The Fountain of Age (38 page)
Inside—inside
what
?—I was too stunned to do more than grab Not-Too, hang on, and gasp. The gap closed. The saucer rose.
After a few minutes, I sat up and looked around. Gray room, filled with dogs in their cages, with grubs in theirs, with noise and confusion and the two robots. The sensation of motion ceased. I gasped, “Where . . . where are we going?”
Blue answered. “Home.”
“
Why
?”
“The humans do not behave correctly.” And then, “What to do now?”
We were leaving Earth in a flying saucer, and it was asking
me
?
Over time—I have no idea how much time—I actually got some answers from Blue. The humans “not behaving correctly” had apparently succeeding in breaching one of the Domes somewhere. They must have used a nuclear bomb, but that I couldn’t verify. Grubs and dogs had both died, and so the aliens had packed up and left Earth. Without, as far as I could tell, retaliating. Maybe.
If I had stayed, I told myself, the soldiers would have shot me. Or I would have returned to life in the camp, where I would have died of dysentery or violence or cholera or starvation. Or I would have been locked away by whatever government still existed in the cities, a freak who had lived with aliens, none of my story believed. I barely believed it myself.
I
am
a freak who lives with aliens. Furthermore, I live knowing that at any moment Blue or Green or their “masters” might decide to vaporize me. But that’s really not much different from the uncertainty of life in the camp, and here I actually have some status. Blue produces whatever I ask for, once I get him to understand what that is. I have new clothes, good food, a bed, paper, a sort of pencil.
And I have the dogs. Mangy still doesn’t like me. Her larva hasn’t as yet done whatever it will do next. Not-Too’s grub grows slowly, and now Ruff has one, too. Their three puppies are adorable and very trainable. I’m not so sure about the other seventeen dogs, some of whom look wilder than ever after their long confinement in small cages. Aliens are not, by definition, humane.
I don’t know what it will take to survive when, and if, we reach “home” and I meet the alien adults. All I can do is rely on Jill’s Five Laws of Survival:
1: Take what you can get.
2: Show no fear.
3: Never volunteer.
4: Notice everything.
But the Fifth Law has changed. As I lie beside Not-Too and Ruff, their sweet warmth and doggie-odor, I know that my first formulation was wrong. “Feel nothing”—that can take you some ways toward survival, but not very far. Not really.
Law #5: Take the risk. Love something.
The dogs whuff contentedly and we speed toward the stars.
The uniformed military aide appeared at her elbow just as Katherine Taney rose from her gilded chair to enter the Oval Office. “The president will see you now,” his secretary said simultaneously with the aide’s statement, “Wait a moment, Katie.”
She turned to stare at him. Keep the
president
waiting? But his face told. For a moment vertigo nearly took her, a swooping blackness, but only for a moment. She said quietly to the aide, “Another one?”
“Two more. Possibly three.”
Dear God.
“Ma’am,” chided the secretary, “the president is ready.”
She straightened her aging back, thought a quick prayer, and went to brief the commander-in-chief. No, not really to brief—to plead, with the war-battered United States government, for compassion in the face of the unthinkable.
In the beginning, Li remembered, there had been big faceless people, white as cartoons. These memories were quick and slippery, like dreams. The other children didn’t have them at all. Since that time, there had been only the real cartoons, the world, and Taney.
He had realized a long time ago that Taney was a person inside a white cartoon covering, and that he himself was a person inside the world, another covering. The world must also have an outside because when Taney left after each visit, she couldn’t have stayed for days in the space behind the leaving door. The space was too small, not even room to lie down to sleep. And what would she eat or drink in there until she came back? And where did she get the fried cakes and other things she brought them?
“There’s another door, isn’t there, Taney?” he said yet again as the five of them sat around the feeder in the Grove. The feeder had just brought up bowls of food, but no one except Sudie was eating them because Taney had brought a lot of fried cakes in a white bag. Sudie, always greedy, had eaten three fried cakes and half a bowl of stew and now slumped happily against a palm tree, her naked belly round and her lips greasy. Jana sat with her knees drawn up to her chin, her thin arms clasped around her legs. Kim stared at nothing.
Li repeated, “Another door. You go out of the world through another door, don’t you?”
“I can’t answer that,” Taney said, as always. The girls didn’t even glance at her. Li didn’t expect them to; he was the only one who ever questioned Taney.
But tonight Jana, still gazing over her clasped knees at the shadow of trees against the sky, said, “Why can’t you answer, Taney?”
Taney’s head swiveled toward Jana. It was hard to see Taney’s eyes through the faceplate on her white covering; you had to get very close and squint. The cartoons covered like Taney didn’t even have eyes, no matter how much you squinted at them.
There hadn’t been any new cartoons for a long while.
Taney finally said, “I can’t answer you, Jana, because the world keeps you safe.”
The old answer, the one they’d heard all their lives from Taney, from the cartoons. For the first time, Li challenged it. “How, Taney? How does the world keep us safe? Sudie still fell over that stone and you had to come and fix her arm. Jana ate that flower and all her food came out of her mouth.” The next day, all of that kind of flower, all over the world, had disappeared.
Taney merely repeated, “The world keeps you safe.”
Sudie said suddenly from her place against the tree, “Your voice is sad, Taney.”
Jana said, “When will we get new cartoons?”
But Taney was already getting to her feet, slow and heavy in her white covering. Even Kim knew what that meant. Kim climbed onto Taney’s lap and started to lick frantically at Taney’s face, and it took both Sudie and Li to pull her back. Kim was tall and strong. Taney said, as always, “Be well, dear hearts,” and started away.
Li, clutching the screaming Kim, watched Taney walk the path between the trees until he couldn’t see her anymore. The leaving door was in a big pink rock at the small end of the world, near the pond. Maybe tomorrow they would splash in the pond. That might be fun.
Except that nothing was as much fun as it used to be. Li didn’t know why, but it was true.
Eventually Kim stopped screaming and they let her go. Jana folded and refolded the white paper bag Taney had left her, making pretty shapes. The sky overhead and beside the Grove darkened. The feeder with its three untouched bowls and one empty one sank into the ground. The blankets rose, clean even though last night Kim had shit hers again.
The four children wrapped themselves in blankets and lay down on the grass. Within minutes all were asleep in the circling grove of antiseptic palm trees that produced no fruit, and whose fronds never rustled in the motionless air.
“Two-and-a-half enclosed acres. Double-built dome construction, translucent and virtually impenetrable. Negative air pressure with triple filters. Inside, semi-tropical flora, no fauna, monitors throughout. Life-maintenance machinery to be concentrated by the east wall within a circle of trees, including the input screen. All instructional programs to feature only cartoon characters in biohazard suits, to minimize curiosity about other people.”
Katherine said, “Two-and-a-half acres isn’t sufficient for a self-sustaining biosphere.”
“Of course not, ma’am,” the high-clearance, DOD engineer said, barely concealing his impatience. “An outside computer will control all plant-maintenance and atmospheric functions.”
“And personnel?”
“Once the biosphere is up and running, it will need little human oversight. Both functional and contact personnel will be your agency’s responsibility. Our involvement extends only to the construction and maintenance of the cage.”
“Don’t call it that!”
The engineer, whom Katherine knew she should be thanking instead of reprimanding, merely shrugged. His blue eyes glittered with dislike. “Whatever you say, ma’am.”
Three days later, Taney didn’t come.
It was her
day
. But lunch came up on the feeder, and then dinner, and then the sky got dark, and the leaving door never opened. Kim sat staring at it the whole day, her mouth hanging open until Jana pressed it closed. Kim couldn’t talk or do much of anything, but somehow she always knew when it was Taney’s day. So she sat, while the others splashed in the pond and pretended to have fun.
All at once the water in the pond gave a small hiccup and sloshed gently onto the sandy beach.
“Did you feel that?” Sudie said. “The ground moved!”
“Ground can’t move,” Li said, because he was the leader. But it had. He waited for the ground to do something else but it just lay there, ground under water. Li got out of the pond.
“Where are you going?” Jana said.
“Feeder time,” Li said, although it wasn’t.
They pulled Kim to her feet and ran. By the time they reached the grove, their naked bodies were dry. Li could feel his hair, which Taney sometimes cut, curling wetly on the back of his neck. Jana’s hair, shorter than his, stood up in yellow fluff that Li liked. Maybe Jana would want to play bodies with him tonight.
They sat in a circle under the trees, hungry and pleasantly tired from splashing in the pond. Sudie studied the keypad under the screen, each with a little picture on it, and chose the cartoon about four children helping each other to make sand paintings. Li was tired of that cartoon, although when it first appeared, they’d all loved it. Days and days had been spent making sand paintings with the many-colored sands on the beach by the pond.
The cartoon played, but only Kim really watched it. The feeder rose and—
“The bowls are empty!” Jana cried.
Li leaped up and examined the four wooden bowls.
Empty
. How could that be? Why would the feeder bring empty bowls?
The ground moved gently beneath them.
“The feeder is broken!” Sudie jumped up and ran to the keypad. Each of its buttons had a picture of a cartoon showing the right thing to do for eating, for playing, for cleaning themselves, for fixing bloody scratches if they fell, for not using up all their kindness if they got angry with each other. But nothing for a broken feeder, a thing that couldn’t happen because the feeder was part of the world. But if there was an inside to the covering that was the world and therefore an outside then maybe—Li had never thought this before—maybe the feeder, like Taney, went outside and things
could
break there?
Cold slid along Li’s neck. Kim started licking everyone’s face, running from one to another. Li let her because Kim was stronger than he was and anyway he was used to it.
“I’m calling Taney,” Sudie said, but she looked questioningly at Li. Calling Taney was, they had all been told over and over, very serious. The only times they’d ever called her was when Sudie broke her arm and when Jana ate the bad flower and all her food came back up through her mouth. Only twice.
“Do it,” Li said, and Sudie pushed at the exact same time both buttons with Taney’s picture.
Katherine sat very erect, the back of her best suit not touching the back of her chair, her face stone. A secret congressional hearing didn’t scare her, veteran of far too many. But what this particular committee might decide, did.
“Dr. Taney, are they, in your expert opinion, the result of deliberate genetic experimentation?”
“Of course they are, Mr. Chairman.”
“And intended by the enemy for use as a covert terrorist weapon against the United States?”
“The enemy does not inform me of its intentions.”