Robert Reed sold his first story in 1986 and quickly established himself as a frequent contributor to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and many other markets. Reed may be one of the most prolific of today’s young writers, particularly at short fiction lengths, seriously rivaled for that position only by authors such as Stephen Baxter and Brian Stableford. And—also like Baxter and Stableford—he manages to keep up a very high standard of quality while being prolific, something that is not at all easy to do. Reed stories such as “Sister Alice,” “Brother Perfect,” “Decency,” “Savior,” “The Remoras,” “Chrysalis,” “Whiptail,” “The Utility Man,” “Marrow,” “Birth Day,” “Blind,” “The Toad of Heaven,” “Stride,” “The Shape of Everything,” “Guest of Honor,” “Waging Good,” and “Killing the Morrow,” among at least a half-dozen others equally as strong, count among some of the best short works produced by anyone in the 1980s and 1990s; many of his best stories have been assembled in the collections The Dragons of Springplace and The Cuckoo’s Boys. Nor is he non-prolific as a novelist, having turned out eleven novels since the end of the 1980s, including The Lee Shore, The Hormone Jungle, Black Milk, The Remarkables, Down the Bright Way, Beyond the Veil of Stars, An Exaltation of Larks, Beneath the Gated Sky, Marrow, Sister Alice, and The Well of Stars, as well as two chapbook novellas, Mere and Flavors of My Genius. His most recent book is a new novel, Eater-of-Bone. Reed lives with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.
Here he unravels a fascinating archaeological mystery with roots that stretch back for millions of years. . . .
The afternoon was clear and exceptionally cold. An off-duty company geologist was driving across the floor of the mine when a flash of reflected light caught his gaze. He didn’t particularly want to go home, and thirty-one years in the coal industry hadn’t quite killed the curious boy inside him. Backing up, he saw the flash repeated, and it seemed peculiar enough that he pulled on his stocking cap and mittens and climbed slowly up over the lignite coal, taking a close, careful look at something that made no sense whatsoever.
His fingers were numb and nose frostbitten when he reached the field office. But he didn’t tremble until he began to the maps, showing his superiors what patch of ground shouldn’t be touched until more qualified experts could come in and kick around.
“What’d you find?” they asked.
“An unknown species,” seemed like an honest, worthy answer.
Sixty million years ago, plant material had gathered inside a basin sandwiched between young mountain ranges. Then the peat was covered over with eroded debris and slowly cooked into the low-sulfur treasure that today fed power plants across half of the country. Fossils were common in Powder River country. The coal often looked like rotted leaves and sticks. But there was no way to systematically investigate what the gigantic machines wrested from the ground. Tons of profit came up with every scoop, and only one person in the room wanted the discovery preserved, no matter how unique it might be.
The geologist listened to the group’s decision. Then he lifted the stakes, showing the photographs that he had taken with his cell phone camera. “This resembles nothing I’ve ever seen before,” he added. Then mostly to himself, he muttered, “It’s like nothing else in the world.”
“I’ve seen these before,” one supervisor barked. “It’s nothing, Tom.”
Normally an agreeable sort, the geologist nodded calmly, but then his voice showed bite when he asked, “Why can’t we damn well be sure? Just to be safe?”
“No,” another boss growled. “Now forget about it.”
Thirty-one years of loyal service to the company brought one undeniable lesson: This argument would never be won here. So he retreated, driving into Gillette and his tiny house. His wife was sitting in the front of the television, half-asleep. He poured the last of her whiskey down the sink, and she stood and cursed him for some vague reason and swung hard at his face, and he caught her and wrestled her to bed, saying all of the usual words until she finally closed her eyes. Then he collected several dozen important names and agencies, sending out a trim but explicit e-mail that included his phone numbers and the best of his inadequate pictures. Thomas showered quickly, and he waited. Nobody called. Then he dressed and ate dinner before carrying two shotguns, unloaded, and a tall thermos of coffee out the truck, and after a few minutes of consideration, he drove back to the mine, parking as close to the fossil as possible.
Tom’s plan, such as it was, involved shooing away the excavators as long as possible, first with words, and if necessary, empty threats. But these were temporary measures, and worse, he discovered that his phone didn’t work down here in the pit’s deepest corner. That’s why he stepped out into the cold again. Navigating by the stars and carrying a small hammer, he intended to break off a few pieces of the fossil—as a precaution, in case this treasure was dug up and rolled east, doomed to be incinerated with the rest of the anonymous coal.
Few took notice of the peculiar e-mail. Three colleagues called its author, two leaving messages on his voice mail. CNN’s science reporter ordered her intern to contact the corporation’s main office for reaction. The PR person on duty knew nothing about the incident, sharply questioned its validity, and after restating his employer’s sterling environmental record, hung up. In frustration, the intern contacted a random astronomer living in Colorado. The astronomer knew nothing about the matter. She glanced at the forwarded e-mail, in particular the downloaded images, and then said, “Interesting,” to the uninterested voice. It wasn’t until later, staring at the twisted body with its odd limbs and very peculiar skull that her heart began to race. She called the geologist’s phones. Nobody answered. Leaving warning of her imminent arrival, she dressed for the Arctic and grabbed the department’s sat-phone, buying two tall coffees when she gassed up on her way out of Boulder.
Better than most, Mattie understood the temporary nature of life. This woman who had never before been stopped by the police earned three speeding tickets on the journey north. Approaching the mine, she slipped in behind an empty dump truck, driving almost beneath the rear axle, and because the only security guard happened to be relieving himself, she managed to slip undetected out onto the gouged, unearthly landscape.
GPS coordinates took her to a pickup truck parked beside a blackish-brown cliff. The engine was running, a stranger sleeping behind the wheel. Beside him on the seat was what looked like huge, misshapen hands cradling a large golden ring. Two shotguns were perched against the far door. For a brief moment, she hesitated. But Mattie shoved her natural caution aside. With a tap on the glass, she woke the stranger, and startled, he stared out at what must have looked like a ghost—this young woman with almost no hair and a gaunt, wasted face.
He nervously rolled down the window.
“Are you Thomas Greene? I’m Mattie Chong.”
Stupid with fatigue, Tom asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I came to see your alien,” she reported.
He accepted that. What bothered him more was the stranger’s appearance. “Ma’am, if you don’t mind my asking . . . what’s wrong with you?”
“Cancer,” Mattie reported amiably, throwing her flashlight’s beam against the deep seam of lignite. “And if I’m alive in four months, I’ll beat all of my doctors’ predictions.”
It was rare not to be the most important man in the room. And today brought one of those exceptional occasions: a trailer crowded with scientists and Secret Service agents, mining representatives and select reporters, plus the three-person congressional delegation from Wyoming. But the hero of the moment was Dr. Greene, and everybody wanted to stand beside the renowned geologist. Of course Dr. Chong should have shared this limelight, but she was flown to Utah this morning, her illness taking its expected, presumably fatal turn. The president was merely another visitor, and as the lesser celebrity, it was his duty to shake hands and ask about the poor woman’s health. Every researcher had to be congratulated on the historic, world-shattering work. And he insisted on smiles all around. Bullied joviality was the president’s great skill, and he was at his best when he was feeling less than happy.
Today was especially miserable. The bitter wind and low leaden skies only underscored a mood that had crumbled at dawn. That’s when word arrived that his former Chief of Staff—a slippery political worm on his noblest day—planned to give the Special Investigator everything, including the damned briefcase filled with cash and ten hours of exceptionally embarrassing recordings. The president’s administration was wounded, and by tomorrow it might well be dead. Cautious voices wanted the Wyoming visit cancelled, but that would have required an artful excuse, and what would have changed? Nothing. Besides, he understood that if enough people were fascinated with these old bones and odd artifacts, the coming nastiness might not be as awful as it promised to be.
Dr. Irving Case was the project administrator, and he had been on duty for less than a week. But with a bureaucrat’s instincts for what counted, he used a large empty smile and a big voice. “Mr. President, sir. Would you like to go see the discovery now, sir?”
“If it’s no problem. Let’s have a peek at old George.”
Back into the winter miseries they went. A tent-like shelter had been erected around the burial site, to block the wind and blowing coal dust. As they strolled across the barren scene, a dozen experts spoke in a competitive chorus, agreeing that the fossil was unique and remarkable, and of course immeasurably precious. The first priority was to disturb nothing, every clue precious and no one certain what constituted a clue. The president kept hearing how little was known, yet in the next moment, a dozen different hypotheses were offered to explain the creature’s origins and how it might have looked in life and why it was where it was and why this wasn’t where it had lived.
“It didn’t live here?” the president interrupted. Aiming for humor, he said, “This splendid desolation . . . this is exactly where every movie alien roams.”
Laughter blossomed—the bright fleeting giddiness that attaches itself to men of power. Then they reached the shelter, and reverent silence took hold. Dr. Case mentioned rules. Politely but firmly, he reminded everybody to wear the proper masks and gloves, and nothing could be touched, and then he warned the press to stand back so that all might enjoy the best possible view.
Photographs and video had already shown the mysterious fossil to the world. The enormous stratum of coal in which he, or she, was entombed was long ago dubbed Big George, hence the fossil’s popular name. Lights had been strung near the tent ceiling. The coal slag was cleared away, the flat floor littered with scientific instruments and brightly colored cables. What rose before the president was both immediately recognizable and immeasurably strange: sixty million years ago, alien hands had dug a hole deep into the watery peat, and then “George” was lowered in or climbed in, feet first. Shovels had been used in the excavation. Two archeologists pointed at nearly invisible details, describing with confidence how the metal blades must have looked and what kinds of limbs employed them, and even while they were talking, a third voice reminded everyone that conjectures were fine, but nothing was proved and might never be.
George was a big fellow, and even to the uninformed eye, he looked like something from another world. The weight of the rock had compressed him, but not as badly as the president expected. Two bent legs helped carry the long horizontal body, and two more legs were presumably buried out of sight. A fifth limb rose from behind what looked like the angular and watchful face of a praying mantis, and the arm was jointed and complicated and partially destroyed. Dr. Greene had removed the matching hands and now famous gold ring. The corpse was majestic, wasn’t it? But in the next moment, in the president’s eyes, George looked preposterous. Pieces stolen from unrelated creatures had been thrown together, a wily hoaxer having his laugh at all this foolish, misplaced fascination.
Turning to world’s most famous geologist, the president asked, “How were we so lucky, this poor fellow exposed this way?”
“The coal’s weak around the edges of the grave,” Dr. Greene explained. His celebrity was wearing on him, puffy eyes half-closed, a dazed, deep fatigue visible in his features and slope-shouldered posture. “If the blade had cut anywhere else, I wouldn’t have noticed anything.”
“It was the ring you saw?”
“Yes, sir.”
The president nodded. “I haven’t seen that artifact yet,” he mentioned.
Dr. Case stepped forward. “The hands and ring have been sent to the Sandia, sir. For analysis and closer study.”
The president nodded, looking up again. “So well preserved.”
Dr. Case enjoyed his little stage. “The corpse shows very little sign of decomposition,” he explained. “And we don’t know why. Maybe the acidic peat and lack of oxygen preserved it. Although it’s possible that the flesh was simply too alien and our microbes couldn’t find anything to chew on.”
The president nodded, pretending to appreciate the vagaries of alien biology. Then he returned to one statement that had puzzled him earlier. “And why do we think George lived elsewhere?”
Somebody said, “The feet.”
Each leg ended with a narrow, three-toed foot.
“They’re not built for bogs,” another voice volunteered. “George would have sunk in to his knees, or deeper.”
Against the rules, the president stepped closer. Nobody dared correct him, but the scene grew noticeably quieter. A Clydesdale horse would have been larger, but not by much. He knelt and stared at the lead foot, moving his head back and forth to avoid his own shadow. Sixty million years in the ground, yet the corpse retained its flesh and what seemed to be its natural color, which was tan. The crushing weight had twisted the dead foot, every toe visible. But what was perhaps more remarkable lay beneath the foot—the remnants of what might be animal skin, cut and stitched to create a simple shoe.
“Is this really a moccasin?” he asked.
Dr. Case joined him, kneeling and pushing his own mask closer to his mouth—making absolutely certain not to contaminate the treasure. “We have at least fifteen features that are probably remnants of clothing, Mr. President. And six metallic objects that look like knives and such, all carried on the body.”
“Anything special?” the president inquired.
The administrator blinked, unsure what to make of the question.
“You know, like a laser-gun or portable reactor.”
“Nothing like that, sir.”
“That surprises me,” the president admitted.
Dr. Case stood, offering his hand. “From what we can tell, sir . . . the technology is Early Iron Age. If that.”
The president rose without anyone’s help.
Another few minutes of inexpert study ended when someone mentioned lunch. “A fine idea,” the president agreed. “Let the scientists back to work!” Then everyone filed outside and pulled off the choking masks. The distraction was over, the show finished. The president found his previous depression waiting for him, like a black mountain bearing down on his aging frame. He wiped his mouth with a sleeve, accepted the vacuous thanks of several people, and then he dredged up another one of his patented smiles, wondering why it was that no President had killed himself in office. Considering the pressures of the job, that seemed remarkable. Almost an oversight, really. The idea was so intriguing that he spent the next several moments dancing with a lurid fantasy: He would kill himself today, people around the world would weep, and with that, he would give himself a lasting, however inglorious place in history.
He was asked to say a few words at the funeral, honoring the heroic figure that had been lost. It was a fine speech and a very pleasant day in late September, the press in full attendance and millions watching only Irving. But how does one dispose of the body of a great person, someone composed of digital images and countless memories as well as flesh and bone? That was the question he had asked himself, preparing for this moment. This opportunity. Of course he wouldn’t say anything so blatant or borderline crass, but that was the crux of the situation. Most of the world’s citizens were anonymous bodies with a few possessions soon to be misplaced. But one can never bury or burn the modern celebrity. Their lives were so vast, so persistent and sturdy, that it was impossible to make a suitable grave. Indeed, death could free the largest celebrities into a greater, more enduring realm where they would never age, and with luck, would only grow even more impressive with the passage of years.
What Irving did address was his great admiration for a colleague who quickly became his good friend. “A sad, tragic death,” he said, “and as unexpected as the discovery inside the coal. And we are all the lesser because of it.” He didn’t mention the deep irony that hadn’t escaped anyone’s attention: Thomas Greene was killed in a minor traffic accident, while George’s co-discoverer was on the rebound, her withered body responding to an experimental regime of stem cells and tailored phages.
The audience smiled as Irving left the podium.
Of course Mattie deserved the final word, and she used her public moment to beg for full funding of the ongoing Graveyard Project. It was a clumsy display of politics, and only she could get away with it. Irving was the project’s administrator, far too exposed to act in such obvious ways. But he was grateful for her waving the hat, and he told her so afterwards. There was a reception back in Gillette, and another one of the endless news conferences, and the two sat close together behind a long table, fielding the same questions again and again.
Ten months after its discovery, nobody knew for sure how large the burial ground was. But evidence hinted at an enormous field of bodies, most of them deeper than George, buried over a period of many thousands of years. That was why the entire mine had been closed and made into a national monument. Power plants were sitting idle back east, but that’s how important the Graveyard was. Every reporter wanted to know why the aliens had used this location. Mattie and Irving confessed that they were just as curious and as frustrated by their ignorance. To date, thirty-eight “georges” had been recovered from within the gigantic coal seam. As a rule, the deeper bodies wore better clothes and carried fancier tools, though nothing worthy of a star-traveler had been uncovered yet. Without giving details, Irving allowed that a final census might be coming, and that’s when Mattie mentioned the new seismic scans—an elaborate experiment to make the lignite transparent as water.
“Don’t put too much stock in success,” Irving warned the reporters and cameras. “This technology is new and fickle, and we might not get results for months, if ever.”
It seemed odd, a man in his position staunching excitement. But if these scans failed, he might be blamed. And what good would that do? This job was a dream, and Irving intended to remain inside the dream as long as possible. He was successful and couldn’t imagine being happier, wielding power over hundreds of lives and a billion-dollar budget: emperor to an empire that had already revolutionized how humanity looked at itself and the universe.
Irving was exhilarated by the news conference; Mattie was exhausted. He made a point of walking the still-frail woman to her car, even when she claimed she could manage on her own, thank you. “I insist,” he told her, and they shook hands and parted, and as he walked back into the reception hall, an associate approached quickly and whispered, “Sir, you have to see this, sir.”
“See what?”
Then in the next instant, he muttered, “Results?”
“Yes, sir.”
The laptop was set up in the little kitchen, linked to Base Camp’s computers, and the news was astonishing enough that this man who never failed to find the right words was mute, knees bending as he stared at data that made his fondest dreams look like weak fantasies.
The screen was jammed with white marks and long numbers, each grave given a precise designation tied to estimated size and metal content and other crucial information. The graveyard covered more than a five square kilometers, and the dead were thick, particularly in the deepest layers.
“How many . . .?” he muttered.
“At least thirty thousand, sir.”
Again, Irving’s voice failed him.
The assistant misread his silence, assuming disappointment. “But that’s not the final number,” she added. “They’re so many bodies, particularly near the bottom, sir . . . the final number is sure to be quite a bit larger than this.”
Why he loved the girl was a complicated business. There were so many reasons he couldn’t count them—moments of bliss and the intense looks that she gave him and little touches in the dark and touches offered but then taken away. Teasing. She was an expert at the tease. She was funny and quick with her tongue, and she was beautiful, of course. Yet she carried her beauty in ways most girls couldn’t. Slender and built like a boy, she had the smallest tits he’d every felt up—a fact that he foolishly admitted once. But her face had this wonderful full mouth and a perfect nose and impossibly big eyes full of an earthly blue that watched him whenever he talked and paid even closer attention when he wasn’t saying anything. She was observant in ways he never would be, and she was smart about people, and even though she rarely left Wyoming, she seemed to know more about the world than did her much older boyfriend who had already traveled across the globe three or four times.
Badger had little memory for the places that he had been, but Hanna knew that if she kept asking questions, he might remember what the Sahara looked like at midnight and what he saw on a certain street in Phnom Penh and what it felt like to tunnel his way into an Incan burial chamber seven hundred years after it was sealed off from the world.
“Why Badger?” was her first question, asked moments after they met.
He sipped his beer and looked around the bar, wondering who this youngster was. “Because that’s my name,” he said with a shrug.
“You dig tunnels, right?”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Hanna.” She’d already settled on the stool beside his. Without another word, she pulled his glass over and took a sip, grinning as she licked the Budweiser off her upper lip. Reading his mind, she said, “I’m twenty-two.”
“You aren’t,” he replied.
She laughed and gave back his remaining beer. “Word is, Badger, you’re working at the Graveyard, digging down to the most interesting georges.”
“Which high school do you go to?”
“I attend the University in Laramie,” she replied. Then she put an elbow on the bar and set her delicate chin on edge of her palm, fingers curled up beneath that big wonderful smiling mouth. Without a trace of doubt, she told him, “You aren’t all that comfortable with women. Are you, Badger?”
“How do you know my name?”
“I’ve seen you. And I’ve asked about you, I guess.” Then she laughed at him, adding, “Or maybe I heard there was this guy named Badger digging holes for Dr. Chong, and you came tromping in here, and I figured, just by looking at you, that you had to be that guy. What would you think of that?”
He didn’t know what the girl was telling him, or if he should care one way or another.
“I know Mattie pretty well,” she reported. “Your boss has come to school to talk . . . I don’t know, maybe ten times. She’s a neat, neat lady, I think.”
He nodded agreeably.
“How long has she been in charge?”
“Three months,” he answered. “Dr. Case got pushed up to Washington—”
“I bet she drives you nuts,” she interrupted.
“Why’s that?”
“A feeling.” Hanna shrugged and suddenly changed topics. “Does it ever make you crazy, thinking what you’re working on?”
“Why would it?”
“The Graveyard!” she shouted. Down came her hand, and she sat up straight on the stool, looking around the quiet bar as if to hunt down a witness to this foolishness. “One hundred thousand dead aliens in the ground, and you’re part of the team that’s working their way to the bottom of the dead. Isn’t that an astonishing thing? Don’t you wake up every morning and think, ‘God, how incredibly lucky can one burrowing weasel be?’ ”
“My build,” he allowed.
She fell silent, watching him.
“I got the name as a kid,” he reported. “My given name is Stuart, but I got the nickname because I’ve got short legs and a little bit of strength, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I’m strong,” he said.
“I can tell.”
“Yeah?”
“I like strong,” she confessed, leaning in close.
Or maybe it wasn’t that complicated, why he loved Hanna. She seemed to truly love him, and how could he not return the emotion? Beautiful and smart and sharp, and he was powerless to ignore her overtures. He gave her the rest of his beer and answered her questions as far as he could, admitting that the scope and importance of the Graveyard was beyond him. He was a professional digger. Using equipment designed by others, he was adept at carving his way through complicated strata, avoiding other graves and other treasures on his way to realms that hadn’t seen sun since a few million years after the dinosaurs died away.
Later, Hanna asked, “What do you think of them?”
They were sitting in his truck in the open countryside, at night. So far they hadn’t even kissed, but it felt as if they’d been sitting there for years. It was that natural, that inevitable.
“Think about who?” he said.
She gave him a look.
He understood. But the honest answer was another shrug and the embarrassing admission, “I don’t think much. I don’t know much at all. I’ve seen hundreds of them, but the aliens still look nothing but strange to me. What they were like when they were alive . . . I don’t have any idea . . .”
“You don’t call them ‘georges,’ ” she pointed out.
“That’s a silly name,” he growled, “and it doesn’t suit them.”
She accepted the logic.
This was the moment when Badger caught himself wondering when he would ask the girl to marry him. Not if, but when.
“Everybody else has a story,” Hanna told him. “I haven’t met the person who doesn’t think these creatures were part of some lost colony or prisoners in an alien work camp, or maybe they were wanderers living in orbit but burying themselves in the peat so we’d find them millions of years later. Just to prove to us that they’d been here.”
“I don’t know the answer,” he said.
“And do you know why?” she asked. “Because you understand what’s important.” Then she lifted her face to his, and they kissed for a long while, and it was all that he could do, big strong unimaginative Badger, not to ask that girl to marry him right then.
He called to ask, “How you doing, hon?”
“Good,” she lied.
“Feel like walking around?”
“Why?”
“Dr. Chong says it’s all right. I explained how the doctor wants you in bed, but for the next couple weeks you can still move—”
“Will I get to see the new one?”
“You want to?”
“I’m getting dressed now,” she lied, crawling off the couch. “Are you coming to get me, Badge?”
“Pulling into the driveway right now,” he reported happily.
So she got caught. Not only wasn’t she close to ready, Hanna looked awful, and it took more promises and a few growls before Badger decided she was up to this adventure. Babies. Such a bother! Laying eggs would be so much easier. Drop them somewhere safe and walk away, living your own life until the kids were big enough to be fun. That’s how mothering should be.
She mentioned her idea to Badger.
He was driving and laughing. “I wonder where you got that from?”
Georges had laid eggs. The younger females always had a few in some incomplete stage of development. Nobody knew if they put their basketball-sized eggs inside nests or incubators or what. Two years of research, yet the aliens’ life remained mysterious, open to guesswork and wishful thinking. But somewhere in those vanished mountains, up high where the air was deliciously thin, the species had struggled mightily to replace the several friends and family being buried every year in that deep black peat.
Mattie was waiting for them at the surface. She smiled warmly and asked Hanna how she was feeling, and Hanna tried to sound like a woman in robust good health. Everybody dressed in clean gowns and masks, and then they took the long walk below ground, following one of the worm-like tunnels that Badger had cut into the deep seam. Seven other times Hanna had gotten a tour. But this visit was unique because of the age of the corpse being unearthed—one of the first generation georges, it was guessed—and because this was a privilege that not even the most connected members of the media had known.
This body lay at the graveyard’s edge. To help the studies, Badger had carved an enormous room beside the fossil. The room was filled with machinery and lights, coolers full of food and drink, a portable restroom, plus several researchers busy investigating the tiniest features, making ready for the slow cautious removal of the dead alien female.
Compared to the first george, she was a giant. Hanna expected as much, but seeing the body made her breath quicken. A once-powerful creature, larger than most rhinoceroses, she now lay crumpled down by death and suffocation and the weight of the world that had been peeled away above her. She was dead, yet she was entirely whole too. The acidic peat was a perfect preservative for flesh born outside this world, and presumably the aliens understood that salient fact.
“Great,” Hanna gushed. “Wonderful. Thank you.”
“Step closer,” Mattie offered. “Just not past the yellow line.”
A pair of researchers—sexless in their gowns and masks—were perched on a short scaffold, carefully working with the alien’s hands.
“The burial ring?” Hanna asked.
Mattie nodded. “An aluminum alloy. Very sophisticated, very obvious in the scans.”
“How different?”
The older the corpse, the more elaborate the ring. Mattie explained, “This one’s more like a cylinder than a ring, and it’s covered with details we don’t find in any of the later burials.”
The clothing was more elaborate, Hanna noticed, legs covered with trousers held up by elaborate belts, the feet enjoying what looked like elegant boots sewn from an ancient mammal’s leathery hide. A nylon satchel rode the long back, worn by heavy use, every pocket stripped of anything that would have been difficult to replace.
“Will we ever find the prize?” Hanna asked.
“That amazing widget that transforms life on earth?” Mattie shrugged, admitting, “I keep promising that. Every trip to Congress, I say it’s going to happen soon. But I seriously wonder. From what I’ve seen, these creatures never went into the ground carrying anything fancy or difficult to make.”
Those words sank home. Hanna nodded and glanced at Badger’s eyes, asking, “What else did I want to ask, hon? You remember?”
“Religion,” he mentioned.
“Oh, yeah.” Standing on the yellow line, she asked, “So why did they go into the ground, Mattie?”
“I don’t know.”
Hanna glanced at the woman, and then she stared up at the alien’s cupped hands, imagining that important ring of metal. “I know the story I like best.”
“Which one?”
“A starship reached our solar system, but something went wrong. Maybe the ship was supposed to refuel and set out for a different star, and it malfunctioned. Maybe its sister ships were supposed to meet here, but nobody showed.” Hanna liked Mattie and respected her, and she wanted to sound informed on this extraordinary topic. “Mars or the moon would have made better homes. Their plan could have been to terraform another world. I know they would have appreciated the lighter gravity. And we think—because of the evidence, we can surmise—that their bodies didn’t need or want as much free oxygen as we require. So whatever the reason, earth isn’t where they wanted to be.”
“A lot of people think that,” Mattie said.
Hanna continued. “They didn’t want to stay here long. And we don’t have any evidence that their starship landed nearby. But they came here. The aliens set down in the nearby mountains, and they managed to find food and built shelter, and survive. But after ten or fifty or maybe two hundred years . . . whatever felt like a long time for that first generation . . . no one had come to rescue them. And that’s why they started digging holes and climbing inside.”
“You believe they were hibernating,” Mattie guessed.
“No,” Hanna admitted. “Or I mean, maybe they slept when they were buried. But they weren’t planning to wake up like normal either. Their brains weren’t like ours, I know. Crystalline and tough, and all the evidence points to a low-oxygen metabolism. What I think happened . . . each of the creatures reached a point in life when they felt past their prime, or particularly sad, or whatever . . . and that’s why a lady like this would climb into the cold peat. She believes, or at least she needs to believe, that in another few hundred years, another ring-shaped starship is going to fall toward our sun, dig her up and bring her back to life.”
Mattie contemplated the argument and nodded. “I’ve heard that story a few times, in one fashion or another.”
“That’s how their tradition started,” Hanna continued. “Every generation of georges buried itself in the peat, and after a few centuries or a few thousand years, nobody would remember why. All they knew that it was important to do, and that by holding a metal ring in your hands, you were making yourself a little easier to find inside your sleeping place.”
Badger sighed, disapproving of the rampant speculation.
“That might well be true,” said Mattie. “Which explains why the rings got simpler as time passed. Nobody remembered what the starship looked like. Or maybe they forgot about the ship entirely, and the ring’s purpose changed. It was a symbol, an offering, something that would allow their god to catch their soul and take them back to Heaven again.”
Just then, the two workers on the scaffold slipped the burial ring out from between the dead fingers. Mattie approached them and took the prize in both of her gloved hands. Hanna and then Badger stared at what everyone in the world would see in another few hours: A model of a great starship that had once crossed the vacant unloving blackness of space, ending up where it shouldn’t have been and its crew and their descendants dying slowly over the next twenty thousand years.
Once last time, Hanna thanked Mattie for the tour.
Walking to the surface again, she took her husband’s big hand and held it tightly and said, “We’re lucky people.”
“Why’s that?” Badger asked.
“Because we’re exactly where we belong,” she replied, as if it couldn’t be more obvious.
Then they were in the open again, walking on a ravaged landscape dwarfed by the boundless Wyoming sky, and between one step and the next Hanna felt something change inside her body—a slight sensation that held no pain and would normally mean nothing. But she stopped walking. She stopped, but Badger kept marching forward. With both hands, she tenderly touched herself, and she forgot all about the aliens and their epic, long-extinct problems. Bleeding harder by the moment, she looked up to see her husband far ahead of her now, and to herself, with the smallest of whispers, she muttered, “Oh, no . . . not today . . .”
Despite night and the season, the thick air burned with its heat and choking oxygen, and the smallest task brought misery, and even standing was work too, and the strongest of the All stood on the broad planks and dug and he dug with them at the soft wet rot of the ground. Everyone but him said those good proper words saved for occasions such as this—ancient chants about better worlds and difficult journeys that ended with survival and giant caring hands that were approaching even now, soon to reach down from the stars to rescue the worthy dead. Silence was expected of the dead, and that was why he said nothing. Silence was the grand tradition born because another—some woman buried far beneath them—said nothing at her death, and the All were so impressed by her reserve and dignity that a taboo was born on that night. How long ago was that time? It was a topic of some conjecture and no good answers, and he used to care about abstract matters like that but discovered now that he couldn’t care anymore. His life had been full of idle ideas that had wasted his time, and he was sorry for his misspent passion and all else that went wrong for him. Grief took hold, so dangerous and so massive that he had to set his shovel on the plank and say nothing in a new fashion, gaining the attention of his last surviving daughter. She was a small and pretty and very smart example of the All, and she was more perceptive than most, guessing what was wrong and looking at him compassionately when she said with clicks and warbles that she was proud of her father and proud to belong to his honorable lineage and that he should empty his mind of poisonous thoughts, that he should think of the dead under them and how good it would feel to pass into a realm where thousands of enduring souls waited.
But the dead were merely dead. Promised hands had never arrived, not in their lives or in his. That buoyant faith of youth, once his most cherished possession, was a tattered hope, and perhaps the next dawn would erase even that. That was why it was sensible to accept the smothering sleep now, now while the mind believed however weakly in its own salvation. Because no matter how long the odds, every other ending was even more terrible: He could become a sack of skin filled with anonymous bones and odd organs that would never again know life, that would be thrown into the communal garden to serve as compost, that the All might recall for another three generations, or maybe four, before the future erased his entire existence.
Once again, to the joy of his daughter and the others, the dead man picked up the long shovel and dug. The front feet threw his weight into the blade, and the blade cut into the cold watery muck, and up came another gout of peat that had to be set carefully behind him. Still the right words were spoken, the right blessings offered, and the right motions made, no one daring complain about the heat or the slow progress or the obvious, sorry fact that the strongest and largest of the All were barely able to manage what their ancestors had done easily.
At least so the old stories claimed.
Then came the moment when the fresh wet rectangular hole was finished and one of them had to climb inside. Odd as it seemed, he forgot his duty here. He found himself looking at the others, even at his exhausted daughter, wondering who was to receive this well-deserved honor. Oh yes, me, he recalled, and then he clicked a loud laugh, and he almost spoke, thinking maybe they would appreciate the grim humor. But no, this was a joke best enjoyed by the doomed, and these souls were nothing but alive. Leaving the moment unspoiled, the ceremony whole and sacred, he set his shovel aside and proved to each that he was stealing nothing precious. Hands empty, pockets opened, he showed them just a few cheap knives that he wanted for sentimental reasons. Then he stepped into the chilly stinking mess of water and rot, and with his feet sinking but his head exposed, he reached up with his long arm, hands opened until that good daughter placed the golden ring into his ready grip.
True to the custom, he said nothing more.
In the east, above the high snow-laced mountains, the winter sun was beginning to rise. Soon the killing heat would return to the lowlands, this brutal ground rendered unlivable. The All worked together to finish what had taken too long, shovels and muddy hands flinging the cold peat at the water and then at him—ceremony balanced on growing desperation—and he carefully said nothing and worked hard to think nothing but good thoughts. But then a favorite son returned to him, killed in a rockslide and lost, and he thought of his best mate whose central heart burst without warning, and because promises cost so little, he swore to both of them that he would carry their memories into this other realm, whatever shape it took.
When he discovered that he could not breathe, he struggled, but his mouth was already beneath the water, his head fixed in place.
With the job nearly finished, most of the All kept working. But others were standing away from the grave—those too weak to help, or too spent or too indifferent—and they decided that the dead could not hear them. With private little voices, they spoke about the coming day and the coming year, gentle but intense words dwelling on relationships forming and relationships lost, and who looked best in their funeral garb, and whose children were the prettiest and wisest, and who would die next, and oh by the way, did anyone think to bring a little snack for the journey home . . .