Eating Memories (2 page)

MTF/GPE BLUE/73.15N/18.24W/15:38:14/**I DO.**/END MSG.

* * *

By the time my driver and I got to Group Blue they were out of the ATV, standing around in the rain. They’d put a tent up, but they hadn’t gone under cover. My driver opened my
door and I waded my way towards them.

“Cap’n, sir?” Ted called. It was cold. His visor was up and the word came out in a burst of fog.

I approached close enough to talk without shouting. “So, whaddya have, Lieutenant?”

Ted daCosta’s mouth was in a thin line below the smoky glass of his visor. His driver, PFC Horace White, looked humorless, too. “In here, sir,” Ted said,

I ducked to enter the tent, but Ted caught me. He bent to whisper in my ear.

“Sir . . .” he began. He didn’t finish it. Behind the tinted visor his eyes were haunted.

“What?”

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

I thought I saw a pale flower lying in the mud under the one-man tent, but it took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. When they did, I saw that the white splotch on the mud was a hand. Five long fingers were held in a graceful Grecian-statue gesture, the index finger pointing at nothing. At the wrist was caught a piece of cloth: navy blue with gray stripes. Crystals of ice glittered on the flesh between thumb and palm.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

Ted stood slowly erect in the confines of the tent. He raised his visor and looked at me. “It’s not human.”

* * *

Helen smiled sadly over the rim of her coffee cup. Through the window a watery blue sky, its single ornament a far, faint sun, canopied the Martian plains. In low spots water still stood. In high spots the mud had cracked. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

I didn’t have to speak. She saw the answer in my face. I thought of the face of the creature we had found not fifty yards from where we’d found the hand. It had been beautiful.

“We’ve been out in space . . . how long?” I asked.

She shrugged. Beyond the mud flats the wintery light cast an aged crater wall in lavender. “Three years. Something like that. You’ve been here a few months longer.”

“No. I mean us. Humanity, How long have we been at it?”

Her eyes flickered. She saw what I was getting at. “Is it that they were from Earth? Is that what the problem is?”

I studied her. After seeing the creature’s face, Helen’s looked crude, and I was glad I couldn’t see my own. I gazed down at my hands. The creature’s hands had been perfect: the fingers long, the last gesture expressive. He had been pointing when some cataclysmic force had burst his ship.
See there,
he might have been saying.
Look there.

“They got to Europa. You think they might have been trying to terraform Mars, too?”

Her voice brought me back to the present. “Maybe they got farther before the end came. Whatever the end was. Maybe they got out
of
the solar system. Maybe they colonized there.”
God, I hope so,
I thought.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if they were waiting for us when we arrived on the other side? Wouldn’t it be something else to sail that dark sea to find we’d made our way back home?
I pictured us meeting, two warm, fragile intelligences in the desert of space. But I didn’t believe it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t believe.

Instead I pictured him, one of the three on the ice, perhaps seeing in his telescope the deadly asteroid arc into Earth, blazing a path brighter and more lovely than the path down to Mars his frozen coffin had made.
See there? Look there.

I remembered the curved metal of the ship, the intricate, spidery hieroglyphics, Only hands that were perfect could have managed that.

“I hear they’re sounding the Antarctic, That’s where they think they’ll find the evidence, if any evidence is left to be found,” Helen told me. Then she smiled and shook her head. “Have you seen the VidNews headlines? ‘Slow, Clumsy and Stupid?’ Jesus. Ignorant laymen. For all science has learned about their forerunners, you’d think the species would get better press, right?”

Slow. Clumsy. Stupid. I thought of the domed, hairless head. The wide, liquid eyes. They had been open when we found him. The ice was melting and running down the face like tears.
See there? Look. Look there.

“They were so much like us,” I said.

“Yes. Surprisingly. And we finally have the proof that they were warm-blooded. But it’s still odd that we could be prey to some of the same diseases when they were evolved from the dinosaurs and we were evolved from the apes.”

“Yeah.” I put my head between my hands. That wasn’t quite what I’d meant.

“So what’s the matter?” she asked as she put her Styrofoam cup down on the Formica. “We found out. We found your aliens. So what the hell’s the matter with you?”

My throat closed. For a long time I couldn’t answer. At my side I could feel the pressure of the wide plains of Mars alight in their brief hiatus from our unnatural clouds, our artificial rain.

In three years the lichens would take over. Twenty-five years after that, more complex plants. Sometime beyond where my future reached, men would stand on red beaches, the forest behind them, the blue seas of Mars at their front. I had the feeling those men would be lonely.

I got to my feet and grabbed Helen’s luncheon dishes in a gesture of goodwill. Helen and I had stood in the stark white sickbay looking down at that strange, elegant body. As a gesture of goodwill she’d said an embarrassed prayer.

“I just wanted to be able to meet them,” I said

AUTHOR’S NOTE:
Charlie Ryan taught me an important writing lesson with this story. It was the second story which he expressed an interest in buying; but he sent it back with a note that said, “I’ll buy it if you cut 1,000 words.”

I was hungry for sales at the time, and if he had said, “I’II buy it if you kiss my feet,” I’d have started puckering. Anyway, I started out by cutting some of the “the’s” and the “ands” and
—
guess what?
—
after a while of staring at the screen I suddenly (there’s one of those “suddenlys” again) saw that this sentence here was redundant and that paragraph there was overkill, Hey, I didn’t need those 1,000 words! So by asking me to line edit my own story mercilessly, he gave me an insight to editing which has served me well, Thank you again, Charlie.

Looking back over the story, I must admit that I really enjoy these two brothers and their relationship, Funny, I’d meant to write a story about restrictive religion and mythology, but ended up saying something very simple about kids and how they view the world. And that’s the way writing works, you know. You set out to say one or two things, and in the end (if you’re lucky) you say so much more.

Pa had whupped Daniel three times that day: once for fidgeting in the morning service, once for leaving his chores half done, and the last time, the worst time, for laughing and saying that the other whuppings hadn’t hurt.

Zeke followed his brother as he ran from the house. By the time he caught up to him, Daniel had stopped pretending the whupping didn’t matter and was crying for real. Snot ran from his nose, leaving a trail of slime from one nostril to his lips.

Daniel’s crying made Zeke feel funny. The welts on his brother’s legs looked like they hurt. “Hey. Wanna see a neat rock?” Zeke asked, pulling the stone from his pocket.

Daniel took the rock and held it in a slimy fist. “It’s got funny pictures all over it. Where’d you get it?”

“Place I know,” he said vaguely, Daniel’s tears had dried, and Zeke’s pity had dried up with them. “Now give it back Come on, Daniel. Give it back I’ll pound on you worse than Pa done, I’ll set you on fire and fan you.”

“Lemme go. I’ll tell Pa,” Daniel said.

Zeke released him instantly, “No!” he said so all-of-a-sudden that a sneaky look came to the younger boy’s face.

“So. Where’d you get it?”

Zeke stared longingly at the rock in Daniel’s fist. “Come on. Give it back. It ain’t so neat. There’s lots of neater things where that come from. They got arrowheads and bows. Junk like that.” He felt betrayed, but he thought that’s what he deserved for trusting his brother.

The snot on Daniel’s lip was a crisp film. He was clutching the rock as if he meant business. “I wanna go.”

“Nuh uh. It’s too dangerous. What if we get stuck out and the sun goes down, huh? What about that?”

His little brother scuffed a foot in the dirt. “You’re always afraid of the dark. Just like Pa. Just like Ma. Shuttering up the windows at night and listening for things.”

“Yeah?” Zeke asked with older-brother derision. “And just how you expect to hear them demon ghosts when they come, huh? Gotta have the fire built up and the shotgun ready.”

“There ain’t no ghosts.”

“Sure there ain’t,” Zeke sneered, “Sure. Guess it was a lion or something et Downy Phoebes and all them others.”

“I’ll tell Pa if you don’t take me,” Daniel said again. “I’ll show him the rock.”

“Shoot,” Zeke said under his breath. “All right, but we gotta hurry. And gimme the rock back, first.”

“Naw. Think I’ll keep it till you take me to that place.”

Without another word, Zeke pushed off with stiff, angry legs across the grass.

It was a loud, blue day. Red squirrels chittered in the tender leaves of a young maple. The boys walked fast, Zeke slapping at branches and rocks with a stick he’d picked up.

“I could of told Pa more things about you, you know? I could of done more than showed him that rock,” Daniel said, picking his way around the thick pines and the spindly trunks of the hardwoods.

“What things?” Zeke asked a little uneasily. There were all sorts of sins to worry about: little sins that got you a mean look and big sins that got you a whupping. Some of the sins, Zeke knew, would push your soul right over the edge, right where God couldn’t catch you anymore, and you’d fall a long way into a lake of fire.

His brother’s face had screwed itself into a grown-up frown, the expression of a deacon who’d just come across a real meaty sin. “Like talking with that space captain.”

Zeke froze. That sin was serious. A whupping-with-a-belt kind of sin, if Pa found out.

There was an ugly smile on Daniel’s face. “Pa’d have a calf if he knowed you talked to a heathern. They’d talk about you in service. Might even turn you out like they did Barney Potts so’s them demon ghosts of yours could eat you.”

“That space captain weren’t no heathern,” Zeke said calmly, even though the idea of being turned out disturbed him. Barney Potts had screamed when they’d closed and locked the door on him. Daniel had never heard a grown man cry before he’d heard the sounds that came from Barney.

To make the flippy feeling in his stomach go away, Zeke threw his arms over Daniel’s shoulders and toppled him to the soft earth. His fingers found the ticklish places at Daniel’s ribs. Daniel laughed until his face got tomato red and tears started up in his eyes. Then he started to hit back. A wild fist, no bigger than a late season apple, hit Zeke on the side of his neck.

Startled, Zeke rolled off his brother. “Why’d you hit me so hard?” he asked.

Daniel wiped the tears from his eyes and sat up, his back hunched, his gaze averted. “Made me piss myself,” Daniel said quietly. “I pissed myself all over.”

Zeke rolled over on his back and hooted into the black-green pines, A banded blue jay flew out of a branch like a bullet of gray mist, leaving the branch twitching behind it.

“I guess you won’t tell Pa about the space captain now. I could let everybody at school know about you, peeing down your leg,” he said, even though his brother wetting his pants wasn’t anything Zeke would have told to anybody except God. He’d have to declare it to God because Zeke figured that somehow, someway, he’d come close to one of those little bitty sins. The little bitty sins counted up, and if you lived long enough, they’d get you. God’d drop down out of the air like a hawk and take your soul someplace so bad you’d wish you’d never been born.

Daniel clambered to his feet as his brother watched. Zeke was, without even wanting to be, somber and sympathetic. “Ain’t like you pissed yourself bad, Daniel. It’ll an be dry by the time we get there.”

In
fact, the spot of damp on the front of Daniel’s pants had dried and stiffened well before they reached even the edges of the old forest.

“Didn’t tell me we’d have to go in here,” Daniel said, hanging back from the blue vines and the dank, dark cellar smell.

“You don’t have to come, if you don’t want to.” Zeke picked a vine out of his way and walked in. The silent forest closed at his back. A few seconds later he heard the snap of a twig behind him and knew that Daniel had followed.

In
the fetid air Zeke could hear the labored, snotty sound of Daniel’s breathing. “What’d you and that space captain talk about?” Daniel asked.

“Just things. Neat things. They got more stuff on other planets, you know,” his brother said sarcastically. “Like plows that go by theirselves without anyone moving them. Things like that.”

“I ain’t stupid,” Daniel retorted, his own sarcasm sounding childish. “I know. The kids talk.”

“Uh huh.”

“Bet they have chickens that don’t need to be fed and water that walks its way into the house and trash that takes itself out and bums itself up, too.”

“How did you know that?” Zeke asked. “Don’t none of the grown-ups talk about that.”

Daniel came up alongside his brother. He shrugged as they walked. “Everybody knows. Why don’t Pa get one of them plows?”

“Cause them plows is heathern. And them self-feeding chickens and walking water is, too.”

“You believe that?” Daniel asked, a little too directly to be comfortable for Zeke.

Zeke shrugged. “We come here in a space ship and stuff. Don’t know how they took to that real good. I mean, if the other stuff is heathern, why wasn’t the space ship heathern, too?”

“We did?” Daniel stopped in the middle of the trail and stared wide-eyed at his brother. “We come here in a space ship?”

“Not you, stupid. But our Ma and Pa done. They come here from Earth when they was young.”

There was a look on Daniel’s face like had been on it the time Zeke had told him there wasn’t really a Santa Claus, “Thought this was the Earth,” Daniel said.

“No, dummy. We’re a colony,” he said, drawing out the syllables the way the space captain had done. “There’s lots of colonies.” He looked up at the place where the blue sky should have been. Triangular red leaves looked down. “All up there,” Zeke gestured. “The captain told me. Said as how there were hundreds and hundreds of them things, all up in the stars.”

“We there yet?” Daniel wanted to know.

“Almost,” Zeke answered, disappointed and a little irritated that Daniel didn’t think what the captain told him was the most wonderful thing he’d ever heard.

Without warning they stepped out of the overgrowth. Sunlight hit them like a blow. Between charcoal stumps of trees the stench of old smoke lay like a fog.

Picking his way across the ashes, Zeke headed for a pile of soot and dug his arm in to the elbow. When he drew it out there was a bit of gray bone clutched in his fist.

“Oh, man,” Zeke said in disgust, flinging it away from him. The jagged cylinder of bone, its soft heart now empty, sailed across the burned scar of the forest, tumbling as it went. It landed several yards away with a rustling crash.

“I never seen this fire. We could see it from the house, right? How come I ain’t seen this fire?”

Zeke avoided his brother’s gaze. “Cause it burned before you was born, that’s why.” He pried his arm out of the refuse. His hand was empty,

“Why ain’t it grown back?”

“Dunno,” Zeke said as he pulled a claw-like branch off a ruined tree to his side. He dug into the pile of trash with hard, short strokes. An avalanche of damp soot fell on his legs, dirtying his pants.

“Don’t make sense that it wouldn’t grow back.”

“It’s a nasty place. And them trees is nasty trees, like they found when they first came here. Ain’t like pines nor oaks. No telling what they’d do,” He pried into the pile, lifting an edge of it. Small pieces of black rained down.

“That space captain tell you this?”

Zeke turned to his brother, his face white around the smudges of gray. “No, and don’t you never tell you been here, understand?”

“Pa’Il whup us, I reckon.”

“More than that,” Zeke said darkly. “Be a lot worse than that. What they done . . .” His voice failed because his throat felt funny. Picking up the stick, he applied it to the pile again.

“What who done?”

“Everybody.” The word came out flat. A dead word from a mouthful of ashes.

“But what was it they done?”

Zeke looked at his brother and then quickly away, “They killed all the demons, that’s what.”

Daniel shrugged, “Don’t sound like no big deal.”

“Shows how rot-gut stupid you are. That space captain find out, he’d take us all away to jail. And don’t never tell nobody I brung you here. It’s a real big, grown-up secret.” Suddenly Zeke whooped with glee. “Lookit. Found another one of them stones.” Stooping, he picked up the piece of sedimentary rock in his hand and gave it to his brother.

“Neat pictures.”

“Them’s demon pictures. Can’t show nobody, okay?”

Carefully Daniel slipped the stone into his pocket. “Okay.”

Both boys bent and searched through the rubble for more. Zeke found a clay jar with demon pictures on it and Daniel found two double-pronged arrowheads.

Zeke was startled when he looked up from his search to see that the shadows of the trees had gone long and blue. “Daniel,” he said softly when his mouth had enough spit in it to talk. “Think we need to go on home.”

Daniel darted among the black tree stumps, bang-bang-banging away with an imaginary pistol. His voice echoed in the clearing.

“Come on, Daniel. It’s Iate,” Zeke said.

The smaller boy laughed as he peered over the top of a fallen tree. “Bang,” he said, shooting an index finger at his brother, “Another dead demon.”

“I’m gonna go, okay? I’m gonna leave you here and let them ghosts get you.”

But Daniel had disappeared behind one of the piles and now was no place to be seen. His absence caused a hollow place to grown inside Zeke’s chest.

“Daniel?” he called again.

A deep-throat growl from the northwest made the short hairs on Zeke’s neck stand. He stood and sniffed into the breeze. The bass snarl repeated itself.

“Daniel!” Zeke screamed. The scream tore at his throat, making him cough. “Daniel!” He started to cry. “Where are you? Come on! It’s gonna rain.”

Abruptly Daniel was there, looking up with astonishment at the tears on his big brother’s face.