The Spaceship Next Door (33 page)

“Yes, very good. It’s a short cut. The universe is incredibly large if you’re stuck inside of it, but very reasonable otherwise. Dobbs, think about the capsule opening.”

“Okay.”

A horizontal line creased the center of the tablet, and then it popped open like an old-fashioned lunchbox. The interior was bathed in a baby blue light.

The device was full of stacks of circular discs or coils. It appeared almost solid-state.

“This looks like a large radiator,” Dobbs said. “Probably isn’t, though, huh?”

“No, it’s much more than that. You’re familiar with quantum computing technology?”

“Oh, wow, really?”

“You’re only seeing the portion of the machine that exists in this dimension. It’s actually much larger, if size even means anything in this instance.”

“What’s the power source?” Ed asked. “Is that here, or is it hanging out in the extra dimension?”

“It’s both. It uses a combination of zero-point energy resources and… there’s no word for the secondary technology. Imagine a way to collect and store chaotic energies. Discharges from the corona of the sun, kinetic energy from a gravitational slingshot, and so on.”

“That would violate the third law,” Dobbs said.

Violet smiled. “Yes, it would, in a closed system. The waste product of this energy storage would be entropic, and it is, but the entropy isn’t manifest in this dimension.”

“Okay,” Ed said. “But nothing nuclear?”

“Oh, yes, there’s a nuclear core too. It’s only a backup, though. Like a battery in an alarm clock if the house loses power. The core isn’t active right now.”

Ed stepped back instinctively, and nearly fell over. Dobbs decided he didn’t want to touch the probe any more.

“It’s shielded,” Violet said. “Don’t worry. Radiation would do the same to me as to you.”

“Sure, but you can go find another body,” Ed said, “we’re sort of stuck with these.”

“Comin’ up on zombie world, everyone,” Oona announced from the driver’s seat.

“Is this still extending the… I don’t know what to call it… invisibility cloak?” Ed asked.

“It is.”

Ed walked to the front to look out the windshield. “Stop at the turn, I want to see what we’re facing.”

“A lot of confused marionettes, Edgar,” Oona said.

The zombies in the street looked like their equilibrium had been severely compromised: a hundred instant inner-ear infections and extreme vertigo.

“Perfect,” Ed said. “Violet, can you shut it off?”

“Why would you do that?” Oona asked.

“I don’t want to ruin the surprise.”

“It’s done,” Violet called.

The zombies righted themselves.

“So now they’re all in my way and you don’t want me to kill anybody, so how do you plan to get there from here?” Oona asked.

“They’re not moving.”

“Yeah, I
know
they’re not moving, that’s my problem.”

“No, I mean they’re not moving toward us or away from us. Honk.”

Oona honked. The zombies immediately in front of her got out of her way. Slowly, but successfully.

“What the hell.”

“Annie made it to the ship,” Ed said.

“How do you know?”

“They’re not looking for her any more. They’re on standby, in some sort of basic self-defense mode.”

“It’s gonna take us a while to get to the ship, just honking and rolling.”

“Do the best you can.” Ed turned the back of the camper. “Dobbs, maybe try the screamer again to get some of them moving. It might help.”

“Okay.”

“When we’re close, I’m going to need you focused on finding that signal again.”

Ed sat back down next to Violet, with her alien capsule at his feet. The zombie parents were standing across from them, holding their balance pretty well in the rocking trailer.

“Do you want to tell me what you’re doing, now?” Violet asked.

“Not sure yet. But I have a few questions. First, how big can you make that invisibility cloak extend?”

“I’ve never tested its range, how far did you want it to go?”

“How about the same size as Sorrow Falls?”

She studied him carefully.

“Perhaps. But why?”

“Maybe question two will answer question one for you. What did Susan and Todd die of?”

“Susan perished from tuberculosis. Todd was crushed by a carriage wheel.”

“Todd looks pretty good.”

“Yes…” And then she understood. She smiled.

“How long would it take?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But if it works, everyone is going to be extremely hungry afterwards.”

A
nnie had
no particular strategy in mind when climbing into the ship, or at any subsequent point in the conversation—possibly except for the part where she mingled Dorothy Gale of Kansas with Violet Jones of Sorrow Falls. She didn’t expect that to actually work, but thought it would be funny if it did. It
was
funny, up until the part where she pissed off the super-powerful alien in the planet-ending spacecraft.

She’d been rolling with the
just keep him talking
rule that really only made sense in different contexts, like talking a jumper off a building, giving law enforcement time to trace a phone call, or keeping someone with a concussion awake. She was pretty sure it didn’t make as much sense here, because if she was stalling, she didn’t herself know what she was stalling
for
. There wasn’t anyone coming to the rescue.

Except of course there was. Ed would come running. So would Sam. Dobbs, Oona, Laura… they probably would too. Maybe even Violet.

Violet was the only one who could
actually
rescue anybody, and only by surrendering. Likewise, Annie could rescue herself just fine by telling the alien where to look. But as angry as Annie was at Violet, it was the kind of angry she expected to get over eventually. When she did, she wanted Violet to still be around.

Besides, Violet’s dad was turning out to be a scary combination of innocent and amoral.

“Drones, you mean all the zombies?”

“That word doesn’t correspond to their function. I have heard it said many times tonight and reviewed the meaning.”

Annie thought about mentioning the whole
undead
thing, which was definitely a zombie standard, but it seemed beside the point. He recognized that a lot of his drones were living people and was threatening to change that, so he understood alive versus dead.

“So you’re an evil idea,” she decided.

“No. Ideas are neither good nor evil. It’s only in their application that they can be one or the other, and even then they can only be judged one or the other from a subjective viewpoint. If I tear apart this planet looking for my daughter, you would no doubt see these as evil actions, but I have seen a million such worlds and consider her of far greater value. I would call it a good thing. Now tell me where to find her or I’ll begin with the drones and stop only after I’ve set the world on fire and picked her out of the remains.”

“You sound like a movie villain.”

“My speech is built upon your expectations. The intent is mine but the syntax is based on what you anticipate. The voice I’m using has been lowered by your expectations as well.”

“So, but the threat’s legit.”

“Yes. You’re running out of…”

“Why do you think she came here?”

“…continuously changing the subject is not going to result in a solution.”

“No, no, I understand that. Look, I’m sorry, you’re the first alien I’ve talked to. Well, second, but the first one didn’t tell me what she was, so I never had a chance to ask things. I get it though, you’re a really, really old idea. I’m not all that clear on how I’m talking to one, because we’re not used to ideas with sentience, but okay.”

“There are many ideas, but only a few are powerful enough to live forever.”

“And, to live outside of whoever thought you up. That’s the part there. Like, if you’re ever in a situation where you have to explain yourself, in the future, I’d start there.”

“You are not advanced enough, as a species, to understand.”

“Yes, yes, I know, we’re primitive, I get it. And my friend, your daughter—or offspring, or piece of you or…whatever—she’s another super-advanced being, right? Then why do you think she’d come
here
, to hang out with a bunch of people who, so far as you’re concerned, can’t even understand what she is?”

“…I don’t know.”

“She’s your idea, and your idea had an idea and
that
idea was to come here and hang out for a few hundred years. If I ask her she’ll say it was to hide from you, but she did a pretty crappy job of that. So why was she really here?”

The alien began showing a series of images. These were different from before, in that Annie didn’t feel so much like she was experiencing them. They were purely visual, and none of them were moving. It was a photo album.

They were extraordinary. She wished they were more interactive, because the scale and scope was magnificent. Great cities of iron, of crystal, of frozen gases and sculptured lava. She saw platforms to slingshot a vessel from the surface into upper orbit, and humanoids with webbed clothing to help them to fly. There was an undersea kingdom beneath a sky of eternal permafrost, and vast libraries of knowledge preserved on stone and cloth, in jars of electrical impulses and three-dimensional models made of silk. She saw ships powered by starlight traveling through holes in the universe poked open by controlled singularities, and beings of radiation living on an artificial ring around a dying sun.

“To be an idea such as myself is to be a part of the greatest accomplishments in the history of all histories. I existed—I was born—as an idea inside of these beings. They were a part of what made me, as I was a part of who they became. But the great civilizations are all gone.”

“Wait, I don’t understand. Which one of them thought of you?”

“All did. It’s equally reasonable to say I thought of them. I appeared in the minds of those who were ready. From their perspectives, I was something new, even as from mine I was older than their stars. But each of these civilizations had different ways of using me, for good or ill. There is a sense of connection, and belonging, and growth, and that’s what your friend Violet took with her. The sense of being something new again. That’s what I truly want back. And that is what I’m sure led her here. To belong. Even among beings unprepared to accept her, which was immature of her.”

“I never told you her name.”

“I know. I’ve found your true idea of her.”

“But we aren’t done talking yet!”

“I have no need of you, or this place, any longer.”

She heard the hiss stop, as the alien cut off Annie’s air supply.

“
E
dgar
, we’re here
!” Oona yelled through the ceiling. Ed was already on the roof with Sam, Laura and Dobbs, who was perhaps the most important person in Sorrow Falls for the next few minutes.

Sam was marching up and down the right side of the camper, which faced the ship. He’d been misidentifying various members of the zombie class of the town as Annie for the entire journey, and now he was mostly just angry and looking for someone to shoot.

“Whole base is here,” he said. “Look at ‘em, lined up in a row. We’re not gonna get through without running them down. I think they’re operating on different orders.”

“We don’t need to get through,” Ed said. He leaned over Dobbs at the computer. “Can you find the signal?”

“I don’t know, I told you this isn’t my equipment.”

“Oh, get out of the way,” Laura said. She pushed Dobbs aside and tapped a few commands. “You gotta at least bring up the array first.”

The ‘array’ was a series of microphones on a stanchion in the middle of the camper, with small parabolic dishes cupping each of the microphones. Dobbs spent the better half of the trip reassembling the array because it had been partly broken down earlier that evening to amplify the screamers. (That it took so long for anyone to point this out only underlined exactly how tired everyone was.) It also meant they made the trip without the one proven means to disable zombies.

“That’s got it,” Dobbs said.

Oona popped up through the trap door. “I’m just gonna leave us in the middle of the road. Don’t think anyone’s driving down here anytime soon. Did you screw up my computer, Dobbs?”

“Not yet.”

“Why we looking for the signal, Edgar?”

“You’ll see. Where’s Violet?”

“The zombie queen’s downstairs fiddling with her magic suppository.”

“
I’ll be right up
,” she shouted from below.

“I’ll be damned. PICKLES?” Sam shouted the last part, and Ed for just a few seconds wondered if the soldier was now hallucinating gherkins. Then he remembered Dill Louboutin’s nickname.

“Hey Sam!” Dill shouted back.

Dill was standing next to a Humvee on the other side of a crashed-in fence, just at the edge of the ship’s safety zone. He had a kid with him, but the kid wasn’t Annie.

“The hell you doin’ over there?”

“Waitin’ for you. See you got a better ride. You want me to mow down these dead-eyes for you?”

“Better stay there. What were you thinking, did you try to run over the ship?”

“I was thinking maybe it was worth a shot. But then the girl went in, so we were just waiting on you. She said you’d be by.”

Sam turned to Ed. “The girl… went in.”

“How’d she do that?” Ed asked.

“How’d she do that, Dill?” Sam asked.

“She said she was here and the thing just opened. Someone should’ve tried that before we had zombies, you ask me.”

“I’ve got it, I think,” Dobbs said. “Just sounds like breathing. Did he say Annie was in there?”

“Yeah, can you hear her with that?”

“No, it’s just the breathing.”

Violet came up. “She went inside.”

“Can you get her out?” Ed asked.

“Only by taking her place.”

“It may come to that.”

“I realize.”

“Then go do it,” Sam said. “Get her out of there.”