go out for longer runs, alone, either late at night or early in the morning. Sometimes I slip into a rhythm—it’s hard to describe—where I don’t get tired no matter how fast I run. At times like that I feel I could break the world record in the mile.”
I understand perfectly. But then, I’m not human.
“So you want a gold medal and you want to graduate medical school before you’re twenty-five. Anything else?”
Teri laughs. “You’re making me sound like Ms. Super Achiever.”
“There’s nothing wrong with fulfilling your desires.”
“What if there are ones you feel you’ll never fulfill?”
“You’re talking about Matt again.”
“No. Yes! How did you know?”
“You can control what you do. But you know you can’t control him.” I pause. “By the way, that was brave of you to encourage him to audition.”
“He has so much talent. You’re right, I can’t hold him back.”
“But it scares you just the same.”
“Sure. You saw the way the girls all cheered when he came on last Friday. If he gets his foot in the door, he’ll hit it big, and then he’s going to get hit on by every chick between New York and LA.”
“Do you want my advice?”
“If you have some to give me, sure.”
“Actually, I usually hate giving advice. People never listen to it. In the end, they just do what they want to do.”
“I’m listening . . . Alisa.”
“Trust.”
“Trust in what?”
“Just trust.”
“You mean, trust in his love for me?”
“That’s part of it. Trust in the big picture as well.”
“What’s the big picture?”
“No one knows. That’s why you have to trust in it.”
Teri considers for a moment, then smiles. “How did you get so wise?”
“Oh, I’ve been around.”
We walk for another hour without talking. I enjoy the exercise, but I’m also looking for places to set up monitoring devices to increase my security.
Back at my house, we find Matt reading a short story that I wrote for a sci-fi anthology. It’s a personal favorite; I left it out on purpose. It follows the observations of K-8-P—or Kap—the name my hero goes by while he’s on earth. Matt reads it aloud to catch Teri up.
Although from another planet, Kap is a low-level grunt who, along with his partner, has been assigned the job of destroying the earth. Kap’s own world is only a few centuries further along than earth, but it belongs to an advanced galactic civilization that has been monitoring earth’s TV and radio programs for decades, and that has determined we are far too hostile a race to be allowed to expand out into the galaxy.
My story begins with Kap and his partner spraying a ten-mile-long asteroid with a special type of black paint that reduces its albedo ratio—its ability to reflect light—to near zero. Then the two outfit the asteroid with rockets that fire for a month and slowly alter its orbit so that it will intercept the earth in three years. Because it’s so dark, earth astronomers won’t notice the asteroid until it’s days away from destroying our home.
The job done, the two enter a deep freeze that will keep them asleep for a decade while they cruise home. Only Kap sets his hibernaculum so that he awakens as soon as his partner is asleep. He turns their ship around and heads for the earth. He is curious to meet humanity. This is the tenth planet he’s destroyed, and he wonders what criteria the top dogs in the galaxy are using to decide who lives and who dies.
The story takes off when Kap takes a shuttle down to earth and is fired upon by America’s missile shield. His shuttle is damaged, and he crash-lands a couple of miles offshore, near San Francisco. The shuttle is equipped with a device that instantly gives Kap amnesia, lest he accidentally or intentionally warn any backward planet that it is about to be destroyed.
Kap survives the crash and is rescued by a fishing ship.
The rest of the story deals with Kap’s innocent observation of human life. In one sense he sees everything with a child’s eyes. But in another sense his observations are profound because they’re completely unbiased.
I called the tale “Eyes of the Stars,” and it won both a Nebula and a Hugo award for best sci-fi short story of the year. Like most of my work, I published it under the name Lara Adams.
“Why do you use a pen name when you write?” Matt asks as he finishes the story.
“Don’t be so nosy. Her reasons might be private,” Teri scolds.
“I do it to maintain my privacy,” I say.
“I don’t believe that,” Matt teases. “Most people, when they’re nobodies, talk about how they wouldn’t mind the money fame brings, but they’d hate to have people chasing after them taking their picture. But I think everybody wants fame.”
“Not me,” I say flatly.
“Come on,” Matt insists. “Wouldn’t you love to have your picture taken by paparazzi and splashed all over the magazine covers?”
“Paparazzi are vultures. They’re the last people I’d want near me.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Teri says. “Our society suffers from celebrity addiction. So much reality TV gives people the impression that the only way to be happy is to be famous.”
“Hear, hear,” I mutter.
“Would Kap agree with you guys?” Matt asks.
“You know he would. You just read my story.”
Matt disagrees. “Kap’s observations of mankind are confined to small things. How people push ahead of each other in checkout lines. He never reads a paper while on earth. He doesn’t study our politics. He doesn’t go after the bigger picture of why we’re a danger to the rest of the galaxy.”
“Remember, for the bulk of the story, Kap’s lost his memory—”
>
“I don’t know why you set it up that way,” Matt interrupts, a bad habit of his. “Kap’s observations would be more interesting if he could mentally compare his home world to earth.”
“Kap’s observations are worthwhile because they’re innocent,” I say. “He focuses on the small things we do because they’re the most telling. When he sees a herd of cattle being rounded up for slaughter, it’s his gut reaction that makes the story ring true.”
“The truth is most of us would be vegetarians if we saw how animals are killed,” Teri says. “Matt, remember that chicken farm we drove past in Kansas? After they gave us a tour, that was it for me. I haven’t been able to eat chicken since.”
“You’re a hypocrite, darling. You still eat steak.”
“Once a month. To keep from getting anemic.”
Matt gestures to the swordfish. “You ate meat right now.”
“Fish is not meat,” Teri says.
“Tell that to the fish just before you chop off his head.”
“Krishna used to say that fish were swimming vegetables,” I say.
“By Krishna do you mean the Hindu god?” Teri asks.
“Yes.”
“I didn’t know you were into Eastern thought,” Teri says.
“I like to study what every tradition has to offer.”
“According to Kap, humanity has nothing to offer,” Matt says.
“Not true. In the end he tries to save the earth,” I reply.