Asimov's SF, January 2012 (5 page)

Rachel talked about the stars. About where we were, thousands and thousands of light years from Earth. Talked about working out in the desert. The dust devils that could blow up out of nowhere and smash and scatter your camp in half a minute. The hive rats that would swarm you if you put so much as one bootprint on their territory. The ghostly eidolons that inhabited certain tombs. The stark emptiness and silence of the land. The weight of centuries and centuries of inscrutable alien history. The Jackaroo had gifted this world to at least a dozen species of aliens before us. All were gone, now. They'd dwindled, or changed, or simply moved on, and we knew almost nothing about their stories. We only had what they'd left behind, and we didn't really understand any of it. We were the latest in a long series of experiments, Rachel said, and I thought of course of the !Cha, Useless Beauty. I asked her if she knew it, and she said that the first time she'd seen it was when she'd come into the roadhouse, seen me talking with it at the bar.

"But I didn't take much notice,” she said. “I was watching you."

"That's nice."

"I mean it. I saw something in you. Something I recognized."

"Yeah."

"We knew each other before we met,” she said.

We watched the stars. Their pale cold light fallen like frost on the playa, on the small and scattered shapes of the ruins.

At last, I asked her about the stone. Why it was important to her.

She told me that it was one of the things that had been stolen from her by her business partner. Something she hadn't thought about since, because she hadn't realized at the time that it was important. It was a nice example of the kind of shaped stone found in and around the tombs that harbored eidolons, nothing more than that. Worth maybe a hundred dollars. There were thousands of them, all chipped from the same seam of rock on some asteroid in the inner belt.

"I didn't know it when I first picked it up, but it spoke to me,” she said. “And then it was stolen, along with everything else. I didn't think about it again until I came to Mammoth Lakes. Maybe it drew me there. I don't know. It definitely drew me to the museum. To the case where it sat with a hundred others like it. All of them dead and silent, except this one,” Rachel said, thumbing the curve the stone made in the bottom of her bag. “I didn't know until I saw it. Until I recognized it. I have a good memory. I remember every one of my finds."

"What did it say? When it spoke to you."

"Do you think I'm crazy?"

"I think we're both crazy."

Rachel was staring out of the windshield at the starlit necropolis. I waited for her to speak. I didn't much care why we here, to be straight with you. Or where we were going. I only knew that I was glad to be there. In that moment. In a stolen pickup that smelled of pizza. A gun digging into the small of my back. The freedom of not knowing what came next.

At last, Rachel said, “We call them soul stones. We think they're imprinted with some kind of quantum structure that generates eidolons. If you take away every soul stone you can find in a tomb, its population of eidolons is reduced. Not eliminated, so there's something else going on, but definitely reduced."

"By eidolons you mean I guess the dead. Dead aliens."

"If that's what eidolons are, yes. But we don't know that. They may be servants, memorializing the dead. Remnants of some kind of ceremony of interment. Representations of particular memories. We impose our stories on things aliens left behind, but we can't ever know the truth. What they really were, what they meant to those who made or owned them, how they were used . . ."

"But you know that it wants to go back."

"After we're finished here, we'll be free. We can do anything we like."

"It'll probably end badly."

"There's a song on ‘Nebraska.’ You know ‘Nebraska'?"

"It's the only one of his I really liked. It had a lo-fi emo thing going for it."

But I was thinking about a different Springsteen song, from a different album.

Rachel said, “This one is about Charlie Starkweather, who killed a bunch of people to impress his girlfriend. It's a true story. There's a film of it, a good one. The song starts off about the movie version of the real story, and goes beyond both of them. It ends with Charlie on trial, asking the judge if he can have his girlfriend sit on his lap when he's strapped in the electric chair."

"My dad had this tribute CD. Chrissie Hynde sang that song."

"I like that version."

"I like it better than the original,” I said.

We drove back to the motel. We watched TV. We fucked. There was an edge of desperation to it. We slept. In the morning, we drove to a short strip mall at the southern end of the little town. Bought potato chips and bottles of water and a few other things in a minimart, had breakfast in a diner. Rachel studied every vehicle that came and went in the parking lot. When a van parked in front of the souvenir store that anchored one end of the little strip mall, she told me to drink up my coffee, we had people to see, things to do.

The van's driver had raised the mesh shutters of the storefront and was unlocking the door when we walked up. A middle-aged overweight guy with pale hair combed sideways over his pate, strands fluttering in hot wind. He smiled at Rachel, asked her if she was working.

"I found a new partner,” Rachel said.

"So I see."

The guy gave me an up-and-down glance. I smiled. The excitement was back. A parched taste in my mouth. A fat lazy hum in my head.

Rachel patted her bag, told the guy she had something for him.

"One of your specials?"

"Definitely."

"You want the right price, Rach, you know you've come to the right place."

"Why don't you unlock that door so we can talk inside?"

What she did when the guy opened the door was follow him inside and shoot him in the back of his head. One shot, all it took. There was hardly any blood: the bullet stayed in his skull. He dropped straight down and she stepped over him and used the butt of her gun to smash the glass top of the counter that ran along one side of the dim and cluttered store.

"Give me a hand,” she told me. “Scatter things about. Make it look like a robbery."

"Isn't that what it is?"

Rachel threw a handful of small white pebbles on the floor, kicked them around, reached in for more. “It's a diversion,” she said.

We spent a few minutes trashing the place. Grabbing alien trinkets from cabinets and scattering them across the floor. Pulling down a display of digging tools with a satisfying clatter. Tossing camping gear and T-shirts everywhere. Stamping on little wooden carvings of tombs. Smashing snow globes with plastic models of tombs sunk inside water.

As we left, Rachel tripped the alarm. We drove off to the sound of bells. People stood at the plate-glass window of the diner, watching us go.

Rachel was at the wheel, driving fast, driving straight out of town down a two-lane blacktop that cut north across the playa, turning off down a dirt road that climbed a low range of hills and cut between Boxbuilder ruins.

Within an hour, we'd left all trace of civilization behind, driving along tracks and gullies, across stretches of sand rippled by the wind, around a small fleet of crescent dunes. Deeper and deeper into the City of the Dead.

I didn't ask why she'd killed the storeowner, figuring that it was payback for some old grudge. Maybe he'd helped her ex-partner cheat her, or maybe he'd cheated her himself, once upon a time. I told myself it was none of my business. I told myself I was along for the ride, ready to help out when she needed it. And when she was done, we'd take off into new adventures.

We drove most of the day. Taking turns. Stopping now and then to look back at where we'd been, see if we were being followed. Eating and drinking at the wheel. The heat and the glare of the sun were brutal. I worried about running out of bottled water. I worried about running out of gas, kept the air-con low. Rachel didn't object, even though it grew so hot in the pickup's cabin that sweat evaporated straight off our skin. Whenever I took my turn at the wheel, Rachel got out her phone and checked it, then eased back, tipped the brim of the baseball cap she'd taken from the store over her eyes, and spoke only to tell me which way to go, or to remind me to skirt wide of rare patches of greenery: hive-rat gardens. Drive into one of those, she said, we might sink hub-deep in one of their tunnels, and their soldiers would open the pickup like a tin can.

In the middle of the afternoon, I heard a helicopter fluttering off in the distance. Here, there. After a couple of minutes, I glimpsed a distant glitter as it turned in the empty dark blue sky. We parked under a bank of coral trees that stretched scarlet, scaly limbs over the ruins of tombs shaped a little like old-fashioned beehives. While Rachel went off to take a leak, I watched the helicopter turn and turn again in the distance. At last, it cut away on a long eastward slant, and we set off again.

It was getting dark. The desert was waking around us. I saw a long sleek creature with eight legs slinking under brush, mouth long and narrow and crowded with teeth. A dire wolf, Rachel said. I saw a gout of things like bats made of crumpled tissue-paper spurt from a hole in the ground, twisting like smoke against the vast sunset. I saw something like a centipede the size of a python moving trainlike through the brush.

At last, Rachel drove the pickup over a low ridge that cupped a small U-shaped arroyo where a tomb sat in the middle of a spiral of stone walls. Rachel drove down the slope and pulled up at a broken part of the walls and we climbed out into the dusky air and dry heat. She was carrying a four-cell flashlight and had a sleepy look, but managed a small smile when I asked her if she was okay.

"We're almost done,” she said.

I followed her through narrow winding roofless passages squeezed between the walls, to the entrance of the tomb. It was a ramp that sloped down into a well of black air under a domed roof overgrown with scrub. Bushes had grown up from old stumps around the entrance. There was a broken shovel and a sun-bleached plastic jerry can and other debris scattered about.

Rachel clicked on her big flashlight, used a broken branch to rake the bushes. When nothing jumped out at her, she pushed through and scrambled down the ramp. I followed her into a square dry space. Blocks of stone fallen from the vaulted ceiling tipped here and there on gritty black sand. Shadows shifted around us as Rachel pointed the flashlight here and there. Some of them kept moving after the beam of light had passed. Small figures emerging from angles and cracks in the stone-block walls, about the size of spider monkeys I'd seen at the Milwaukee zoo, one of Dad's less inspired post-divorce outings.

With a sound like whispering in a far-off room, the eidolons stepped toward us. Nudging each other, twisting their hands together. They were as pale as cigarette smoke. Bands of tiny black eyes set above sphincter-like mouths turned to Rachel as she walked queen-like among them. Watching as she took out the soul stone and set it on the floor. When she stepped back, the eidolons flocked around the stone, pawing at it but never quite touching it.

There seemed to be more of them, suddenly, but it was hard to tell because they crowded so close together, wavering in and out of each other, faintly luminescent. I thought of cats, feeding.

"That's it,” Rachel said. Her voice flat and small in that vaulted space.

"That's it? What about the stuff ? The alien treasure?"

"It's somewhere else. Really."

We stood looking at each other, half-lit by the splash of the flashlight's beam.

I said, “I just want to be with you. You and me against the world. But no more stories about treasure. Okay?"

"We're nearly at the end of this story,” Rachel said. She had that dreamy look again, but she spoke with clear certainty. “The stone is back where it wants to be."

"So we can go."

"Yes. We can go."

We were about halfway around the spiral of the labyrinth when Rachel pointed at the sliver of dark sky pinched between the walls. I looked up, and that's when she cold-cocked me. Hit me behind the ear with a solid blow from her flashlight, caught me on top of my head when I went down. I heard her say something. I'd like to think it was an apology. I heard her footsteps crunch on sand and grit, moving away. And that's all I knew for a while.

The man paused. He sat on the bunk bed that hinged out from one wall of the small death-row cell. He wore orange coveralls and his head was shaven and his stubble was dark against his pale skin. He told the alien, “I guess you know the rest."

"I am interested in every part of your story,” the !Cha said.

His tank squatted low against the opposite wall, overtopped by the joints of its spindly legs. Fluorescent lights caged in the steel ceiling and in the steel walls picked highlights from the tank's black cylinder. There were no shadows anywhere, apart from a small one crouched under the bunk bed.

"It isn't really my story. It's hers. I was there, I went along, I did what I did. I never denied that. Never cared not to. I did what I did,” the man said, with a sudden jut of defiance. “I shot that old guy. The guard. And I was responsible for the kid dying. When we left them, we meant for both of them to get free, but I hit him too hard. He was bleeding inside his skull. Went into a coma and never came out of it. So that's on me too. And I was there when she did her killing too, and never tried to stop her."

"And yet you are here, and she is not."

"I told you I'd tell you my story if I could ask a couple of questions. Here's the first. Your friend, Useless Beauty. He put her up to it, didn't he?"

"He is not a friend."

"You could be him. Those tanks all look the same . . . All you have to do is call yourself something else. Unlikely Worlds, say. Who would know?"

"I call myself Unlikely Worlds because that is the name I took when I came here. Useless Beauty is my rival. We compete for the same things."

"Whatever. He did a number on Rachel, didn't he?"