Asimov's Science Fiction (10 page)

The one thing Zed was surest of was that he did not want to be his father.

"No," he said slowly, "I guess I don't hate the aliens."

"It's a complex subject because—"

Zed never heard why it was a complex subject because Isobel fell off the bed. She'd shifted her weight too far to the left and slipped off, and she must have landed on something sharp because she screamed: loud, piercing, high. She went on screaming and Zed leapt off the other side of the bed and called out something, he wasn't sure what. Before he could reach Isobel, or the light switch, or his wits, the door was flung open, light flooded the room, and Dr. Bellingham stood there in a vast pair of loose cotton pants, his face already turning purple.

"What the—oh, my God!"

Isobel had started to cry. "It hurts, oh it hurts...."

Zed cupped his hands over his penis, which helped not at all. Both of them naked, Isobel hurt and sobbing, the Bellinghams would think Zed had
raped
her—

They didn't. Mrs. Bellingham appeared behind the doctor and hissed at Isobel, "You little slut!" Dr. Bellingham flung the blanket over Isobel's nakedness and began reaching carefully under it to examine her back. Jonathan appeared in the doorway behind his mother. Zed pulled the sheet off the bed and draped it around him, his heart pumping so hard that no words would rise up past it.

Dr. Bellingham said, without looking up from Isobel, "Go, you. Go!"

Just what his mother had said to him yesterday. Zed pulled his things from the chest of drawers and frantically stuffed them into his dirty pillowcase. He grabbed his rifle. Still wearing the sheet, not looking at any of them, he sprinted down the stairs and outside. Behind a clump of bushes on the lawn, he dressed as fast as he could and ran down the empty street in the direction the street lamps ceased. He didn't know if Dr. Bellingham or Jonathan—well, no, not Jonathan, not that spindly intelligent body—would come after him with a gun. Still, it wasn't fear that drove him, but shame.

And loss. Once he was again in the familiar environment of a forest, Zed sank to his knees and put his head in his hands. He'd fucked up. He'd lost her.
Isobel, Isobel, Isobel...

Dawn rose behind him, red and gold, and the stars faded slowly from sight.

He headed south until he came to another town, bigger than Carlsville but not by much. Zed found a cornfield, maybe two acres, with too many weeds between the calf-high plants. He offered to weed in exchange for food and a place to sleep a few nights. The farmer, a middle-aged woman with a face like an old boot and kind eyes, looked him over and agreed. He worked until evening. She brought him lunch in the field and he had dinner with her family, three half-grown sons and a little girl. No husband. The family prayed before eating. No one mentioned aliens.

He slept, fitfully, in the barn, to the soft lowing of cows. He'd thought he might dream of Isobel, but instead he dreamed of his mother. He was a little boy again and she sat with him in summer woods beside their spring, teaching him the names of wildflowers: Queen Anne's lace, buttercup, Indian paintbrush. Abruptly the memory changed to terror as something huge and formless and black swarmed up the mountainside. His mother put herself between Zed and the horror, as she had never done with his father, but it made no difference: the sticky black goo drowned them both.

He worked the whole next morning, and she asked him to stay on for the summer. "I can't, ma'am," he said. "I'm sorry."

"There's someplace you need to be?"

"Yes, ma'am."

She studied him. "All right. But it don't look good to me. You got a transparent face, boy."

"Can you tell me which way the alien domes are?"

She didn't change expression. A long silence, followed by, "Don't do it."

"Don't—"

"Don't go near them aliens. You know what they done."

"Ma'am... it was sixty years ago."

"Don't matter if it was six hundred years ago. My grandparents died in Worcester, leaving my mother and uncle orphans."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't go there. You seem like a nice kid. Stay away."

He shook his head. She packed up some food for him. Just when Zed had decided she'd cut off all conversation, she said, "Take the road south till you get to Route 90. The signs are gone but you'll know it, it's the old highway. It goes east all the way to Boston, where the dome is. Be careful, there's stretches where the old cities used to be that are pretty lawless."

"I will. And thank you."

He was not a "nice kid," Zed reflected as he walked the road under the bright noon sun. He was rotten with lust, hollowed out by it like a fallen log by termites. He ached for Isobel. The only thing big enough and spectacular enough to get her out of him would be aliens.

Isobel, Isobel, Isobel...

And then, when he reached Route 90 in the early evening, she was there.

The old interstate Thruway was in places a mass of cracked and broken pavement. In other places, near or between towns, two lanes had been kept in repair by local governments. At greater Springfield, Sturbridge, and Worcester, the road was nearly impassable. At first the people in nearby towns were too busy grieving and surviving to go to the sites of the lost cities. Then some were too superstitious. Sturbridge, in particular, was rumored to be haunted. Trees grew up through the roadway. As trade between towns flourished, a well-worn dirt road, hard-packed, paralleled Route 90.

Both the United States and Massachusetts had nominal governments, but mostly because people wanted to keep the American traditions alive. Neither government had any power. The old saw from a hundred years earlier was reality: All politics were local. Law worked best in small locales, where everyone knew everyone else's business, or in huge ones, where the vanished cities had been populous enough to afford a small army of police, courts, lawyers, legislators, and prison guards.

Isobel, ghostly in the dusk, walked out of a clump of trees where the road from Carlsville met Route 90. At first Zed thought she was unreal, something he'd conjured up in his tired mind. Then she spoke. "I thought you'd never get here, Primitive Boy."

"Isobel... how...?"

"You think you're the only one who can leave home? Or wants to?" She walked close and pressed her body into his. "Did you miss me?"

He grabbed her and kissed her all over her face and hair and neck and shoulders. He thought he might cry. Her shoulders were knotted with tension, but her tone was all light sarcasm.

"Now, now, save it for later. We got to make a safe camp."

"How—"

"C'mon. Off the road."

She showed him the dirt bike she'd stolen from someone. He was shocked but said nothing. She showed him scrip (also stolen? He didn't ask), a lightweight tent, dried food, a handgun, and ammunition. He'd seen such things only in shop windows. They made camp, made a small fire, made love. Her back must have healed really quickly. When Isobel finally told him they could be at the dome in two or three days if the weather and the dirt bike held out, Zed didn't ask how she knew where he was going. He was too happy, and his entire life had taught him to not ask questions of stronger personalities than his own. You never got any answers.

Just before sleep, Isobel said, "You're sweet. Maybe the sweetest person I ever met."

"You, too," he mumbled, too sleepy to ask about the unfamiliar tone in her voice: reluctant regret.

The weather did not hold out. The bike did not hold out. No one in any of the towns they passed through had the parts to fix it. America had become adept at conserving and jerry-rigging anything manufactured, but the bike was just too old. Isobel kicked it hard, bruising her foot even through her boot. They walked, in rain.

She tired far more easily than Zed. Sometimes the rain was too heavy, or the road too potentially dangerous, to risk a fire. Then she shivered in the tent while Zed tried to warm her with blankets and sex. Usually it worked, or she said it did.

On the fourth day, the weather cleared. Isobel sent him to buy food in the largest town they'd come to yet. When he returned, laden with packages and triumphant with a rabbit he'd shot to roast, Isobel sat before their tent with three men. Zed dropped his packages and reached for his.22. But she saw him, rose, and beckoned him forward.

"Zed! Look—my cousins!"

They didn't look like cousins. Older, unsmiling, faces closed as rock, they reminded Zed of his father. The oldest, maybe forty, held out his hand.

"Hi, Zed. I'm Gary. Isobel radioed us that you two were here."

Radioed? Isobel had a radio? Zed knew that once there had been a whole system of phones you could hold in your hand, of televisions and computer stations (or whatever they'd been called), of satellites in orbit that made communications instantaneous even across oceans. Then the nerve centers for these things, the TV stations and cell towers and servers and launch sites, had gone. The artifacts remained and some had been gotten working again, for local TV and rerouted cell networks and small servers. The problem, as with the dirt bike, had been parts. The factories, American and foreign, no longer existed. A few electronic geniuses, mostly young, had concentrated on cannibalizing computers and some still worked. Zed had heard that in some places factories were producing TVs again, and TV shows. Everybody else made do with crystal radios. Even his father had had one, so he would know when the aliens made their second assault on humanity. Once a month, he tested the radio.

"Isobel, why didn't you tell me that—"

"Gary says there's trouble ahead. Outlaws. He and Luke and Dave came to take us the rest of the way to the dome. They have a truck."

Zed saw it, then, parked just under cover of the trees, seventy years old and still running due to fanatical care and parts cannibalized from other vehicles. It ran on corn alcohol now, but it ran. He and Isobel had passed a surprising number of cars on the road. Small towns were more likely to have spare parts for cars than for cell towers or orbital satellites.

"Get in," Gary said. "Isobel already loaded your gear. We can be there before morning."

"I—"

"Come on, Zed!" Isobel said happily. "We're almost there!" She took his hands and smiled.

He couldn't resist her. Maybe these guys were her cousins. They must be, or why would they be so eager to help? Jealousy was silly; she was his, all his, she'd risked her life, practically, to be with him. Anyway, they were too old for her.

Zed climbed into the back of the truck. He held Isobel close and fell asleep. When he woke just after dawn, the truck had stopped and he was alone. He got out, holding his.22, calling for Isobel. And stopped cold.

A few feet from him stood the alien dome.

It wasn't what he had expected. He'd vaguely imagined his mother's mixing bowl turned upside down, only made of tingling energy instead of ancient plastic. This wasn't clear, wasn't curved, didn't tingle. Opaque and black, it rose straight up into the air taller than all trees; it stretched as far in both directions as he could see. Any curve must be really gradual, which meant the dome enclosed a huge area. When Zed touched it, it felt solid, slick, and hard.

It was real. He was here. He, Zed Larch, touching the alien dome created by beings from the stars.

Isobel exploded into view from the other side of the truck. "Oh, good, you're awake, we have to go now! Right this minute, before the battle!"

Battle? Zed saw no signs of battle, heard nothing but the first morning birds, warning everybody away from their territory, their mates, their insects. Isobel grabbed his hand and pulled him into a run alongside the alien wall. It made an abrupt, sharp turn—whoever had called this a "dome" was crazy—and there stood a serious camp. Large olive-green tents, open-sided lean-tos with wood stoves, an American flag on a tall pole in the middle, guards with guns.

"Earthers," Isobel whispered. "To prevent anyone going in. Be very quiet. We only paid off the night guards. Shhh!"

Three men with guns stood between the camp and the wall. There was no one else in sight. The breeze shifted, carrying to Zed's nostrils a thick, coppery odor.

Gary, Luke, and Dave nodded at the guards. Unsmiling, they stepped aside. Isobel tugged on Zed's hand.

"Wait," he whispered. "Isobel—wait. What's happening?"

"We're going inside!"

"But how... who...
wait.
"

Gary said, "Hey, this isn't really the time to discuss logistics, you know?"

They were hurrying him along, body and mind. Zed didn't like it. He planted his feet apart and talked directly at Isobel. "Who goes inside? All of us?"

"No, no, they're too old—I thought you
knew.
Everybody knows!"

Zed didn't flinch at her tone. Not this time. "You have to be young to go in?"

"Yes, yes—Zed, let me by, I have to stand by the gate!"

All her self-assurance had fled; she was frantic. Zed caught her shoulders and held her. "How do you know what to do?"

"Do you think we're the first? Zed, come on, we have to hurry, before the camp wakes up and stops us!"

"That's what they're here for? To stop us?" He looked over her shoulder at the quiet camp, the guards who had been bribed to break the rules. Birds shrilled. The wind picked up and he caught again the coppery odor.

Gary said, "Shit—they're waking up!"

Zed hadn't seen anything but he let Gary dart past him and lean into the black wall. Isobel yanked Zed around to face the dome. Low to the ground, a square hole opened, no more than three feet tall and three wide. In it, mist swirled. Isobel tore herself from his grasp and dropped to the ground.

Zed caught at her hair. "No, me first—it might be dangerous!"

Isobel hesitated but then said, "Okay."

Zed got down on all fours, still holding his rifle. He couldn't see anything through the mist. Fear blossomed in him like a lily, chalky white, but not as vibrant as his excitement. He was going into an alien dome. He was going with Isobel, whom he would protect. It was really happening.

The mist felt like nothing at all, not even droplets of moisture. He emerged into a perfectly featureless cube of a room, maybe ten feet square. No windows or doors. Nothing. His.22 was gone.