Dark Energy (5 page)

A
liens continued coming down. They were all dressed in some variation of mummy bandages, and it made me worry for the future of fashion. I could imagine some designer in New York saying “Scrap everything—we're moving entirely to mummy chic!”

Not all of the aliens had white hair, but they were all fair. The darkest of them had very light reddish-blond hair.

A woman, who Kurt told me was one of the school's English teachers, said we ought to journal about our thoughts and feelings. I told Kurt that
journal
is a noun and not a verb. He told me to stop being a prescriptivist. I slugged him in the shoulder.

He offered to take me on a tour of the school, and since I was getting bored watching the aliens—think about that:
they only emerged a couple hours ago, and I was getting bored watching
aliens
—I agreed.

“How long have you gone here?” I asked as we left the common room.

“Since freshman year. But I've spent my life in boarding schools. I even have the pleasure of staying for summer semesters.”

“They have summer semesters here?”

“Is this your first boarding school?” he asked. “Most of them offer summer school, because if your parents are too busy to care about you nine months out of the year, they're probably too busy to care about you twelve months out of the year.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“No worries. I honestly think mine just really love their jobs. They don't even see each other. I can't remember the last time my parents lived in the same city. They're both in finance, and no, I don't know what that means, except that they're rich, but they think they're poor because they're always dealing with other, richer people's money. I'm the kid who happened accidentally. You should see us on vacation: every summer for two weeks we go on a private yacht somewhere, and they spend all their time on their cell phones and laptops—we never go far enough from shore for them to lose cell reception.”

“Sounds awesome.”

“I like school better. I'm used to it.”

“Next summer you can come visit me in Miami. We'll do normal person things.”

He pointed to a door that was decorated with fake blood and the Mensters sign. “There's our dorm. No girls allowed.”

“Speaking of which, how strict are they with rules around here?” I asked, walking past the door.

“Depends,” he said. “They're tasked with raising us to be just as successful as our parents, so they're really strict about things like homework and testing. And if you do anything remotely illegal, you're in deep trouble. But they're lax on other things. So, for example, you can break curfew every night as long as you're getting straight A's. And girls go in the boys' dorms all the time, so long as no one is smoking or whatever else.”

“‘Whatever else' seems to encompass a lot.”

He grinned. “You'll get a feel for it. Just remember: if it will hurt your chances of getting into college or getting elected, they're going to punish you for it.”

We walked up a long set of stairs that led into the old part of the building. There was a very distinct change—they didn't try to make the transition smooth at all. It just stopped being steel and cement and became marble and oak. I felt like I was stepping back in time.

“If I were a better host I'd tell you the history of the building, about how the awards in this trophy case represent
Minnetonka's win against our rival school in the 1939 something or other, but I have no idea about any of that stuff.”

I stopped at the trophy case. There was a very large brass cup with a plaque that said “First Place, Minnetonka School.”

“Well, that's explanatory,” I said.

He pointed at a picture. “They look like they're in football uniforms, maybe? But we don't have a football team here. We have soccer and field hockey and lacrosse.”

“I'm gonna go with lacrosse,” I said, and then continued down the corridor.

Kurt stopped in front of another display case. “Here's the real deal with this school. The donor wall. I mean, there's a museum on the third floor that has an amazing private collection, but this donor wall really explains Minnetonka.”

I scanned the case, looking at the dozens of plaques and pictures. Friends of Minnetonka got their name on just a tiny plaque. Platinum Friends and Diamond Friends got progressively bigger nameplates. Honored Friends got photos, and every one of the pictures was of someone I recognized—business leaders who were always on the covers of magazines. Politicians. A Nobel Prize winner. And in the center of it all was a past president of the United States.

“He didn't go here,” I said. “I would have heard about that from Mrs. Cushing.”

“He didn't,” Kurt said. “His son did.”

“I feel honored?” I said. “I guess?”

“Here's my bet,” he said, leaning his back against the mahogany-and-brass case and folding his arms. “The school has a waiting list a mile long. But when they got the call from your dad, they didn't see a regular rich girl, they saw a way to connect themselves to the biggest event in history. You're their ticket to all things alien.”

I rolled my eyes. “Great.”

“No, you don't get it: this is great for you. They're not trying to build your resume—they're using you to build
their
resume. You can get away with murder.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Then I don't think I'm going to dye this blue out of my hair.”

M
y dad called after lunch. I was in my dorm room, scanning the internet for any interesting news that CNN wasn't reporting. When my phone buzzed I snatched it up and answered before it could vibrate twice.

“Hey, Dad.”

Rachel and Brynne both looked over, knowing I was potentially going to get the information we were all looking for.

“Hey, Aly,” he said. “I don't have a lot of time. How's school?”

“Shut up, Dad, and tell me about the aliens.”

“Promise me you're not going to talk to reporters.”

“I'm going to talk to my roommates.”

“Any of them work for the
New York Times
?”

“Come on, Dad.”

“Well, we've started talking to them. They have a machine that can translate languages. It's a learning machine, so the more we talk, the better it gets. It's really an amazing piece of technology.”

“And what are they saying?”

“Patience, my dear. The president is going to address the nation tonight and talk about that,” he said. “He's meeting with the leader of the aliens soon.”

Brynne waved her hand. “Ask him why they look like humans!”

“Dad? Why do they look like humans?”

“We haven't figured that one out yet. But we were as surprised as you. They breathe our air, and the gravity in the ship seems to have been pretty equivalent to the gravity here—this is what they were used to.”

“In movies aliens always look human.”

“That's because it's cheaper to give a guy Spock ears or green skin than it is to make creatures that aren't humanoid. But these guys don't even have Spock ears.”

“They're really pale.”

“That's probably from spending so much time on the spaceship,” he said. “We think they lived on the ship their whole lives.”

“Like a generation ship?” I said, and Rachel's face broke into a big smile.

“No,” he said. “Well, kinda. Okay, I'm just guessing here, but I think they lived on this ship permanently. I think they were on the ship long enough that the pigment in their skin evolved out, like how salamanders in caves are albinos. Granted, I'm not a biologist. I'm just—”

“You're frickin' director of special projects for NASA,” I said. “And I'm going to tell the
New York Times
that you said they're salamanders.”

“It still doesn't explain why they look human, though,” he said thoughtfully. “As soon as we can we're going to get a DNA sample. But given how hard it's been to convince them to go along with our security measures—the fences and the guards with machine guns and numbers we've pinned to their chests—I don't know how long it'll be before they let us take their blood.”

“I have to say that I'm proud of you, Dad. You didn't just lock them up like in
E.T.
You're behaving much more like
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
. Good job.”

“There are people who want to tackle them and perform tests,” he said. “The only reason we haven't done it is because we don't know how many of them are in that ship. People here are scared, Aly.”

“They don't have weapons, do they?”

“We don't know what they have. A lot of them are carrying packages, and we don't know what's in them. The only tech that we've seen from them is that translator. And that's
sufficiently advanced to make us all nervous.”

“But they seem nice, don't they? I saw the game of charades where they drew lines from their brains to the vice president's brains.”

“You saw that, huh? Yeah, they definitely want to tell us something. We just need to figure out what. So, how are things with you? Are you married to a doctor yet?”

“They're not doctors here,” I said. “Politicians.”

“Yikes,” he said. “You don't have my permission to marry a politician.”

“I'll try to restrain myself.”

“Hey, Aly. I've got to go. But I'm going to call you back soon. I've got a job for you to do.”

“Seriously?” I said with too much enthusiasm. “I mean: Okay. Call me soon.”

“Love you.”

“You, too.”

I hung up the phone and looked up into the expectant eyes of my roommates.

“He said he had a job for me to do soon, which I'm going to translate into me and my two roommates will have a job to do soon.”

I tried to relay the conversation as word for word as I could, but Dad hadn't really given me a lot of hard facts. Still, his guesses were better than most people's facts.

“That makes sense about the pigment in the skin and
hair evolving out,” Brynne said. “If they were always on a ship. I wonder if it was dark on the ship, or if there just wasn't any UV light—maybe their artificial light is harmless.”

Rachel nodded. “It would also explain why they seemed surprised by dirt. But still—what's the purpose of a ship if they never leave it? Do they not have a planet of their own? Are they completely self-sustaining? Do they never have to stop somewhere to pick up supplies?”

“Algae,” Brynne said. “I've read about it for long space voyages. Produces oxygen, and they can live off it. They recycle their body water.”

“Their pee,” I said. “That sounds less gross than ‘body water.'”

“But nothing is completely sustainable,” Rachel said. “You don't pee out as much as you drink. Your body consumes calories that it doesn't give back. They'd have to refill on supplies somewhere.”

“Maybe that's why they came here,” I said. “Maybe they were passing through and saw a planet with people similar to them, and they accidentally crashed.”

“It seems hard to accidentally crash something that big.”

“It seems harder to fly something that big,” I said.

Brynne tapped her tablet screen. “By the latest count, they've passed the four thousand mark. Aliens who have come out, I mean.”

I opened my laptop back up. “Are they all still standing out in the open?”

“The army is putting up tents,” Brynne said. “But I bet they're cold. Fox News has a picture of a woman alien holding a baby.”

“Really? Does it look like a human baby?” Rachel asked.

“It's not a larva,” I answered.

A girl popped her head in the door. “Hey, guys.”

“Hey, Emily,” Brynne said.

“The president is speaking tonight, now that he's had a chance to communicate with the aliens.”

“That'll be weird,” I said. “How much could they have communicated this fast?”

Emily moved into the doorway and leaned on the jamb. “Faster than you might think. There was a study out of the University of Utah—”

“Nerd!” Brynne called out, and threw her pillow at Emily.

Another girl appeared behind Emily—a girl dressed like one of the aliens, in mummy rags. “Today I officially say, ‘Who cares?' You know what this school needs? A party. And what would a party be like without the succubi?”

It turns out that it's not that hard to throw a party if you go to the Minnetonka School. The cafeteria is always stocked with a hefty array of desserts, and there's a soda machine and chips with six different kinds of salsa. It's a wonder that everyone
in this school isn't overweight. Well, not really—pretty much every student is a type A personality with an eating disorder.

Not me, though, and I made sure to force chips and pie and cheesecake onto everyone.

We were wearing our alien suits, of course. It only took Brynne trying on her skintight mummy costume (a leotard wrapped in strips of cloth from cut-up bedsheets) and parading down the hall for all the other girls to decide they needed to compete or be completely overshadowed. And somehow the boys got wind of it, and they were doing their best; there were a lot of abs, biceps, and pectorals on display. None of us looked exactly like the aliens, but we looked like their alternately sexier/shabbier versions.

Someone plugged their iPod into the TV, and we all danced as we waited for the president to speak.

I learned a lot at the party. I learned that Sunglasses Girl always wore sunglasses in her hair, even when she was dressed up as an alien. I also learned that her name was Hannah, and that her dad was a senator from South Carolina. I even learned that she knew how to dance really dirty and attracted a lot of attention from the guys. So, enlightening.

I overheard one of the dorm resident assistants asking another if we should be acting like this in the middle of a national emergency, and the other one said that everyone mourns in different ways. It hadn't occurred to me that we were even mourning—I had been so caught up in the aliens
coming out of their ship that I hadn't thought much about the people in the path of the crashed spaceship. But I also got the feeling that the counselor thought we should be mourning all the time, for the sake of our waning youth, or our uncertain future, or for all the people who were outside Minnetonka and not getting to dance like aliens. Maybe he was right. Or maybe he needed to eat more habanero salsa.

The music cut out and everyone turned to look at the TV. The shot had changed to the president standing at a podium. He was in a tent by the spaceship, dressed in a suit and tie, like always. Beside him stood four of the aliens—the four who had first emerged from the ship.

“Tonight I greet not only my fellow Americans, but also the people of the world. An historic step has been taken today, and we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are not alone.

“Let me begin with what we know. Six days ago, an alien craft crashed onto Earth. We now know that this crash was an accident, and I want to stress that this disaster was in no way a part of our alien visitors' plans. I have assured them that the American people will recognize this for what it was—a terrible, terrible accident. We have no intent to punish these well-intentioned people for what has happened.

“I have been in communication with them all afternoon, and soon we plan to introduce them to the United Nations, as they are visitors not just to America, but to the entire human
race.” He gestured to the bearded man beside him. “This is Mai, and he is the leader of this group. They call themselves the Guides. It is indeed unfortunate that they landed in such a tragic fashion as their intentions were to come here to help us as a people, to teach.”

Emily, the languages expert, shouted, “That's bullshit. They came here to teach? Teach what?”

Everyone shushed her, although I was sure many people agreed.

“America welcomes the Guides. I've spent the last few hours with Mai, and I feel his group poses no threat. We will be setting up shelters for them as they are transferred out of their spacecraft and slowly integrated into society. We are taking every step to make sure that everyone is safe, both human and alien. We will be protecting everyone—everyone—from threats to their health and to their physical safety.

“For those of you who are suffering tonight, we are mobilized to help you. For those who are concerned, let me assure you: we are taking every precaution. We will constantly be updating America and the world. God bless you, and God bless America.”

Maybe it was the Navajo in my blood and the history of Native American oppression, but the idea that these aliens were here to teach us didn't really work for me. I wasn't going to stubbornly insist that there was no possible way that
someone might have a better idea of how things ought to be done. But these guys had just wiped out twenty thousand people. And they expected us to listen to their ways of peace and prosperity? Fine, it was an accident. We all make mistakes. But this was like someone driving a semitruck through your living room, running over your grandpa, and then getting out of the cab and telling you how to move on.

And were they really calling themselves the Guides? Could you get any more pretentious?

I suddenly wanted to be out of my stupid alien costume. I didn't want anything to do with them. I stormed out of the party, my bare feet slapping on the cold cafeteria tile. I was already yanking off strips of fabric by the time I got to the Ghouls sign, and was down to my sports bra and shorts when I got to my room, a trail of torn bedsheets in my wake.

I yanked my phone from the table and called my dad. It rang once and went to voicemail.

“What the hell, Dad? Guides? They're here to tell us what to do? Call me back, because this is ridiculous, and I need to know that the world isn't just rolling over and letting these people—these aliens—tell us how to live our lives.”

I hung up and tossed the phone on the bed beside me.

After about ten minutes I got a text from him.
Swamped with work. Can you do dinner Wednesday?

I texted back with
Sure. Love you.

He didn't reply. He always replies. He always tells me he loves me. Damn those aliens.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” I shouted.

“Are you sure?” It was a male voice. “There's a lot of clothing that didn't make it to your room.”

“I'm decent, Kurt,” I said, leaning back against the wall. “You're not supposed to be in here.”

“A lot of things aren't how they're supposed to be.”

“I don't need you to be all sympathetic. I just want my dad to answer his phone.”

He sat down at the empty desk and turned the chair to face me.

“So what are you thinking?” he asked after a moment.

“What do you think I'm thinking? This is bullcrap.” I left him in the common room and went into the bedroom to pull on a sweater and a pair of jeans.

“I'm not even American, and I agree with you.”

“You're not American?”

“Technically Indian,” he said. “I've been in America since elementary school though. My first name's not Kurt. It's Karthik.”

“So I learn there are alien Guides and my friend isn't American all on the same day,” I said, elbowing him in the ribs as I stepped back out of the bedroom and plopped down
on the couch, leaning next to him.