Collected Short Fiction, page 791
“What about the rocks?”
“Victoria said they came from far outside in the Milky Way. That’s a galaxy, he said. A big one, with two smaller ones close to it that he said we call the Clouds of Magellan. He said the galaxies are swarms of stars. Millions of stars. He said a lot of them are inhabited by civilized beings. Mostly not much like us, but just as smart as we are. Some maybe—maybe smarter.”
She faltered and stopped, shrinking from the district attorney’s impatient scowl. The judge nodded slightly when she looked at him. She caught her breath and went on again.
“About Mr. Magellanic, he said his own people came down from a group of human specimens picked up by explorers who landed in ancient Greece two thousand years ago.”
“He really said that?”
“Magellanic’s story.” The judge had his hand cupped to his ear, and she seemed more sure of herself. “Not mine.”
“What was his business here?”
“He told Victoria he was a professional guide. He talked about a galactic culture on thousands of civilized planets scattered all across the three galaxies. They live in peace, with regular transportation between them in ships that move faster than light. But he said a lot more planets are still wild. Too hot for any kind of life. Too cold. Their atmospheres chemically poison. Infested with hostile life-forms. Dangerous in all sorts of ways.
“But explorers want to visit them. To prospect for precious elements or anything of value. To survey them for what he called terraforming—making them fit for settlement. Sometimes just for adventure or sport. They hire the guides to get them there and keep them safe and get them back. The guides have the know-how and equipment. They understand the problems, and they can cope.”
“Here in Portales?” The district attorney had thick black eyebrows that lifted in scornful unbelief. “How was he coping here?”
“As for that—” Shawnel stopped to fidget with Jason’s gold band on her ring finger. “Of course Victoria wanted to know, but he wouldn’t tell her anything till after he came to trust her, and then just enough to frighten her. He never really said so, but she came to think he was hiding here with the red stone till he could make some kind of deal. She thought it had been stolen.”
“Stolen?” The district attorney was on his feet, shouting as if accusing her of the crime. “From whom?”
“A museum.” Shawnel flushed and sat straighter. “Victoria said the rock was priceless. Damaged, but she said he was proud of the way it was healing itself when he got all the pieces fitted back together.”
“A rock?” The district attorney glared in disbelief. “Healing itself?”
“That’s what Victoria said he said.”
“It must have been a remarkable rock.”
“Victoria said it was. Mr. Magellanic told her that it stored information like a computer chip. He said it was the journal of the greatest author on his home planet, containing a holographic record of his life and the original versions of all his plays and poems. A unique artifact, it had disappeared from the museum a hundred of our years ago. Mr. Magellanic was first here guiding a search party that traced the thieves to Earth. They’d crashed here, trying to land in a rocket-assisted shuttle. The impact dug the pit the rancher took for a sink hole. The rock was shattered. The thieves must have died. The search party left with nothing, but Mr. Magellanic never gave up. He came back alone, with a little chip off the rock he had picked up. The fragments are all linked together by something like radio, and the chip helped him locate the other pieces.”
“Stolen goods?” the district attorney barked like an angry dog. “He was hiding with it?”
“I don’t know what he told Victoria, but she thought he was trying to work out a deal to let him return the object for a reward.”
“Another thief!”
“Maybe not.” Shawnel shrugged. “He got the diamonds. They’re what his people use for money. I guess he made his deal.”
“You were here when they left.” The district attorney cleared his throat and scowled at his notes. “Where did they go?”
Shawnel flushed. “I told you I don’t know.”
“Don’t you have any kind of clue?”
She frowned, trying to get her words together. “He hadn’t known how sick Victoria was. The news from Jason distressed him. He told her he wanted to take her back to his home planet to doctors who could save her life and heal Jason’s wound.”
“Hogwash!” A scornful hoot. “She believed him?”
“Does it matter?” She shrugged again. “Victoria knew she was dying. Jason was still bleeding. But still at first she didn’t want to go. She thought Magellanic would be risking his own life. Jason’s answer was to nod toward the siren sound of an ambulance coming up the street. He had to get away.”
“You saw how they did it?”
“I saw a machine in his room. Something with seats like the seats on a bicycle. A canopy over it that looked like yellow plastic, and a net around it that looked like woven silver wire. He put Jason and Victoria on the rear seats and climbed on the front seat and pulled the net around them. I heard a crackling like corn popping; maybe some kind of static. They flickered and disappeared.”
“They did?” His bushy eyebrows lifted. “What else did you observe?”
“Nothing, sir. Nothing at all.”
That was the end of Shawnel’s testimony. The judge recessed the hearing with nothing else to explain the escape and no evidence to support any charge that Shawnel had conspired with anybody. The disposition of the diamonds was settled later in civil court, when the attorneys for Kleeman and Scarlo worked out a compromise to have the stones sold and the proceeds split between them, on condition the judge would declare Shawnel’s bill of sale invalid.
She must have been disappointed, but not for long. On the first day of the school vacation, her landlady reported her missing. Carrying the morning mail to her room, she knocked and heard nothing from Shawnel. The door opened when she tried it. She was slow to talk about what she thinks she saw, but now she swears she caught a glimpse of a strange machine standing in the middle of the room. It had three seats, like bicycle seats. A small dark man sat on the front seat. She thinks she saw Shawnel and Jason Strunk on the two behind, but they were gone before she was really sure.
None of them has been seen again. Shawnel left no note. Her car was repossessed. A sister came from Deming to clean out her room and claim her effects. People laugh at pet rocks, and most of us are uncertain what to believe. We’re commonly absorbed with the everyday events of small-town life, but when we look out across the Milky Way on a moonless New Mexico night, we sometimes search the sky for one bright star where we hope Victoria and Jason and Shawnel are well and happy, learning the ways of a stranger world than we can imagine.
1999
Miss Million
She’s beautiful. She’s rich. And she wants to know what makes us tick.
SHE HIT PORTALES LIKE A FALLING STAR. I met her at the Inn as I crossed the lobby to the Wednesday breakfast meeting of a few literary friends who laugh a lot and seldom mention literature. Her soprano voice overtook me.
“What is credit card?”
A slim young woman with a creamy tan and her hair in a perfect coif, a folded newspaper under her arm. She had turned from the flustered girl at the desk, waving a crisp new hundred-dollar bill. Here in Portales, where shoes and shirt are sufficiently de rigueur, she wore something with a blue iridescent shimmer that gave her the look of a Hollywood starlet on Oscar night.
Instant enchantment had taken my voice, but the manager burst out of the back office, begging her to forgive an unforgivable contretemps. Her reservation was perfectly valid. She was a most welcome guest who would surely enjoy our friendly town.
“I called the bank.” He dropped his voice for the clerk. “Miss Million’s New York reference is a diamond dealer. Nothing wrong with her money.”
Demurely unperturbed, she was turning to offer me a card plainly printed on an odd silvery plastic:
A.D. MILLION
1100 0101 0010 1001 0111
I stood squinting at it until she asked, “Feeding place near?” My brain spun for several seconds before I found enough wit to ask, “You mean a restaurant? Food?”
She raised a silver-nailed hand to twist at something in her ear, seemed to listen at it, and gave me a heart-stopping smile. “Exactly. Appetite sharp.”
I caught my breath again and asked her to join us for breakfast. Amazingly, she agreed. Max and Rob snapped to their feet in instant admiration when I introduced her. Margo and Trix nodded politely while they surveyed her form and her outfit and her hair.
“Cuisine?” Raising perfect eyebrows at the menu, she pushed it at me. “Can request meal?”
I ordered the All-American breakfast for both of us. Rob asked where she came from.
“Year million, more or less.”
Rob loves a tall tale.
“A time traveler?” He played along without a blink. “Where’s your machine?”
“No machine here,” she said. “Chronoflexor transit.”
“Be careful with butterflies.” Grinning, Rick spoke up from the end of the table. “Harm to a gnat could erase your own future and leave you stuck right here with us.”
“Risk accepted.” She shrugged. “Mission significant.”
“Significant?” Carefully grave, Rob mocked her language. “Can explain?”
She sipped her coffee and made a face at it.
“Temporal research.” Touching the device in her ear, she tipped her head and nodded to whatever she heard. “Pushing travel envelope for fresh survey of human origins. Prime objective: collect specimen of early human DNA.”
“So?” Rob set down his cup to make his show of sober interest. “Who wants DNA?”
“Engineers, of course. Genetic engineers.”
“I see.” He nodded as if he really did. “What will they do with it?”
“Test it.” Her voice had an edge. “Exchange of DNA induces reproduction. Successful recovery of early human DNA could enrich gene pool.”
“So you want to clone an early man?”
“Nonsense.” She frowned reprovingly, as if impatient with him. “Searching for fossil remains. Early artifacts. Primitive folkways. Dawn of technology.” She gestured widely. “Researching history of assisted human evolution.”
“Assisted evolution?” Rob blinked at the idea but drove doggedly on. “Flow was it assisted?”
“Engineered,” she told him. “Engineered procreation.”
“Playing God?” In spite of himself, he betrayed an instant of doubt. “You’re recreating the race?”
“Humans still human,” she assured him. “New proof expected from test specimen of primitive DNA.”
“If you yourself are engineered . . .” Max grinned at her, raising his coffee cup. “Here’s to genetic engineering!”
A hard look from her erased his expression. Back in the game, Rob gave her a sympathetic nod. “If you’re a student of evolution, take a look at this.”
He reached for her newspaper, spread it across the table, pointed to a black headline: EVOLUTIONIST DEBATES CREATION SCIENTIST. She scanned it, a finger on her translator.
“Creation science?” She looked up inquiringly. “Early genetic technology?”
“Not quite that.” Rob grinned. “Doc Pharr calls it hogwash. He’s our local evolutionist. A biologist out at the college. He says it’s twisting science to support superstitious mythology.”
“Myth of human origin! Must record.” She clapped her hands in delight and closed her eyes to murmur something, perhaps to the gadget in her car, before she turned to ask, “Fact of natural evolution still in question in this era?”
“Debated, anyhow.” Rob shrugged. “A thorny question. I’ve got friends on both sides, but yonder there’s a true believer. You might talk to him.” He nodded at Tim Flynn, sitting alone at the next table. “He set up the debate.”
Pastor Flynn’s face had lit up when he saw Miss Million, and his eyes hardly left her while we waited for our breakfast. I caught her smiling toward him while we ate, but she kept a lively conversation going at our own table.
Margo and Trix write romance novels. She asked if they knew the Bronte sisters. Phil is a playwright; she inquired if his plays were presented at Shakespeare’s Globe.
“Shakespeare’s dead,” he informed her. “So are the sisters.” Rob is a journalist. When she asked what he knew about the lost colony on Mars, he kept a straight face and asked if she had been there.
“Once only. Bad hotel. Virtual Mars better fun.”
“No doubt.”
Confidentially, she leaned to murmur at my ear. “Time frontiers unexplored. Access restricted. Facts fragmentary. Early records lost. Dates not established.” She shrugged without apology. “Perils of the pioneer.”
Rob looked at his watch and abandoned the game to finish his ham and eggs. Pastor Flynn was still at his table. He jumped to his feet when lie saw us breaking up, waited eagerly to meet Miss Million, and asked us to join him.
“Of surety!” Her quick smile delighted him. “If discuss creation science.”
I’m no creationist, but Tim has been a friend since we were in grade school together. Sometimes I’d gone with him to hear his father, an old-time fire-and-brimstone preacher. A rangy, red-haired athlete, Tim had given up a baseball career to follow his father into the pulpit. He has the same ringing baritone and the same stern fundamentalist faith, though he tries to be a gentleman about it. Never married, he had seemed immune to women till he saw Miss Million.
He turned pink when she offered her hand, and stood gaping and speechless till she showed him the headline. That clouded his face for a moment, but he grabbed her hand and clung to it, beaming.
“Miss Million!” He whispered it like a prayer. “A most beautiful name.”
She liberated her fingers. “Why debate creation?”
Staring as if he had not heard, he waved her into a chair and ordered coffee. She smiled at him, her eyes innocently wide. “You question fact of human evolution?”
He sat dazed for half a minute, trying to compose himself.
“I respect science.” He spoke with a solemn gravity, choosing his words as if in his pulpit. “Modern medicine. Computers, TV, rockets to the planets. Precious gifts that reveal the guiding grace of God. However . . .” He paused, and then his voice sharpened.
“I differ with those sneering Yankee atheists who call this the Bible Belt. I deplore their mockery of faith and deny their Satanic cult of evolution. They attack the truth I live by. What I do believe and obey is the word of God. I seek my truth in the Holy Bible.”
“Bible?” She touched the translator, seemed to wait for an answer, finally nodded. “Book of tribal fables?”
“Sacred revelations.” Sternly, he echoed his father’s graveyard tones. “Read Genesis about creation. God made man in His own image on the sixth day. On the seventh day, He ended His work and rested.”
She leaned to ask, “You believe?”
“I’d leave the pulpit if I didn’t.” He slammed his hand on the table for emphasis, hard enough to rattle the cups. “I’d sell cars or go into real estate.”
She shrugged and turned from him to eye a heavy woman with a big belly waddling out of the room, while an overalled farmer carried a sobbing, tow-haired tot behind her.
“Primitive horrors!” She shrank from the woman and dropped her voice for me. “Disease, genocide, pretech procreation. Ordeal of early female. Needless suffering. Life at risk. Records shocking, reality appalling.”
The pastor frowned, astonished.
“That’s Bella Fell. She sang in the choir till she got pregnant.”
“Manner of primitive beasts.” Primly, Miss Million pursed her lips. “All elegance lacking.”
“Huh?” He blinked at her, bewildered. “What’s wrong?”
“Learn science,” she advised him. “Watch bacteria fission. Stay young forever, avoiding unpleasantness of age and death.” He gave her a baffled grunt.
“Fission?” I goggled like the pastor. “You can recreate human beings to make them fission like bacteria?”
“Not exactly.” She shrugged at my amazement. “Bacterial fission complex. Human fission more complex. Transient phase required.”
“How could that be?”
“Cells divide.” With her eyes half closed, she fingered the translator. “New cells form mobile complexes. Migrate to separate sites. Assemble into duplicate individuals.” I caught a fleeting smile at the pastor’s perplexity. “Process clear?”
“Miss Million,” he whispered suddenly, “you have beautiful hair.”
The coffee had come but he ignored it, leaning to admire the tiny bangles on her silver bracelet. She asked to see his watch and called it a fascinating artifact. They both laughed. I left them silent at the table, Tim smiling into her eyes.
Next morning I found him there again, sitting moodily alone over his coffee in a far corner of the non-smoking section. He beckoned me to join him, rose to grip my hand, and stood blinking as if he had forgotten my name.
“God forgive me!” His voice was a stricken whisper. “I’ve prayed on my knees and got no answer.” He gulped and tried to recover himself. “Sit down. I need a friend.”
Wondering, I sat and waited.
“Miss Million,” he said. His coffee splashed when he tried to drink. He set the cup down and gave me a hard interrogative look. “How long have you known her?”
“Only since yesterday.”
“I don’t—don’t know—” Nervously, he wiped his napkin at the spilled coffee. “I was with her last night. I—I’m afraid I don’t know what happened. When I called an hour ago, she said she’d meet me here for breakfast. But I don’t know . . .”
His voice trailed off. He sat for half a minute, staring blankly at nothing.
