Gold Rush, page 33
Dice nods. His eyes fall away from the desk, looking down at his bare feet.
The cop says, “The devil makes work for idle hands. And you. You’re better than this, Rich.”
“Yes, sir.” Dice swallows the lump in his throat. He’s Dice to his friends. Richard to his Mom and Dad. Dicky to his sister. And only ever Rich when he’s in trouble with teachers or his parents. Officer Anderson is a family friend through the church. There’s no doubt he’ll tell his folks.
“Can we keep this between us?” Lisa asks.
Officer Anderson doesn’t respond immediately. Dice looks and feels guilty. It’s as though he’s committed murder. If he could wind back time, he would, but he can’t. The past is set in stone, and yet he can’t remember why he’s here at the police station. He can’t remember how he got here. Past and future no longer exist. Even the present feels like a dream.
“I don’t want to see you in here again,” Officer Anderson says, gesturing with his head toward the door of the station. “Get out of here.”
“Thank you,” Lisa says, picking up her bag and slinging it over her shoulder. She grabs her keys with one hand and Dice with the other, pulling on his scrawny arm. Being four years older than him, she’s in her late teens, but to him it feels as though she’s a million years older and far more mature.
As she ushers him out the door and into the night, she asks, “What were you thinking?”
“I—I…”
It’s humid outside. Dice walks into a wall of heat radiating from the pavement. There’s easily a difference of thirty degrees between the air-conditioned interior of the police station and the steaming August evening outside.
“Go to a friend’s house,” Lisa says. “Or swim in the lake, but don’t break into the high school at night. That was dumb, Dicky. Really dumb. If either of you had slipped while jumping from that roof, you could have broken your legs or—or—or ended up in a wheelchair for life.”
The concrete pavement is hard and dirty. Bits of grit dig into the soft skin beneath his feet, causing him to hobble.
“Think, Dicky. Think. You’ve got your whole future ahead of you. Just… think. Okay?”
“Okay,” he says, feeling ashamed. Dice feels like a failure. He’s in a hole. It’s deep. Too deep to climb out of, and yet he knows he will. He must. And she’s right.
He blinks, and Lucy Ruthers is rocking back and forth on him in the early hours of the morning. She’s got her knees bent, gripping the sides of his waist with her legs. Her hair falls from her face, dangling before him, swaying back and forth as she rides on him, moaning and groaning. Her breasts hang down, rocking back and forth. He touches them, reveling in their soft warmth, running his fingers gently around the curves.
Lucy smiles. Her eyes are full of life. She leans back, sitting on his groin. He can feel himself inside her. At that moment, they’re one.
She rests her hands on his pecs, pushing against his chest as she swings her head to one side, clearing her long blonde hair away. Her fingernails claw at his nipples. She rocks her head back, looking up at the ceiling.
Waves of ecstasy wash over him. His body shudders. Electricity runs from his waist to his head, swamping him with endorphins.
Lucy drops onto him. She writhes with her hips. He matches her tempo, feeling the rush of an orgasm and then the joy of release as they both fall still, panting for breath. Sweat cools their skin.
“Oh, baby,” she says, whispering in his ear and kissing him on the neck. “Oh… so good. You are so goddamn good.”
Lucy falls to one side, rolling over on the bed and staring at the soft blue light flickering across the ceiling of the bedroom. Dice rests his hand on her back, feeling her silk-like skin. He runs his hand down her body, enjoying the soft curves of her waist and hips.
Moonlight drifts in through the glass sliding doors leading to the patio. The lights are on in the swimming pool outside. The swimming pool. Dice was just thinking about a swimming pool, but he doesn’t know why. Then he remembers. He was thinking about the pool outside the high school gymnasium, not the one in the backyard of his friend’s place. And Venus. He was thinking about Venus, but not as a bright dot sitting low in the sky around sunset.
Light flickers with the waves rolling across the surface of the pool, causing streaks to form on the underside of the roof. Wave after wave curls across the ceiling, swirling and joining each other, creating peaks and troughs, lacking any hard edges. He’s seen this before in the clouds, but that thought confuses him. He watches, fascinated as the twists of light blend and disappear, reappearing and then vanishing from sight like mist over a lake.
Dice was thinking about something. Something important. Something a long way from the spare bedroom of John Morrow’s parents’ house. Outside, teens splash in the pool, enjoying John’s folks being away for the weekend. Music plays. The smell of pot drifts through the air.
“Coming?” Lucy asks, getting up and pulling on a dress.
“Oh, I just did,” he says, pointing at one of the pillows. She laughs and punches him lightly on the shoulder.
Dice gets to his feet and immediately falls over. He topples forward, only he’s outside and in daylight. Freshly cut green grass grows on one side of the driveway. A plastic toy tricycle careens ahead of him, toppling on the grass and hitting a tree near the road.
Dice sprawls on the concrete driveway, tumbling onto the grass. Skin is ripped from his palms. Stones are embedded in his knees. Pain tears through his body, shocking his mind. Tears rush from his eyes. He screams in agony.
“Richard!” His mother rushes to his side. Her pleated skirt sways back and forth. She doesn’t hesitate, grabbing him and clutching him to her breast, comforting him, holding him tight. “Easy. I’ve got you. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.” Blood stains her white blouse. Dice looks at his trembling hands. His palms are small. His fingers are stubby and short. Bits of dirt have worked their way under the torn skin. He cries.
His mother kneels in the grass, cradling him.
“What happened?” his father asks her, running up beside her, but she doesn’t reply. She comforts Dice, whispering in his ear, trying to calm him.
“Can you get some ice?” she asks her husband.
“Yes, yes,” he replies, turning and running up the concrete stairs into their old wooden home.
The sun is low on the horizon, lighting up the sky with golden streaks. The clouds. Dice looks at the clouds through tear-stained eyes. His breathing slows. In the midst of the surge of pain burning within the depths of his mind, it’s the clouds that distract him, not his young mother. The clouds remind him. The clouds call him back.
Dice blinks, and he’s standing on a black mirror tens of thousands of feet above the burning rocky surface of Venus. Fingers grip his gloved hand. His reflection stares back at him. He raises his eyes, looking at the alien opposite him.
Dice sees himself. The alien standing in front of him is now the spitting image of him. The eyes. The nose. The lips. Square jaw. Scar just below the hairline. It’s him. He’s looking at himself.
“I—I…”
“We had to know,” his doppleganger says to him.
“M—Me? About me? But...”
“It’s okay. Please. Have a seat.”
“A seat?” Dice asks, turning within his spacesuit and seeing a table and chairs. His table and chairs. He’s back in his apartment in Houston. The scratches on the table. The watermarks and stains on the old wood. He’s been meaning to sand back this table and polish it, but it’s more effort than it’s worth. There’s a clock on the wall that reads 3:20, but the second hand is frozen in time.
Dice isn’t sure what’s real and what’s a hallucination. He reaches for the chairback, expecting his hand to pass through the leather. The chair shifts with his touch. He pulls it back and sits at the table. As he’s wearing a life support backpack, he balances on the front edge of the cushion, but it feels good to sit down.
Dice rests his hand on the table. It’s real, but then, so were his memories. His alien doppelganger sits across from him. To one side, there’s his old gas stove and refrigerator. A picture of Suzanne is held on the white door with a magnet. The window on the opposite wall should open out onto a view of the street leading to the main road. From here, he should be able to see trucks crossing the intersection and the roof of the mall on the far side of the broad avenue. He should be able to hear the roar of cars running amber lights or horns sounding as drivers get frustrated waiting to turn into the mall, but there are only clouds. He looks up. There’s no ceiling—only the clouds of Venus rolling overhead.
Shadows fall around him, being cast by the underside of dense clouds as they drift overhead. Slowly, they part, allowing the brilliant copper sky to shine from above.
“You,” he says, struggling to catch up with reality. Having relived highs and lows from his life in fractions of a second, he’s still reeling. Dice wants to be professional. “You speak English.”
“So do you,” his doppleganger says with the same sense of humor he has, mirroring more than his physical characteristics.
Dice is scrambling mentally. He feels he needs to say something. He has to say something meaningful. “Ah, there’s so much we can learn from you.”
“No,” his opposite says, gently shaking his head. “No, there’s not.”
“But you know so much more than us. You can teach us.”
“You mistake what knowledge means,” his doppleganger says gently to him, resting his hands on the table, mirroring Dice. “You think knowledge is as simple as knowing that Paris is in France or one plus one equals two, but knowledge is more than facts. Knowledge demands reason.
“Look at us. We have watched you from afar for generations. We have listened to your radio. We have deciphered your video. We have monitored your technological progress. We have learned your languages. And yet we have learned nothing. Nothing before today.”
“I don’t understand.”
“To see inside your mind, to relive your memories, to experience your life, that has taught us more than an encyclopedia could hold, more than all the lectures on morals and philosophy.”
“But me? I’m no one.”
“You’re an astronaut.”
“I’m just one among eight billion.”
“You. All of you. All eight billion of you are unique. And yet you’re all the same. You all think and feel and hope and long for something more. Your minds are busy and yet focused.”
“But you could help us. You could teach us.”
“No one can teach you what you already know. You need to remember the things you’ve forgotten. The things you really want in life—love, wealth, power, peace—none of these mean anything if you don’t already have them within you.”
Sitting there, Dice feels as though he’s talking to his father once more. He looks up from where his gloved hands are resting on the table, and it’s his father sitting opposite him. He’s old and grey. His hair is thin and wispy. He’s wearing a New England Patriots t-shirt. His hands are wrinkled and worn.
“Knowledge is more than understanding physics or chemistry, history or philosophy. None of that means anything without application, without experience. Knowledge isn’t the end. It’s the beginning. Knowledge is a platform, a launch pad.”
His heart races. Those last few words were spoken by Suzanne. Dice blinks, and suddenly she’s sitting opposite him. She’s wearing her NASA blues, a set of flight overalls with the NASA meatball logo on one side and her surname embroidered on the other. Her fingernails are painted pink. Suzanne is wearing a gold friendship ring she’s had since high school. It’s all Dice can do not to think it’s really her sitting before him.
“We cannot teach you anything you don’t already know,” she says. “You don’t need to know more, you need to do more. You don’t need to understand what happens at a subatomic level; you need to understand what happens between your ears.”
“Why did you come here?” Dice asks, intrigued.
“Not to teach you. You can’t learn from us. You must learn for yourselves. If we were to teach you our ways, they would still be ours, not yours. You must find your own way.”
This is not what he wants to hear.
Dice hangs his head within his helmet. He feels overwhelmed. He sees a contradiction—people he knows sitting in his own home, yet sealed in the confines of his spacesuit. And deep down, he understands that this is deliberate on the part of the aliens. They want him to understand. The aluminum locking ring, the microphone, the sip straw for the suit’s drinking supply, the scratch pad for his nose, the metrics being displayed on the inside of his visor, they’re all the product of the same intelligence that crafted stone axes from flint, that struck them with precise blows to form a cutting edge, that learned how to skin an animal and dry the hide for use as clothing, that butchered meat to be cooked over a fire. A hundred thousand years may have passed, perhaps a million, and yet the problem-solving efficiency remains the same. The alien is right. It hasn’t come to deliver a cheat code, a get-out-of-jail-free card or a shortcut. Humanity has to face its own problems with honesty and resolve.
“I pity you,” his mother says.
“Me?” Dice replies, blinking, seeing his mother not as he left her on Earth in her seventies, but as she was when she was younger than he is now. Seeing her as no one has ever seen their mother—not as a parent, but as a peer, someone navigating their own way through life. This is his mother as she tended to his scraped hands and bloody knees.
What happened on the driveway on that sunny afternoon? Dice isn’t sure. Did he rush away from her and hurtle down the slope before she could catch him? Or was she human? Did she have a lapse in attention and not realize he could hurt himself? Did she blame herself for what happened? Either way, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that she learned from that moment, and that’s what allowed her to become the mother who guided him over the decades.
“You. Your species. Your nature. You cannot be content. You can never have enough.”
Dice nods. “We’re always looking for the next gold rush, huh?”
His mother taps her chest. “What you’re looking for is in here. What you’re missing has been inside you all along. There is no peace if you can’t find peace within yourself.”
“I understand.”
“You do,” Lucy says, reaching across the table and gently taking his gloved hands in hers. His high school sweetheart is sitting opposite him, wearing a baggy sweatshirt with Johns Hopkins written on it. Her older brother went to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, so the sweatshirt was easily two sizes too big for her, forcing her to roll up the sleeves. She was wearing this when they broke up. Dice feels rather than thinks. And this is what the aliens want. They want more than understanding; they want acceptance. “We’ve heard from your people, from Aaron and Jill. They’re sending a spacecraft for you. We will return you to orbit so you can return to your home.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“Others will come,” Lucy says. “They will sacrifice their memories, and we will tell them the same thing.”
“And Venus?” he asks. “What will you do here?”
“Take a look for yourself.”
Life
Dice gets up and walks forward. The walls of his apartment sink into the mirrored black surface of the alien vessel. The sky is bright, far brighter than noon on Earth. He squints and lowers his visor, reducing the glare around him.
Far from the clear blue skies of Earth, the vast, open expanse of Venus appears foggy in the distance. To his mind, the pale yellow-orange haze resembles the pollution of heavy industry. High above, thin clouds form long white streaks swirling with what must be the equivalent of the jet stream on Earth. The Sun is a white smudge, the blur of an intense spotlight glaring down on him, piercing the clouds.
Dice is in awe of the sights around him.
Something that surprises him is that there’s no horizon, as such. Instead, looking out across the distinct curve of the planet, the gloom fades to pink and then a muddy brown. As his eyes track down beneath the alien spacecraft, the gradient of color extends to reach what looks like dirty dishwater.
Dice stares into the hellish depths of Venus. If he didn’t know better, he’d assume he was floating among the clouds of a gas giant, as there’s no hint of land beneath him. In every direction he turns, the view out to the horizon is the same—dead flat, which is unnerving. There are no mountains, no lakes or rivers, no ocean or canyons. The vast open sky spreads itself over a dark, hollow void that seems to draw him in. But this isn’t the darkness of outer space. To him, the pitch black darkness that pervades the cosmos seems empty and eternal. Outer space is the deep, a hollow void punctuated with stars fighting off the night. Space seems to stretch on forever in all directions. In contrast, the looming depths of Venus appear dense and unforgiving. Dice has a sense of something malicious in the murky darkness beneath him. An inferno rages below. Hades awaits in the shadows.
As the gravity is similar to Earth’s, his gait is gentle and familiar, and it strikes him that he could easily be in some exotic virtual reality simulator back in Houston.
A foghorn sounds. It’s low and resonant, vibrating through his suit and into his bones. He turns and sees a sight that takes his breath away—a whale swimming through the air, rising from the depths beneath him, only the term whale fails to describe the majesty of the creature before him. At a guess, the behemoth is easily the size of a blue whale or perhaps larger. Its body is teardrop-shaped, resembling the hydrodynamics of a terrestrial cetacean. The sleek creature has a bulbous head. Its body tapers behind it, leading down to a thin, trailing tail. The kaleidoscope of colors on its skin defies reason.
As the leviathan rises beside the alien spacecraft, its skin shimmers in the light, causing a cascading rainbow of color to ripple over its hide. Instead of being one color, it’s all colors at once, depending on the angle at which it's seen. The portion closest to Dice appears red, but as its body curves, the gradient shifts to burnt orange, then golden yellow, followed by a deep sea green. On the fringes, there’s an iridescent blue. Rather than appearing one color or another, it’s as though a rainbow has been projected onto the canvas of its skin. As the creature slowly overtakes the spacecraft, the deep burgundy red spot remains closest to him. And he realizes it would look like this from all angles equally, reflecting the light around it like a disco ball.
