Alien Invasion and Other Inconveniences (7 page)

PERSONAL LOG:

A patrol ship and officer in Section 3a are missing. I have sent two patrol ships to investigate. It is possible we missed, in our scouting reports, some type of natural phenomenon that might be dangerous to us.

I see no reason to report this to the company. The settlement is proceeding as planned. Soon the first wave of colonists will arrive. Everything will be fine. No, I won’t report any trouble. Father would no doubt find time to criticize my concern. He has little time for me, but he makes time for criticism.

Last night I had a conversation with my second, who calls herself Catlin. She wanted to know about the One. I knew she wouldn’t understand, but I spoke to her, anyway, humored her, because of my affection for her. I described the One and how He is connected to all things as we are connected to all things. He speaks and hears as we speak and there are moments when the whole universe listens as one. He is supreme, and we are made in His image.

She said the One sounded like God, angering me. I scolded her. Then I tried to patiently explain.
The One is connected to all things and is all things and we are as He is because we are part of the One. You are not. You do not hear and you cannot speak. Your God is like the god of most primitives, a reflection of what you are. He is false.

I was so patient in my explanation. But then she said our god was just like us, which meant He could be a reflection of us. I became very angry. Here was product, the unconnected, speaking blasphemy to me. It was too much. I nearly broke her mind, but I stopped myself at the last second. Still, I damaged her. I do not yet know how badly. I will learn today if she can be repaired. I hope so. She amuses me most of the time.

We’re working outside, painting.

“It’s not the same,” I say.

“It’s the same,” Michael says.

“No,” I say, “it isn’t.”

“Why isn’t it the same?”

“They set the whole thing up,” I say. “How is that real?”

“They had to set up the situation. But then what happened, happened. Like life, Tex.”

“I don’t think so. I think they scripted parts of it.”

“What do you mean, scripted?” Michael says.

“They learned lines for situations. Not the whole thing but some situations.”

“No way.
Survivor
? Those people were serious.”

“Even if they didn’t script it, or all of it,” I say, “people were watching. That changed everything.”

“They were real people, and they acted out.
Big Brother
? You put people like that in a house, and it will get crazy. Even if no one was watching, it would get crazy.”

“I’m just saying they acted a certain way for the camera. It made a difference.”

“That’s still real,” Michael says.

“They voted on who had to leave the house or island or whatever.”

“Well, yeah, it was a competition. You got to have that.”

“Like a game,” I say.

“Right,” Michael says. “It was a game.”

“So it wasn’t real.”

“Reality TV,” he says in a loud and totally obnoxious tone. “Not reality. It was real enough for TV.”

He knows that he’s on weak ground. He asks me what I watched, then, if I hated reality TV so much.

“I liked lots of things,” I say.

“A guy like you who wouldn’t watch reality television must have watched public TV and news shows and stuff like that, right?”

“Sometimes. I watched movies a lot. I’m a movie person. I was.”

“So you’ve never seen that superhero show?”

“I watched that,” I admit.

“Right. I knew it. Comic books, graphic novels, fantasy, and sci-fi. That’s you.”

“So? What’s your point?”

“Shit, man, you’re giving me a hard time about reality TV. Look at yourself. Look at what you watched. You talk about something not being real.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “Doesn’t seem so far off now.”

Michael looks over at a Handler. “They were still lame shows.”

Then he adds,
Lame like you
.

You’re just bitter about your lame defense of reality shows
.

Only then do I realize that he didn’t actually say “Lame like you” out loud. And I’ve answered without speaking, just by thinking. We both stare at each other.

We’re like them
.

“No, we aren’t,” he says. Then he shouts it. “We aren’t like them!”

He walks away.

I make friends with this white-haired woman named Betty who is the oldest person here. She used to be a college history teacher in Michigan. She tells me she’s been keeping track of the days since the aliens came. The Sans have destroyed all calendars and clocks and watches because our way of breaking up time irritates them. Also, of course, they consider watches and clocks machines.

Betty may be the only one who knows what day it is.

I sit with her at lunch. I say, “What day is it, Betty?” I care because it’s something from our world. More and more of our world disappears every day.

She looks like she may not remember me, but then she smiles. “It’s my husband’s birthday,” she says.

“Your husband was sent somewhere else?” I say.

“Bad heart,” she says. “We were together when they invaded. He fell asleep with the others. The big sleep as that noir writer called it.”

I don’t know what she’s talking about but the memory of her husband dying twists up her face and I think she’s about to cry.

“What day is it, Betty?” I say again.

She smiles a broken smile. “And tomorrow is the first day of spring.”

Michael sits next to me just as Betty says this. “What did you say?”

“Tomorrow is officially spring in Texas,” she says again. “It feels the way summer in Michigan feels, but here it’s only spring.”

“Can’t be.”

“I’m quite sure,” she says. “I’ve been very meticulous. We historians like to keep our dates straight.”

“Spring,” Michael says, looking down at his tray.

“I would like to give you a happy spring present, Jesse,” Betty says. “You remind me of my son when he was your age. Look for me tomorrow.”

She gets up.

“You haven’t eaten,” I say.

“I don’t eat their food.”

She’s thin, and her movements are stiff and unnatural. I worry because the aliens won’t keep anyone alive who can’t be of use to them. “What do you eat, then?”

“Only what they don’t give me.”

“Can I eat it?” Michael says.

She pushes her tray toward him and walks away.

“Kind of a strange old lady,” Michael says, “but I think I might start eating with her every day.”

I see Lauren putting her tray up on the cart near the kitchen and then walking toward the library. I get up just as Lindsey sits down.

“Don’t leave on my account,” she says.

“I’m not. I just need to tell Lauren something. Michael can tell you.”

“Nothing to tell,” Michael says.

“What?” Lindsey says.

“There
is
something to tell.”

“The aliens just left one of the lines open or something. Why can’t you let it alone, Jesse?”

“Because it means something,” I say, walking away.

For some reason I think of my dad telling me the story of how he once nearly died in a desert. He was dying of thirst, and he almost gave up. He wanted to. Something kept him going. One foot in front of the other.

“If I’d given up, I never would have met your mother, love of my life, or had you for a son or seen a Texas spring or done a million other things. You don’t know what you might miss if you don’t make it to the next day. It could be something pretty wonderful. So sometimes, no matter how bad it is, you have to just put one foot in front of the other and hope you make it to a better place.”

That’s what I’m trying to do now. It’s true, I don’t know if it really means anything, but I want to believe it does. I want to believe that there’s a way out of here, just like there was a way out of the desert for my dad.

I find Lauren reading and I sit down beside her on a big leather sofa. Something about her looks particularly pretty. I can’t say what it is exactly, but I feel it.

“What?” she says. “Do I have something on my face?”

I realize I’m staring. I must look ridiculous. “No. Nothing.”

She rubs her face anyway. “Did I get it?”

“You got it,” I say. What else can I say at that point?

“Thank you.”

Lindsey and Michael come in. I guess Lindsey didn’t eat much of her lunch, or maybe she pushed her plate too close to Michael and he inhaled it. They sit down on the sofa across from Lauren and me.

“Did he tell you?” Lindsey says, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “They read each other’s minds.”

“I was about to tell her,” I say.

“What do you mean?” Lauren says.

“It was just a few sentences,” Michael says.

“Whatever,” Lindsey says. “They did it. Like the aliens.”

Lauren looks at me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was just about to.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?” Lauren says. “I mean, you did something only they can do.”

“I don’t know,” I say, “but I think it’s good.”

“It’s bull,” Michael says. “We’re not like them.”

“I think it’s good,” Lindsey says. “I’ve thought I’ve heard things sometimes. Whispers, kind of. I thought maybe I was, you know, just hearing stuff that wasn’t there. But maybe it was there.”

“We’re getting stronger,” I say.

“You don’t know that,” Michael says.

“They aren’t as strong as they think they are, and we’re stronger than they think we are. They aren’t invincible.”

“Okay,” Lauren says. “Maybe not. So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying we have a chance to escape. We need to start thinking like prisoners who can escape. We don’t have to just accept we’re going to be slaves the rest of our lives. We have a choice.”

“Right,” Michael says. “We can be dead. What a choice.”

“I’m afraid he’s right,” Lauren says. “They conquered the world in ten seconds. We’re just four people.”

“But we aren’t the same as we were,” I say.

Everyone is silent. I can feel them considering this. Is it possible? What does it mean?

The Handler on duty, Anchise, interrupts our conversation and orders us back to work.

“I think your biological clock is off, Anchise,” I say. “We still have five or ten minutes.”

Lauren foolishly agrees with me.

Anchise picks us both up and shoves us roughly toward the door. Not physically. He does it with his mind. I can hear him thinking how nice it would be to turn us off and be done with it.

Are you reading me?
he thinks, stopping, holding me where I am. It’s like he’s pinching my arms with his fingers. Among all the big-eyed freaks, his eyes are the most frightening; something about them makes me think of a lake full of snakes. His mind closes. It’s like I was looking through a window and now it’s a wall. I feel him in me, and it’s all I can do to hide what I saw under another thought. It’s like I’ve thrown a blanket over it.

He frowns. I can tell he thinks he must have been wrong. I can tell he thinks it’s impossible for a human to read him. He lets me go.

Wrong again. Another of the all-powerful Sanginians is wrong. We
are
stronger. There’s a power in me that the aliens can’t believe I have. It’s come alive because of them, but it feels like something that was there all along. As I go back to work, I can hear my father say, “That’s your advantage, Grasshopper.”