Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (20 page)

"Fully consistent with all the new regulations the Grays made necessary," the trucker said. "Mostly that means soundproof ing; horns and sirens get piped through, but otherwise nothing gets in or out. Even if the engine wasn't a Whisper, we wouldn't be able to hear it."

He pulled a little lunch tray out from behind his seat and set his food on it. He shut his eyes and was silent a moment before he started unwrapping his food.

"Do you believe in God?" he asked.

I took my time answering. "I used to."

"Before the Grays, you mean."

"Pretty much."

He took a bite of his sandwich, chewed it carefully, and swallowed it. "I never did," he said, and took another bite. I waited. "Not until Wichita."

"You were at Wichita?"

His mouth was full, but he nodded. I looked out at the parking lot, at the people eating in their cars and their trucks, keeping a respectful distance from each other. Not a Gray in sight, but they had trained us well.

"I was driving a food services truck at that time," he said after a while, "and I had just made a delivery at the convention center there, where the gun show was taking place. Don't ask me what started it, because I don't know any more than anyone else about that. I just... I was pulling away, and I saw it in the rearview, saw the roof just lift off the place. I stopped the truck so I could see what was happening. Things were f lying out from under the roof, spinning out in all directions. Some of them fell on my truck. Machine screws, clouds of dark powder, little metal rings. Pieces of f irearms and tables and displays, I guess. Disassembled bulletproof vests and unrolled paper cups and ceiling panels peeled back into their constituent layers.

"I was worried about damage to my truck, so I was about to get out of there when I glanced in the rearview and saw people streaming out of the hall. And a Gray appeared in front of them, and they all just..."

"Exploded?"

"No," he said. "I know that's what it looked like later, in the pictures. But it was more like when you take apart an engine, or a rif le. Were you ever in the army?"

"No."

"The point is, you can take an M-16 apart and put it back together and it'll still work. You can't do that with a human being."

He put his sandwich down. After a minute he went on. "I saw that, and I threw the truck into gear. But then I looked out, and there was a Gray blocking the road in front of me. Just standing there, arms at its sides, big eyes looking at me and probably a million other things at once. I suppose if I'd been able to connect it to what was happening behind me, I'd have tried to run it down, but my training kicked in, and I stood on the brakes. We learn early on how deadly a rig can be; I used to have nightmares about running people down. Not that a Gray is a person, exactly.

"I stopped, though, and then I thought, 'Now I'm going to die.' There was no way I was going to get the rig moving at any speed before the Gray did whatever it was going to do. I don't carry a weapon in the truck, and considering what was happening in the convention center I thought that was probably a good thing. The only thing I could think to do was to put my hands up, like it was pointing a gun at me, you know?" He laughed. "Which, you know, is pretty much the same as giving them permission to approach you.

"Well, it didn't come any closer, but the words—I saw them in my mind, you know? Just for a second. Looked like a road sign, like 'EAU CLAIRE NEXT 3 EXITS,' but it said 'TODAY'S FRIEND URGES YOU TO LEAVE THIS AREA.' And then it disappeared."

"So you left?"

"I f loored it. Drove to Oklahoma City with the radio going crazy, never picked it up. Told my supervisor I'd left before anything strange had happened. Tried not to read about it or listen to conversations about it. Tried to figure out why I wasn't... disassembled. Like all those other people."

"Maybe you were just lucky."

"Luck is a word we use for things that aren't worth thinking about too much," the trucker said. "Luck is Bingo. When it comes to life and death, luck doesn't explain anything away."

I shook my head. "It's just that we can't process death, not really. That's why we invented God."

"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe the Grays are God. They're all-powerful, all-knowing. We can't hurt them."

"I think God has to be able to create, not just destroy."

"They're creating something here, something we don't understand. They're changing us. Listen—I'm telling you this because I can see you're running from them. One of them, maybe more than one, was inside your head, and you're looking for some-place where they're not. I've seen it before. But they're God. You can't go anywhere where they can't reach you."

"So you're not going to take me anywhere?"

"I just want to make sure you understand that you can't get away."

"Well," I said, "I'm going to try."

He carefully rewrapped his sandwich and set it in a cooler under his seat, then rolled down his window and shook his tray clean outside. "I'm going as far as Seattle," he said. "I can drop you anywhere between here and there. You got a place in mind?"

"I'll know it when I see it," I said.

I took the ride as far as Belvidere, South Dakota. The Grays tend to stick to the cities, so I thought it would be safe to look around and stretch my legs while I decided what to do next. There was a little pizza joint there with a few people sitting together in twos or threes, talking low. I stared at them as I walked in, then sat at the bar behind a beer that the bartender had already poured for me.

"You'll like it," he told me. He was slim and streamlined; long hair pulled back, dark mustache slicked back, crooked nose like the bump on a fighter jet. He had
away of standing behind the bar when idle, his head tipped back on his shoulders, elbows bent, wrists hanging loose. He reminded me of an otter.

The beer was a smooth ale with a nice bite at the finish. "You were right," I told him, and ordered a mushroom slice.

He put the order in on a computer register, the type that used to beep. "I have a sense about these things," he said.

"Beer?"

He nodded. "I know what people are going to order the moment I see them. Someone like you, who's never been here before, I know what you'd like best."

"I guess you develop a sense for that kind of thing if you tend bar for long enough."

"No. I never did. Done this for twelve years, never could even remember what my regulars drank until about three years ago."

"Something just clicked?"

"No." He leaned his fists on the cooler behind the bar. "Tell me something about yourself," he said.

I understood that he was seeking an exchange; he would tell me his story if I told him one about me. I took another sip of the beer, for courage. "I used to be an architect," I said.

"A long time ago?"

"About four days, now." My hand drifted to my waist, where my iBerry should have been. "I was working on this project," I told him. "The firm was hired by the Grays, or by a company owned by a company working for them. They wanted a proposal for a hive design. Terrestrial housing for Grays. There were all these requirements: as little direct sunlight as possible; cool, but without any noisy mechanical ventilation; private, secure, all those things.

"So I had this idea to basically excavate a high-rise out of the ground, right? Dig down thirty or forty stories and build the living space into the walls. Not a new concept, but the idea I had was that we make it narrower at the top. Usually you'd want it wide at the top, let in as much sun as possible, but obviously not in this case. And then I thought why not make it like a tree? Like an oak tree. The outline of one, you understand? I mean they—I don't know that the Grays would see it at all. Maybe no one would, once it was actually built, but it's there in the concept drawings and the blueprints. An enormous oak in bloom, hanging upside down from the surface. It's—we were calling it Negative Space. It was a code name, because obviously there would be other proposals. It was a competition."

I heard how fast I was talking, then, and I stopped. I checked the mirror behind the bar to see if any Grays had come in. None had.

"It was a good idea," I said more slowly. "My boss liked it. I think we might have won the contest." All of that was true, and only four days ago Negative Space had been the most important thing in my life. Part of me wanted that back.

"Will they go ahead and enter it without you?" the bartender asked. For some reason I was taken aback by the idea. I didn't want to think that the firm was just another hive; I wanted to think that when I left, something was lost.

"Maybe they will," I said.

"You ever met a Gray?" the bartender asked.

"Yeah."

"Ever been inside one of their hives?"

"No." "I have." He nodded as he said it, as if someone else was speaking. "Three years ago. I used to drink," he said. "I used to drink back here, while I worked, then get serious after close. I was what you call a functional alcoholic.

"So one night I'm out there on the hills, with a bottle and a half of Jack in me,
howling at the moon, you know? I was with some friends, but I'd wandered away—I remember thinking how I felt lonely, sitting there by the fire with my friends, so I got up and wandered off. I remember the stars had been out, but at some point it got cloudy, and I was stumbling along in complete darkness. And I fell, or I lay down, on the side of a hill, and the hill opened up and let me inside.

"The inside of the hill was like a fancy hotel lobby. There were plants and fountains and stuff, and there were Grays everywhere. I mean, I was so drunk that I thought
I
was a Gray. They didn't pay any attention to me at first. And then it was like everything froze, and they were all looking at me, and they took me apart."

He picked up a glass, filled it with water from the soda gun, and drank it down in one long gulp. A waitress brought my slice to the end of the bar. The soles of the bartender's shoes made a
squick
noise on the mats as he walked over to retrieve it.

The pizza was hot, and the cheese stuck together in a molten mass; I took one bite and had to reel in most of the topping, leaving the crust wounded and half-naked. I gulped at the beer, and managed to cool the cheese but ruin the taste of everything.

"They took you apart," I said once my mouth was clear.

"Yeah," the bartender said, and picked up a cloth to wipe down the bar. "Then they put me back together. The right way. They fixed me. I used to have a bad knee, but it's fine now. I don't limp. I quit drinking and I never even broke a sweat. But I know what other people want to drink."

"I've never heard of them putting someone back together."

The bartender shrugged.

"Did any of them say anything to you?"

"No. They just..." He lifted his hands, then dropped them. "They just felt sorry for me. Did you ever break your leg or anything? The way people look at you when you're on crutches, like they're so glad they're not you, but they feel guilty for feeling that way—it was like that."

I ran my tongue across the burns on the roof of my mouth. "What happened afterward?"

"I woke up in my bed at home. Two days had passed. Never found the hive again."

A group of children and parents arrived and took over one end of the pizza parlor. Several tables had been pushed together and covered with white paper tablecloths, balloons tethered to the centerpieces, a party hat on every plate. The children were at first shy, sitting in the too-big chairs kicking their feet, but soon one of them announced that pepperoni was his favorite, and the others joined in. I could see the parents' tension in their restless eyes and pressed lips, but gradually they, too, began to relax, to joke with the children and each other, to laugh.

There were eight small children in the group, perhaps nine or ten years old, but among them there were two who sat quietly beside each other. One wore a party hat and watched the activity at the table through round glasses that were too large for his face; the other held her hat in her lap, perhaps because there was already a pink ribbon woven into her dark braided hair. They observed without participating. Once the girl laughed at something one of the other children did, and the boy looked at her curiously until she was calm again.

I finished my pizza, watching the boy and girl watch the rest of their table. Perhaps there was a Gray or two nearby watching all of us. Was that why these children were the way they were? Was the trucker right? Were the Grays changing us, hunting certain qualities out of us, like tusks out of African elephants? Or were these just the sort of quiet, reserved children who had always been among us, growing up to be quiet, reserved adults?

"What did they do to you?"

"What?"

"The Grays," said the bartender. "What did they do to you?" I was still thinking about the question when someone came inside and a bird slipped in the door. It was a sparrow, a tiny dusty brown thing, jittery and fragile. It landed on the bar and jerked its head back and forth a few times, chirping. Then it f lew up to the ceiling and landed in the wooden rafters there. It trilled its anxiety at the room, and the noise level went up in response, in particular from the kids at the birthday party. The quiet boy and the quiet girl were looking up and laughing with the rest. But I found myself seeing all of them as the bird must see them: inexplicable, indistinguishable, inscrutable—unknowable in every way save the vague sense of potential danger that each of them carried. TODAY'S FRIEND WISHES TO HEAR YOUR SONG.

The last human CEO
has just resigned.
Forced retirement is rumored.
And now the finest tailors
work only in metal.

—Bruce Boston