GERRY KNEW KAFIS FROM MARBLEHILL, but every time he saw the alien—and Kafis was here on the Moon with a contingent of five other aliens—he had to get used to the Tarsalan’s appearance all over again, especially the bicephalic nature of his cranium. Under the alien’s coarse, dark hair the impression of two separate casings was disconcertingly unmistakable.
Kafis’s face was blue, the color of a robin’s egg. The quality of his skin was like the quality of human flesh, with all the imperfections of pores, wrinkles, and blemishes.
His eyes were a little over twice human size, and were divided into sclera, iris, and pupil, like human eyes. His irises were amber, like Stephanie’s were today, the color of a fine scotch whiskey, and his pupils, black like human pupils, were highly reactive, but not necessarily to light. The way the alien’s pupils dilated and contracted reminded Gerry of the way a hummingbird dances around a bloom, in sudden shifts, so that when Malcolm Hulke burped after a particularly capacious gulp of synthi-beer, Kafis’s pupils twitched open, then twitched closed, then twitched to the halfway point, the changes in aperture occurring with lightning quickness.
The alien’s lips were delicate, a dark shade of blue. Kafis’s teeth, though white, weren’t really so much teeth as upper and lower semicircular serrated blades fitted along his gums like a mouth guard. Below his mouth was a delicate, pointed chin, impossibly small considering the size of the rest of his head.
As for his body, it was about the size of a Vietnamese man’s, smallish and agile-looking.
And his hands … interesting … six digits—like those cats with six toes.
These particular Tarsalans spoke English. Physiologically, their tongues, mouth cavities, and larynxes were equipped for verbal language.
Kafis spoke English best of all—those summers at Marblehill with the Thorndike family had taught him well. And because he had learned most of his English from Neil, Gerry occasionally heard Neil’s phrases in the alien’s voice.
“It’s a wisdom your negotiators should embrace,” he was telling Hulke, who was halfway to getting drunk and arguing for the sake of arguing. “Think of it. As a species, you’ve been confined to this one system ever since you evolved from apes. What if something were to happen to this system? And something eventually will, of course. Your sun will, in a few billion years, go into its red-giant phase, and that will be the end of you. We’ve already talked to at least ten worlds, and they would be willing to welcome you as émigrés.”
“I don’t think you’ll get many takers,” said Hulke. “You may get a few screwballs.”
“But then you might at least have a handful of humans on other worlds. The future of your race would be assured. And that’s all we want as well. To plant some of our people on Earth. There’s plenty of room on Earth, and my colleagues and I are at a loss to explain your intransigence.”
“It’s not my intransigence, Kafis. As far as intransigence goes, you’ll have to talk to Earth.”
“We would prefer you talk to Earth for us. It’s been more than apparent these last nine years that our own negotiators aren’t getting anywhere with them.”
“Uh … Kafis … it’s their ball of wax, not ours.” Kafis stared at the mayor as if he hadn’t understood a word. Then he rubbed his long, delicate, six-fingered hands together, and glanced at his five silent colleagues.
Kafis turned back to the mayor, and stared at Hulke for a long time, his eyes inscrutable. It really was hard to tell what he was thinking because it was like staring into the eyes of a cat or fish, especially because, characteristically, there wasn’t much play of muscle around his eyes. But at last the alien seemed to dismiss the mayor. He focused on Gerry instead. Some of the muscles around the alien’s small mouth twitched.
“Why do you attack us?”
Here it was, what Gerry had seen so often at Marblehill, the human mind confronting the alien mind, unable to traverse the gulf between.
Kafis continued.
“Why do you allow millions of your own people to die daily? We never meant this. Why do you set fire to your own house … then lock the door and stay inside? We came as your benefactors. We tried to teach you the way of things. But at last you made us force you to kneel, as we make our children kneel, even though it was the last thing we wanted. This you must understand: When the knee is on the floor, it’s time to acknowledge that the lesson is learned. And this is the lesson we have tried to teach you. Life is worth living no matter what the cost. We mean to be your friends and help you any way we can. But you are like the bluntwog, who fights for the sake of fighting. The bluntwog doesn’t understand the ways of harmony, or how the resolution of conflict should best be treated like a ceremony, something that must be performed so all sides can save face. We understand the nature of pride. But the true mark of a civilized being is humility. You show none. Instead of acknowledging our wisdom, you attack us. You force us to use the violence we abhor.”
Gerry sat back and shook his head, feeling the gulf more than ever. “Earth has offered compromise after compromise, Kafis. In case you didn’t know, compromise is a form of wisdom.”
“But you attack us. You kill us. We have suffered ten thousand casualties.”
There it was again, the unbridgeable chasm … and a certain inflexibility to the way Kafis thought about things, as if his way of thinking was too evolved, too hardwired, and too insufferably condescending. Put the phytosphere around the Earth and surely the humans will come to their senses and follow not human cultural norms, but Tarsalan cultural norms. Surely the humans will get down with humility on bended knee and acknowledge that the Tarsalans aren’t their enemies but simply their teachers, wise ones who want only to welcome them into the Commonwealth of Worlds, to disperse the human race so that it can survive when the sun’s red-giant phase at last comes. And if passive protest in the form of the phytosphere is needed as a teaching tool—a cinerthax—then surely the humans won’t lock themselves in their own house and burn it down.
Kafis looked perplexed by the whole situation.
“Let me teach you a fundamental lesson about human beings, Kafis,” said Gerry. “Push us, and we push back. No one’s going to tell us what to do.”
“Yes, but why push against reason and common sense? Do you not value your lives?”
“Of course we do. But we value freedom more.”
“And we offer freedom. Freedom to live wherever you want on any of the habitable worlds. Wouldn’t you like to see the Sungeely Falls on the planet Yravo from their two-mile summit? Wouldn’t you like to see the ringed gas giants Osa and Meta so close in the sky of Hita that you can nearly touch them? And what about the diamond caves of Farostatar, where whole cities are built out of the precious gems? These are the wonders we offer. These are the freedoms that can be yours. Any of these planets would welcome you. And on any of these planets you would see a mix of races, species, and genera hailing from all parts of the local Milky Way. We offer you the galaxy, and in return, you fire your weapons at us so that we are forced to convert our peaceful shuttles into birds of prey, and shoot down your pilots like pesky insects. We now understand that the mothership is your next objective.” Kafis sat back and his pupils twitched open to their fullest size. “And in that regard we have something we wish you to convey to your United Nations for us. We’ve tried to convey it to them ourselves, but so far they haven’t acknowledged our overtures.”
“Kafis … we’ve been told by Earth that they’ve abandoned any and all diplomatic initiatives.” He thought of the most recent Earth drop, and how Earth planned to board the TMS and abscond with the phytosphere control device. “They’re not even going to try with you anymore. They’re going bluntwog on you.”
Kafis continued right along, ignoring Gerry’s interjection. “Please convey to them that should they actually succeed in damaging the mothership to the point where its life-support systems no longer function, we will then unilaterally claim as places of refuge those areas marked in the most recent U.N. counterproposal. Namely, the Kanem Region of Chad, the Arnhem Land Reserve in the Northern Territory of Australia, and the Chattahoochee National Forest in America’s state of Georgia. We will secure these areas with military force and use their hinterlands as regions of supply, regardless of the cost to human life.”
Gerry’s face sank, and Kafis must have noticed it because his pupils shrank. In one of those brainstorms Gerry sometimes had, he realized he had made a breakthrough. He no longer wondered why Neil had such an easy time communicating with Kafis, and was pissed off at Neil for not telling him of this discovery sooner. If Gerry had discovered on his own that the whole key to understanding Tarsalans lay in the movement of their pupils, it would have been one of the first things he would have shared with his brother.
“You’re on weak ground, Kafis. You obviously never expected us to respond with such overwhelming force, and now you’re on the run. You can’t go dictating.”
“Nonetheless, we will stake these claims if life support on the mothership becomes unviable.”
“Then let me give you some advice. You shouldn’t molest any of the local population when you go down. Humans hate that more than anything in an invading alien. Especially in good ole Georgia. If you’ve got to take over, just take over nicely, and try to help everybody.”
“Our survival will be our sole priority.”
“So you understand after all?”
Kafis gave him a double take. “Understand what?”
“How this is about survival.”
“Human, you exhaust me.”
“You exhaust me too, Kafis.”
Ian came to his room much later, just as he was going over the more recent views of the phytosphere, the ones with the toxin holes. Ian was like a caged animal and all he could do was pace in front of the twin beds, stopping occasionally to look at the dark lunar surface, or turning around and gazing briefly at the lamp, always with a look of bewilderment in his eyes. Gerry didn’t know if Ian was here for a reason, or if he was here simply because he had to be somewhere. Sometimes Ian just … showed up. Was he drunk? Gerry didn’t think so. He couldn’t smell any booze.
Ian finally looked at Gerry. “This whole thing is spinning out of control.”
The anxiety in his friend’s voice was like the news the doctor gave you when you had a tumor. Gerry tried to rise to the occasion. He struggled to mount some semblance of courage. But he couldn’t help remembering his wife’s words: If anybody gets too close to the house, that’s it, Gerry, I’m not asking any questions. And then there was Kafis, spinning out of control as well, his strange alien pupils twitching in fear as he considered the unviability of TMS life support. Gerry tried to show courage but, after a visit from the aliens, courage eluded him—the Tarsalans might go down to Earth; they might go to Georgia, which was right next door to North Carolina. And Glenda wasn’t asking any questions.
“I thought we were going to beat it,” said Ian, still pacing.
He didn’t have to say more because his implication was clear—maybe they weren’t going to beat it after all.
Then it was one non sequitur after another from Ian. “God, I’ve done some horrible things in my life.” Just out of the blue, as if, with that thing knitting itself around the Earth, he had finally found it in his soul to feel remorse. It didn’t matter that Gerry had no context; he understood it well, how the alcoholic could become a beast, how he could black out for hours at a time and have no memory of the abysmal things he had done. “Remember Maggie Madsen?” A pathetic chuckle, as if Maggie Madsen had been one of the bigger lost chances in his life.
“Ian, I thought we agreed we would never talk about Maggie again.”
“Remember that night in the pool?”
“That was her idea, not mine. I had no idea she was going to come up to me that way.”
“Yes, but you didn’t do anything to stop her, buddy, even though you knew she was going out with me.”
“You see what a bad thing alcohol can be?”
“If it was just that one night … but you stole her away from me.”
“And I regret it. I told you that. That’s why we don’t talk about her.”
“What ever happened to her? I wonder how she’s making out down there in the dark.”
“Last I heard, she’d married a car dealer in Norfolk.”
“Really? She always struck me as the more adventurous type.” Then came a whole sequence of, “What am I going to do, what am I going to do?”—the same six words uttered again and again, nonstop, a bizarre refrain wrapped in regret and anxiety. And still the pacing. Wearing out the rug. The clock moved, edging past midnight. Ian got more and more worked up, haunted by ghosts only he could see, driven—so much so that he finally punched the mirror, broke it, and drew blood.
“Jesus, Ian.”
“Sorry, buddy.”
Ian walked to the washroom and cleaned himself up. Gerry heard running water. He tried to concentrate on the stills of the phytosphere, but thought of the damned Tarsalans instead, coming all this way, reminding him of born-again Christians because they were all so smug, so sure of themselves, as if they had seen the Kingdom of Heaven. Ian came out of the washroom. He had a white towel wrapped around his fist. He radiated desperation.
“But there’s still time, isn’t there, buddy?”
“Time for what?”
Ian became distracted by his own thoughts. He went to the refrigerator, got a little booze bottle, twisted the cap off, sucked the contents into his mouth, but then spit the whole works out, not bothering to swallow, and uttered a string of obscenities, telling Gerry he had to stop that stuff, stop that stuff, stop that stuff, like a man with bipolar disorder in the manic phase.
“That’s it, Gerry. I’m through with booze. I’m walking the straight and narrow from now on.”
“Sit down for a while. I’ll make some coffee.”
Gerry played a role he knew well—the role of sponsor—remembering his own sponsor, Pat Turnshek, an old guy he’d met first at Bellwood, then at all the meetings afterward. When his own demons haunted him, Pat would make coffee, the magic elixir of A.A. meetings, the thing that made everything all right, even when everything was horribly wrong. So he made coffee, and soon it was dripping into the pot.
Ian sat in one of the chairs and rocked, as nervous as could be. “I always manage to say the wrong thing, don’t I?” Another cryptic utterance, one Gerry couldn’t immediately make sense of. “How did you do it, buddy? How did you marry such a nice wife?”
How his wife got into it, Gerry wasn’t sure—Ian was all over the place.
He could have offered Ian the usual platitude, that he was lucky, but knew that it went far beyond luck, that it was his wife’s compassion and forgiveness, and that she wasn’t going to give up on him no matter how bad things got.
The test pilot motioned out the window. “I hate looking at it. It reminds me of all the terrible things I’ve done. I’ve got a lot to make up for, Gerry. I’ve got a whole list of bad things I’ve done to people. I’ve got to make things up in a hurry.” He motioned out the window. “Before we run out of time.”
Gerry stared at the coffeemaker. If they could all just drink enough coffee, maybe the phytosphere would disappear. Maybe the Tarsalans would go home. Maybe they would stay away from Georgia. And North Carolina. Ian started talking about the Tarsalans: how they creeped him out, how it wasn’t natural for them to come all this way, and how sentient species were meant to stay on their own planets and make their own isolated homes surrounded by their own isolating light-years. And then it was back to Maggie Madsen again.
“In the pool, buddy. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Ian, I’m sorry about Maggie Madsen.”
But Ian bluffed, saying, no, that was all right, we were just kids, we didn’t know any better. “You’re unlikely to do the same thing again, aren’t you, buddy, steal a girlfriend out from under me?”
All Gerry could say was the same thing again. “Ian, I’m sorry.”
They lapsed into morose silence after that.
They sipped coffee.
Gerry tried to bolster Ian’s spirits by telling him it was never too late, and that Maggie Madsen wasn’t the only woman in the world.
But all Ian could do was sit there and shake his head. “That green thing over the Earth—it gives me a whole new outlook.”