The Best of Nancy Kress (44 page)

“—just because the Navy doesn’t choose to admit that a UFO—”

“Last month it was transactional analysis.”

“That was different! If you’d just have an open mind—”

“With enough holes to fit the airtight case in?”

“That’s enough!” Kara shouted. She bolted upright in bed and clutched Casey’s grubby sheet around her. “You’re so superior, aren’t you, with your clever little wisecracks about my intelligence! Just because you’ve never seen one, they don’t exist, right? If
Jerry Casey
, great unpublished novelist, hasn’t personally seen and touched and goddamn tasted a UFO, then there’s no such thing. Of course not! No matter that hundreds of sightings have been reported, no matter that a respected witness right here in town saw a ship streaking over the woods, no matter that there doesn’t—if
Jerry Casey
didn’t see it, it doesn’t exist, because Jerry Casey is the great fictional expert on spaceships and galactic empires! If
Jerry Casey
, with three unpublished novels and the enormous authority of his sacred pile of rejection sl—”

Casey hit her. It wasn’t a hard slap, he didn’t know he was going to do it until he had, and instantly he regretted it more than he had ever regretted anything else in his life. Kara put her hand to her red cheek and turned away from him, the sheet twisting itself around her small striped breasts. Tears filled her eyes but did not fall. Casey put out one hand to touch her shoulder, but he couldn’t make the hand quite connect and it hung there, suspended between them, useless.

“Kara…oh God, Kara, I’m
sorry
.”

She didn’t answer. The sheet humped up over her thin legs. Something broke in Casey, something so light and delicate he hadn’t known himself that it was there, or what he would say when it wasn’t.

“Kara, listen, I’m sorry I hit you, so fucking sorry I don’t know how to say it. But, Kara, you don’t know, you
can’t
know, I’ve wanted there to be something out there since I was a kid, wanted it more desperately than anything else in my whole fucking life. I used to stand out there on the plains and squeeze my eyes shut and
will
them to be out there, to come down to me, because I was one of them. I knew it, so they had to know it, too. I made up whole stories, epics, about how I got left here by mistake and adopted by my parents, but they’d come back for me eventually. It was so real I could taste it, Kara, could shiver with it down to my bones, my marrow. It was like a religion, or an insanity. And I
still
would like to believe, would give fucking anything to believe, but I can’t. The evidence against it is just too strong. Do you know what the odds are that intelligent life would behave like…so I started to convince myself that the stories were just made up. I started to make them up, to write them down. Kara, it’s not ‘superiority,’ it’s not wisecracks, it’s…Kara, do you see what I’m talking about? Can you understand what I’m trying to mean? Kara?”

She didn’t answer. After a while he touched her. She put her head on his shoulder. He wiped her tears. She let him. He stroked her hair and apologized all over again. She said it was all right, looking pensive and thoughtful. He pulled the blanket protectively up to her chin. She lay still in his arms. He kissed her. She smiled. A few days later she called and said they should have a long talk. He never saw her again.

Paul Rizzo was getting married, and he wrote to invite Casey to the wedding. His bride was a fellow faculty member at Lunell College—an
assistant professor
, Rizzo wrote, underlining the words twice. She was also “the only child of a wealthy shoe polish entrepreneur.” Casey tried to figure out how you got really wealthy from shoe polish, couldn’t, and knew that this proved nothing. He wouldn’t have known how to become really wealthy if the process were detailed for him in heroic couplets. For all he knew, shoe polish was a rewarding and fulfilling way to make money enough to freshly wallpaper all the spare rooms in Montana. For all he knew, shoes and the right polish were what his life had been missing all along, the yin and yang of his universe’s deficiencies. For all he knew.

With his letter Rizzo had enclosed a picture of his fiancée, cut from the local newspaper which had announced their engagement. She looked pretty, if a little blurry. The invitation was embossed with blue-and-white doves swooping around a quotation from Keats.

Tramping along over the hard Montana snows on Christmas night, Casey tried to picture the wedding. There would be champagne, and sexy-coy toasts, and good food. There would be women—bridesmaids in silky dresses, Lunell professors with good minds, college-student relatives giggly and flushed with wine. The wedding was in April, over Easter recess, so the bridesmaids and professors and gigglers would have on spring dresses, light and bare. They would smell of flowery perfumes. They would dance on strappy, high-heeled sandals. They would talk to Casey on the dance floor, at the bar, on the church steps. And they would all ask him, eventually, what it was that he “did.” Or tried to do. Or was supposed to be doing.

Somewhere near the barns a cow lowed. Casey tramped up to his old flat rock, knocked the snow off it, and sat down. Overhead the stars blazed. He willed himself to concentrate on the stars, to forget the depressing mechanics of attending Rizzo’s wedding, the self-kept score sheets. He just wouldn’t think about it. Above him glittered Thekala, aka Aldebaran, aka The Red Terror. To the south and east shone Rigel, Sirius, Betelguese, Pollux, Procyon. The Orion Nebula, spawn ground of new stars. They used to pretend it was alive, like a queen bee. Only the southwest looked subdued, empty of all but the faint stars of Cetus. The sky there was a soft, even black, lustrous with reflected light, like….

Like shoe polish.

In January the ground froze so hard that no graves could be dug. People continued to die anyway, and their caskets were stacked, carefully labeled, in a brick vault to await a thaw. Casey was laid off. Nothing else seemed to be opening up in the cemetery line. So he took a job as a part-time janitor in a high school, nightly scrubbing anatomical impossibilities off lavatory walls with industrial-strength cleanser. He wrote.

In February, it snowed 52 inches, a century’s record. During the entire month the sky remained cloudy; if the stars had all simultaneously winked out, their light spent like so many weary philanderers, Casey wouldn’t have known it. He caught the flu and spent six days in bed, feverishly watching the barber pole revolve against the gray snow. He wrote.

In March, Dr. James Randall Stine, Chairman of the Graduate Committee and a widower for two years, announced his engagement to Miss Kara Phillips, a kindergarten teacher in the local public schools. Casey’s father called to just pass on the information that Marty Hillek’s father was looking around for someone with business sense to help him run the Holiday Inn. He wrote.

In April, a week before Rizzo’s wedding, Casey’s third attempt at a novel sold to a major publisher. It was about a galactic empire.

He leaped through the dark April woods, the letter in his hand, the ground inches below his feet. He was Pan with scriptorial pipes, Orpheus with graphic lyre, Caesar of the literary space ways. He was the god-child of intergalactic muses. He was the first person in the universe to publish a novel. He was the Pied Piper with hordes at his singing back, Circe with spells to drive men mad. He was drunk, but only partly on California champagne.

Running wildly through springtime smells unseen in the darkness, he held the letter before him and a little to one side, like a spear, brandishing it upward.

“See! See!” he called up between the trees, drunkenly flaunting his own theatricality. “See! See what I did about you! Look! Look!”

The stars glittered.

Casey stopped running and stood panting beneath a sugar maple, holding his side. He was Shakespeare, he was Tolstoy, he was Dreiser, he was a definite A. He could walk on spangle-colored planets forever, just as soon as his stomach lay still.

The stars glittered.

Across the sky the branches of the sugar maple slanted like bars. Gemini sliced in half, Dubhe divided from Merak. Through the bars the Milky Way looked broken, fitful, about to sever and recede even more, and it was already so far away, so high…so high…they were all so high…. For a dizzy second Casey put his hand on the tree trunk, searching for a foothold. But the second passed and he stood on the ground, half-trampled fern shoots under his worn boots.

The stars glittered.

Okay, so the universe doesn’t notice, hardly an original observation, Casey ol’ boy, got to do better than that. What’d you expect—a supernova? No romantic despair; cosmic self-pity strictly forbidden in moments of drunken triumph, on pain of triviality. No brooding, no self-indulgent self-incrimination. “A man’s reach should exceed….” so you’ve got a hell of a reach, kudos to you ol’ Jer, good to have a hell of a reach.
Supposed
to have a hell of a reach. Reach for a star a star is born born to boogie…oh, hell. I am not Prufrock, nor was meant to be—

Meant to be what?

Abruptly, he saw that he was not alone. Under the sugar maple, at the edge of the wide circle of branches, stood a child. A skinny, grubby boy, ten years old, gazing upward. Casey lurched forward, but the boy ignored him. Motionless except for his eyes, he was conquering distant, spangle-colored planets, and in his shining look, Casey saw, there was no longing; no one longs for what he already possesses. He was still, complete, but as Casey grabbed wildly to throttle that unbearable wholeness in the rapt face that he knew perfectly well was not there, the champagne heaved and he threw up into the trampled fern shoots. When he could finally wipe his mouth on his shirt tail, the boy was gone.

The stars glittered.

Casey stumbled back through the woods. In one small clearing he smelled lilacs, barely budded but sweet in the dark, and he turned his head away. Somewhere he lost the path. Scratched by brambles, scuffing the decay of last year’s leaves, he thrashed forward until the moon rose. It was easier, then, to walk, but the moonlit pattern of dark branches on the white letter made him squeeze his eyes shut, and it was thus that he tripped over the spaceship.

It wasn’t really, of course. The ship itself was a hundred feet away, dully black in the moonlight, circled with birch branches that had been pushed aside by its landing and had snapped back. Casey, sprawled on the ground over a foot-long, log-shaped…whatever it was, could almost feel the crack of those returning birch limbs on his back and shoulders. He reached under himself to feel the Whatever; it was hard and smooth, faintly vibrating. Unlike the boy, it did not vanish.

Unsuspected additional champagne churned in his stomach.

The ship was small; it could hardly be more than some sort of shuttle. Curved into flowing lines and embraced by budding trees, it looked weirdly beautiful in the night woods, weirdly right. Moonlight slid off the black surface, a deep rich black the color of loam. Leaves and ferns grew right up to where the ship rested on the forest floor. There was no burned patch, no sign that the ship had not always been there, would not always be there, a part of the ferns and birches, surrounded by the usual night rustlings and scamperings. An owl hooted.