Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 3, July 2013 (23 page)

“Dutch.”

“Suppose we had burned up in shoals, our angle of attack too steep; or plunged into one of the boundless seas that swamp this world; or grounded in civilized lands, where they would have quite rationally stoned us or burned us. When you ponder the many-worlds that the quanta tell us might have been, remember that most would have been worse than this. Why not approach the past with gratitude rather than tears?”

“A School trick. Because this is of the many-worlds the best? That may be cause for the greatest melancholy of all.”

“Ah, Rann, I’d not have the stealing from you of that melancholy which you so treasure; but why not suppose that the others landed safely and have been ‘lying low,’ just as we have.”

Rann said, “Then perhaps we should stand up straight.”

Venkaaszbuul stood a while longer at the glass doors before letting the curtain fall. “Why? So we can be spirited off for the studying in some secret laboratory?”

“They would be insane to so risk the wrath of a star-faring people of unknown powers.”

“If I am to place myself in trust of their sanity, your objection answers itself. Whether they burn us at the stake or dissect us in the lab, I would just as soon not face them with the choice.”

“But if they knew we had among them come, they might strive again to reach the stars.”

“To what point, navigator? Once there was a hope that they might find our old base on Mars—or the observation post on the Moon—and we could scavenge the materials to build a messenger packet or a communicator and so secure rescue. But only a double-handful of us now remain, and each of us nearing the end of days.” He glanced at his hands, turned them over. “Less than a double-handful. Forgive my error. If you must weep, Rann—and I know you must—weep that the humans never reached Mars when we were young enough and numerous enough for it to matter.”

The backhoe’s engine revved and the claw dug into the earth. Steve, perched in the driver’s seat, worked the levers back and forth. He did not notice the watchers. Venkaaszbuul grunted. “Is that where he is?”

Rann understood. “Somewhere in there. When the wreck hit, it threw dirt over everything.”

“The boat still lies beneath the trees?”

Rann gestured yes. “The inertial sheath would have long ago shut down; so the earth has been working on it.”

“Poshtli should have worn his life vest; but lakelanders are more feckless even than hillmen.”

“Maybe he did wear an inertia bubble, and it failed him when we were forced to leap. One more sorrow. One more might-have-been.” Rann imagined all the possible Poshtlis whose lives had not been lived, even here among the savages.

“You expect this hired man of yours to dig up Poshtli’s corpse?”

“A corpse unmodified by the nanosurgery. Our insides may be passing strange, but outwardly you and I appear merely foreign.”

“Which is why we permit no autopsy.”

“But Poshtli’s mummy will appear more than passing strange. The humans will realize that aliens have been among them; they will restart their space programs in an effort to find our world. It is too late for us; but not for them.”

“You vastly underestimate their capacity for self-deception. They will call it a hoax, or an odd and crippling mutation.”

Rann hugged himself with both arms. “Captain, of the crew and science staff how many were still aboard
Vital Being
when she hit shoals and burned?”

Venkaaszbuul looked at him for a long time. Then, he said, “I believe all made it to the boats; and perhaps the boats all made it to shore and they have been living out their days concealed as we are.”

Rann laughed. “Now you are overestimating
my
capacity for self-deception.”

“But Rann, you know the law of the quanta. When you don’t
know
, anything is possible.”

***

That night Rann and his captain ate dinner together, and Rann prepared a meal that would not irritate their digestive tracts. They raised a glass—of filtered wine—to their comrades who had perished and another to those who inevitably would soon perish. Rann proposed a toast to the earth—the real earth, not this one on which they had been shipwrecked for so long—and he sang a poem in
puralon
to honor them, even improvising a stanza in praise of the flatlands. Venkaaszbuul declaimed a heroic ballad in
chegk
concerning some bold explorer of ages past; and it was good to hear the old tongues and the old songs, even in
chegk,
and to praise a world whose star did not so much as shine in this planet’s skies. They both wept—even the flatlander captain so forgot his Schooling that tears wet his face in abundance—and they embraced and promised never again to allow the years to intervene so thickly.

In the morning, Venkaaszbuul secured Rann’s promise that, should the excavation by wild chance unearth the body of Poshtli the Lakelander, he would not disclose in any manner that there were others yet living who wore such unlikely bones beneath their skins. And then he departed.

***

Later that same day, a sheriff’s deputy served Rann with a court order to cease and desist all digging. His neighbor Alma Seakirt had objected that since the encumbrance against digging appeared in all the other deeds surrounding the wood, and because the clear intent had always been to protect the woodland, it must have been omitted in error from the Vander Alkrenn deed. Rann Valkran disputed the order in township court and when he lost, appealed to the State, where he lost again.

By that time, the hole that he and Steve had excavated had been filled in and, per court order, planted in wildflowers. As a sign of hope in the future, Ms. Seakirt said.

***

Rann took it hard, his neighbor later observed, and could be seen on his patio sitting before the filled-in swimming pool weeping into his lemonade. He had always been a sensitive soul, Shaw commented, much given to tears and melancholy as well as sudden enthusiasms. Even in his happier moments, he had seemed haunted by some great and terrible sorrow in his past whose memory would not release him.

So it came as no surprise when Shaw saw him one morning lying dead with a shovel in his hand in a hole he had dug in his ground. Like everyone else, he assumed at first that it had been suicide. But suicide over a swimming pool never dug? In the end, there were enough anomalies—the position of the body, the placement of the wound, certain papers he had filed with his lawyer, Sèan FitzPatrick—for the coroner to rule ‘suspicious circumstances,’ and order an autopsy.

***

Afterward, amidst the sensation that followed the autopsy and the strange artifacts found in Rann’s attic, when his death had been ruled a suicide after all, Elizabeth Abbot, a grief counselor whom he had briefly consulted, remembered that he had once said that he would not give up on life out of despair, and she wondered if he might have done so out of hope.

***

Afterword to “Buried Hopes”

The germ of this story was planted many years ago, when I discussed with a counselor who worked in our office building the notion of an undercover alien who goes to see a counselor. The unformed idea was that the usual clichéd alien-observer-for-the-Galactic-Union would suffer pangs of loneliness and separation from his home culture and the counselor would eventually pick up on this.

It was not that this was not much of a story, as that it was not a story at all. So not much happened, and the notion lay dormant until recently when I read a news story of a man who had unearthed mammoth bones while excavating a swimming pool on his property. That suggested the title “Buried Hopes.” I began to noodle over what else someone might dig up. Hidden chambers? A doorway to other dimensions?

Then I read an essay by the philosopher James Chastek entitled “A Theme for a Sci-Fi Story That I’ll Never Write,” in which he laments the cliché by which the aliens are always logical and the humans are emotional, and emotion always wins. Being a Thomist philosopher, he thought this a false dichotomy and inverted the scenario to one in which the aliens cry over spilt milk while the humans try to be logical about it. I asked him if I could use it, and he said sure. You can find his essay here:

http://thomism.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/a-theme-for-a-sci-fi-story-that-ill-never-write/

At some point, these three threads—the emotional aliens, the need to see a counselor, and the notion of buried hopes—came together, with the results you have just read.

At this point in the “neighborhood stories,” Singer is dead, Henry relocated, and Kyle uploaded (or not). However, Alma from “Captive Dreams” makes a brief appearance, as does old Doc Wilkes. Rann’s neighbor, Jamie Shaw, was mentioned briefly in “Hopeful Monsters” and, along with his cousin Sandra Locke, was the protagonist in another story, “The Longford Collector.” [Publisher’s Note: The referenced stories can be found in the collection
Captive Dreams
, from which “Buried Hopes” was taken.]

Copyright © 2012 by Michael F. Flynn

“Buried Hopes” is excerpted from Michael Flynn’s collection,
Captive Dreams.

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