The Spaceship Next Door (10 page)

That opinion was actually shared to a certain degree by everyone there. A kind of cognitive dissonance was taking place among these (as Annie called them) experiencers, whereby the spaceship actually had done a thing and they were already living in the aftermath of that thing. In that sense, they had a little more in common with Ed—who thought the ship actually was having an impact on the collective psyche of the town—than he was fully comfortable admitting to. But their version of ‘done something’ and his varied drastically.

One particularly impressive iteration of this theme was espoused by a man named Gunter, who was convinced the world effectively ended when the ship landed and everyone was living in a kind of
Matrix
-like artificial reality. His proof was that he could find no proof, which proved the program was so seamless it could only be designed by a superior alien intellect.

Laura and Oona were a little less dramatic, but only a little. Their camper, normal-looking on the outside, was a reinforced tank on the inside, with a bomb-shelter store of canned goods and at least ten guns. Ed didn’t know much about guns but was pretty sure two or three of the ones they had weren’t legal for private ownership.

Annie made the introductions, and then went into the preamble.

“Mr. Somerville is doing a story on the ship, but what he’s really looking for is the whole picture. Everything, just from your perspectives. Like, when you got here, what you’re here for, what you’ve seen, what you think. All that stuff.”

“Sounds like a goof hunt,” Oona said.

Oona described herself as ‘the big butch dyke of the Sorrow Falls’, which appeared to be a deliberate attempt to embrace what might be said about her behind her back. She was a heavyset woman with a buzz cut, wearing an appreciable quantity of studded brown leather.

“It’s not a goof hunt,” Annie said. “He’s talking to everyone in town, I just brought him here first.”

“What’s your part in this sweetie?” Laura asked. Laura introduced herself as a ‘lipstick lesbian’, but was only stereotypically effeminate in contrast to Oona. She was more petite, certainly, and kept her hair longer. The hair even had a barrette with a plastic flower. But she favored the same leather clothing; she just wore it a little better.

“Tour guide. Mr. Somerville’s interested in the people nobody’s talked to before, and not the ones
everybody’s
talked to. I know everyone, so…”

Laura laughed. “You sure do.”

“Still sounds like a goof hunt,” Oona said.

“I’m sorry,” Ed said. “What is a goof hunt?”

“It’s when a reporter shows up and promises a fair perspective, then goes on back to New York or wherever they’re from and writes up a goof piece.
Look at what these dummies believe
. That’s a goof hunt.”

“Oh. No, this won’t be anything like that. Promise.”

“Well I don’t trust you, mister.” Oona turned to Annie. “This is on you, girlie.”

“You won’t see any goof stories coming from Ed,” Annie said. “I promise.”

“All right. So what do you want to know?”

“Hey, we should tell him about the thing,” Laura said.

Oona glared at Laura. Laura was either oblivious or deliberately ignoring her partner.

“Something cool started happening about six weeks ago,” she said to Annie and Ed.

Annie said, “we can just start at the beginning and—”

“Actually, let’s start there,” Ed interrupted. “What happened six weeks ago?”

Annie shot Ed a look, and all of a sudden there were three conversations going on at once in the trailer, and only one of them was a verbal conversation.

“Nothing,” Oona said, her eyebrows screaming at Laura.

“Oh, for goodness sake, if we keep secrets we’re just as bad as
they
are.” The ‘they’ was conveyed as meaning the government but, tellingly, she pointed at Ed when she said it. “Come on, you guys, let’s go to the roof, I’ll show you.”

T
he only way
to the roof was up an internal ladder, which distinguished Oona and Laura’s trailer from all the others Annie was familiar with.

It was easy to understand why the women preferred this design: their roof was a gun tower. A three-foot wall augmented the edge, making it possible to crouch down and—assuming the wall could stop bullets—hide from an attack on the ground, and there were four rifles mounted on hooks at strategic points. A Gatling gun would not have been entirely out of place.

Annie had never been to their roof before, and only really seen it from a distance, from Gunter’s roof two spots over. (Gunter was nuts, but he was also really nice.) It drove home the paranoia she’d seen in small doses before from the women.

“It’s over here,” Laura said, attracting the attention of a suddenly eager Edgar Somerville. This was an enormous annoyance to Annie, although she couldn’t say why. She already knew he wasn’t telling her things, because he told her specifically he couldn’t, so there were no surprises here. Still, this was the first time he’d responded this way. Dobbs thought the ship moved two inches a few days ago, Johnny Nguyen insisted he saw the ship alter the migratory patterns of geese ten days ago, and Mika and Morrie said the ship’s aura turned ‘more purplish’ fifteen days back. Ed didn’t even raise an eyebrow then.

What happened six weeks ago, Edgar?
she thought.

“What’s all this do?” Ed asked Laura, referring to a large bank of equipment. Already, they had seen multiple arrangements of electronic toys. Ed asked the same question each time, and the answer was almost always disappointing. Either what the equipment did wasn’t all that interesting, or it would have been interesting if it did what the owner thought it did.

Behind them, Oona lumbered up the ladder. She fit through the opening only barely. It was close enough for Annie to wonder if they had plans on either widening the hole or reducing the size of the owner any time soon.

“Well, it’s pretty basic. I know we’ve got, what, a hundred gadgets pointed at that thing, right? Altogether?” She looked to Annie for affirmation. She was still ignoring Oona, who was actively glowering in a way that would have made angry Earl proud.

“At least a hundred,” Annie agreed. “Plus the ones on the other side of the fence.”

“Right, the government sensors. That’s some state-of-the-art stuff, isn’t it Mr. Somerville?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You should know if you’re going to write about it. You didn’t ask general Morris when you were over there yesterday?”

Ed blushed. Annie nearly laughed out loud. She warned him.

“No, it’s… it’s all classified.”

“Everyone loves that word,” Laura said. “
Classified
. Anyway, we’re all playing the same game of ‘let’s see what the invaders are going to do’, like it’s going to make a difference.”

“It isn’t going to make a difference?” Ed asked.

“Maybe I’m being naïve or… help me out.”

“Fatalistic,” Oona said. She was settling into a beach chair near one of the rifles. “That’s what dear old daddy called us.”

“My daddy, not hers,” Laura whispered.

“Go on, give up the whole story. I’ll just be over here cleaning the guns.”

Ed had the good sense to look alarmed.

“Don’t worry about her,” Laura said. “She’s a big teddy bear.”

Oona giggled.

“Where was I?”

“You were being naïve,” Ed said.

“Yes, so everyone’s hung up on what they’re going to do, and from where I’m sitting, well, whoever the invaders are, they did something we may never know how to do. Interstellar travel, right? Who does that? Not us.”

“It doesn’t matter if we know what they’re going to do,” Annie said.

“
Right
, honey. Who are we to stop them? The ant doesn’t stop the boot, the ant gets out of the way of the boot.”

“You’re pretty close to the boot,” Ed said.

“Right, but we still want to know when it’s going to move.”

“Let’s dispense with the boot analogy,” Oona said.

“What we decided was that maybe we don’t care as much
what
the ship is here to do so long as we have a good idea
when
it’s going to do that.”

“That’s what this equipment can tell you?”

“It tells me about sound.”

Ed looked visibly disappointed. “Oh. You mean like what Art Shoeman’s doing?”

Oona laughed. She had a laugh designed specifically for maximum derision. “UFOMAN doesn’t know what he’s doing. Neither does that kid of his, Dobble.”

“Dobbs,” Annie corrected.

“Whatever. Every time a truck climbs the hill they’re running for the bunker. Metaphorically.”

“We don’t have a bunker,” Laura said to Ed. “Don’t write that we have a bunker.”

Annie was suddenly convinced they had a bunker.

“So let me show you,” Laura said, turning on a monitor. The markings of a three-by-three grid appeared on the screen. Laura pointed above her head.

“We have an array at the top of this pole. Right now it’s pointed across the street.”

The array she spoke of was nine parabolic microphones in a configuration that matched the screen grid.

“It’s not focused. This is… it’s like a wide angle shot if it were a video. You get it?”

“Sure,” Ed said.

“Now, we figure, everything makes noise, right? This is how we’ll know if the ship is about to do something. It’ll make a noise. Art’s thinking the same way, but he’s lousy at it. I’m gonna turn on the array.”

She flipped a switch. Nothing changed, aside from a light on the underside that turned red. The screen came to life, though.

“Each square in the grid is a different quadrant. You can see the sound waves.”

It looked like a black pond with green ripples from invisible stones.

“How sensitive is this?” Ed asked.

“It’s on a starter setting, so not very. The ship is the middle grid, though. Do you see it?”

The middle grid had little wave splashes at the corners, but nothing in the middle.

“It’s not making any noise,” Ed offered.

“It’s not that simple,” Oona said. “This is how we were goofed. Some ass from the
Times
wrote about how we flipped because the ship wasn’t making a sound, but that isn’t the point.”

“Even at this setting, everything makes noise,” Laura said. “Look top left. You know what that’s picking up? The wind through the leaves, or a bird, or cricket a thousand feet off.
Everything makes noise
. Except the ship. The ship is a hole in the sonic signature of this field.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s sucking up the sound,” Oona said. “Always has done. That’s why it pisses me off when people talk about how it’s not doing anything. The hell it isn’t. Something in there is absorbing sound waves.”

“It’s always done this?” Ed asked.

“Up until six weeks ago,” Laura said.

She punched a command into the system. The sound array expanded, the parabolic microphones spreading away from one another and refocusing on a single point.

“When we target just the ship the whole system goes silent,” she said.

The screen reflected the point, showing no ripples.

“Now let’s turn up the sensitivity.”

The screen remained uncluttered, until…

“Whoa, what was that?” Ed asked. A tiny ripple appeared on the top center grid. It dissipated quickly, and then recurred.

“It’s on a five second pattern. Silent for three, audible for two, and so on. Started six weeks back, like I said.”

Annie crowded in to get a better look, but there wasn’t much else to see.

“Never did that before?” she asked.

“We do a narrow scope check once a day and the first time we picked it up was last month. I can’t speak for what may have gone unnoticed before we got here.”

“What does it sound like?” Ed asked.

“Hold on,” Oona said. “How about a little
quid pro quo
?”

Ed looked at Annie, confused. She had nothing for him.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“How about if you tell us what you were doing with that infrared scanner yesterday?”

Hello,
Annie thought. Ed looked surprised. He was a terrible poker player.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Nope, sorry, we’re done here. Annie, he seems like a nice man, but don’t you trust him.”

“Hold on,” she said. “Ed, why don’t you just tell them?”

“I can’t, it’s…”

“He’s embarrassed,” Annie said. “Ed had this stupid idea that the ship was… what did you call it? Glowing, but only outside of the visual range. And I was like, c’mon, I’m sure someone thought of that already, but he insisted nobody had. So then he goes out with the general yesterday and he was like, let me tell you what
I
think, and then he whips out these lights and…”

“And glasses,” Ed said. “Special glasses.”

“Right! And Morris was like, okay, whatever let’s get this over with. Funniest thing. I guess they were making fun of him all night. But, you know, everyone has their pet theory, right?”

“Well that’s stupid,” Oona said.

“That’s, like, the first thing anybody checked,” Laura said. “Who was it?”

“Larry was doing spectroscopic testing first, before, well, you know. Have you met Loony Larry yet?”

“Not yet.”

“He doesn’t do it any more, but trust me, someone else is. Laura and I don’t even bother, we’ll hear about it. Don’t remember who told us about your little infrared test. Did you find anything?”

“No,” Ed said.

He was lying. Annie could tell. She was a little surprised nobody else could.

“Like I said. It’s been done.” Oona bobbed her head at Laura. “Go ahead, play the audio. This’ll blow their minds.”

Laura typed in a couple of commands, and the audio kicked into life.

Ed leaned forward, squinting, perplexed, not quite sure of what he was hearing. Annie felt about the same.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that… breathing?”

“That’s what it sounds like, yes.”

“You’re telling me the ship is breathing?”

“No, I’m telling you the first time sound has ever come
out
of the auditory black hole that is the ship, it resembled the sound of a person breathing. But the significance of this...”