Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 (25 page)

"For God's Sake, Joe! You
remember
me?" I was doubly amazed. He hadn't seen me in eighteen years and not only had he recognized me instantly—and apparently without looking—he'd remembered my childhood fascination with astronomy.

"
Remember
you, my young friend? October's pet, mighty, flighty Pegasus, watches from above as I watch from below and neither of us . . . knows how to forget." The artist shook his head, perhaps a bit grimly, and continued in a more casual tone. "Truthfully, I've been expecting you for weeks."

"Sorry, Joe, I've been meaning to get down here ever since I got back, but—did you hear what happened to me?"

"Certainly. Your parents keep in close touch with their friends here, do they not?"

I stared at the Cloudman's homely profile and thought about the absolute trust the neighborhood had placed in him and the countless happy days I'd spent under his occluded but oddly watchful eye. This man was
important
to me and I'd never fully appreciated it before.

"Uncle Joe, I've . . . I've missed you. Terribly."

"Bless you for saying so. I've missed you too, Gregory. You were a delightful child. Intelligent and good-hearted and always so
inventive
."

"Inventive? Oh. You mean about causing trouble? Jesus! How embarrassing. I never thought about it from your point of—I must have caused you one hell of a lot of grief."

"Why be embarrassed? I knew you were doing it for the sake of your hand."

For the second time tonight, goose bumps sprang to attention. The back of my neck tingled.

"You were
aware
of the effect you were having? That's . . . very interesting."

I stared down at the little water-filled atomizer the painter used to keep his paints moist as they sat on the tray, but found no answers. Children easily accept things adults would find incredible and I was no longer a child . . .

"I don't get it, Joe. What
are
you? Some kind of . . . healer?"

The old man sighed deeply and the breeze carried a faint yeasty scent of fresh bread. "Since you ask so politely, I will tell you exactly what I am, but I cannot explain it: I am a city."

"What? Did you say ‘a city'?"

"Ask no more questions. Not now. But I have heard tales of the torment in your legs. Why don't you take my hand now as you used to—you needn't even misbehave!—and we shall see what happens."

This offer seemed so bizarre that I felt as if I'd suddenly landed in some lunatic's dream. But I remembered how much Joe had done for me when I was young. So I accepted, held his right hand with my left, and felt awkward and foolish—until my knees suddenly began to tingle. At that point, I couldn't think of a thing to say and wasn't even sure what to think, so I just scratched my legs surreptitiously and watched the man paint.

He'd lost none of his skills, but his art looked different in the moonlight. Although it was nearly midnight and the Moon was getting low, the night was so clear and my vision so adjusted, that the sky was surprisingly bright. There were clouds up there, puffy and pearly cumulous jobs, but not too many. They were as still as if they'd been nailed to the stars.

The matching clouds in Joe's painting were extraordinary. They were obviously modeled on the real ones, but the artist had taken liberties. The faint extrusions on the painted billowy edges seemed close to forming recognizable shapes, and the intensity of light in the centers made the clouds suggest distant nebulae or coalescing galaxies.

What most grabbed my eye, however, were the dark spaces
between
clouds. In daylight, they wouldn't have seemed so prominent; besides, the way I'd spent my evening had left me acutely sensitive to forms. Some dark spaces didn't match the real sky at all. These particular shapes were unfamiliar—or maybe I'd seen them in Joe's paintings before and they hadn't quite registered. Each such shape had the purposeful and simple design usually associated with written letters or numbers. One looked like a "V" with a cloverleaf blob in the middle. As a graphic artist, I know a
character
when I see one. But if these were letters, I wondered, what was the language?

"Have you left some of your pain . . . behind, Gregory?"

For an instant, Joe canted his head and the moonlight glinted slyly off his cataracts. The tiny stress he'd put on the word "behind" put the crowning touch of oddity on the evening. I was sure the emphasis had been deliberate, as if the Cloudman had somehow known about the problems I'd had with the toothbrush commercial.

"Joe," I began, but then wasn't sure what to ask or how to ask it.

"Your legs? Better or no?"

"My God! I hadn't realized . . . this is
incredible
. . . the pain is gone! I mean completely! How could—I don't remember my hand changing so—"

"Yes, yes." He sounded a bit distracted, as if he was already thinking about something else. "The slowest part is setting up the basic channels but we'd already done that when you were younger. Once the system is in place—"

"What the hell are you talking about, Uncle Joe? How is this
possible?
"

"Ah, please accept my regrets! I shouldn't talk so much when I intend to tell you so little. There are some things, young Gregory, that an old fool should not hope to explain."

I couldn't get him to say anything more on the subject and I felt too happy about the pain ending and too confused about why it had ended to keep trying. After a long stretch of surprisingly companionable silence, I said goodnight, promised to return soon, and headed for home. On the way, I tried to glimpse Pegasus through the glaze of the streetlight, but couldn't. My legs felt absolutely wonderful. The old punchline, "it feels so good when it stops," kept going through my head.

But underneath all that, I was troubled. I don't like to think of myself as the kind of person who can't believe in miracles; but I sure as hell don't believe in
magic
.

I have learned, by trying everything else, that I function best by getting up at the same time every morning no matter how late I go to sleep.

Which didn't make it any easier to force my body out of bed when the alarm sounded. And when I went to the kitchen, my coffee wasn't brewed. I'd remembered to get the morning's coffee ready to go, but I must have forgotten to push the damn timer button. Only a fellow addict will understand what a blow
that
was.

Cursing myself, still too groggy to notice that I'd been walking around like a normal person, I switched on the Krups, flopped on the couch, flipped on the TV, and stared at the flatscreen in a caffeine-deprived stupor. The channel was set to one of those morning shows where they rarely scratch more than the gloss on the surface of an interesting story. Truthfully, I was paying more attention to the happy squeals and grunts of my elixir brewing . . . until the report about "Team Champ" came on.

Since spring, a team of crypto-zoologists had been working up near Burlington, Vermont, doing research in Lake Champlain. The team had the latest multi-source sonar and side-scan sonar equipment, a big boat, two mini-subs, and one dubious goal: to finally track down (if it existed) the local version of the Loch Ness monster, the ultra-elusive "Champie." This was a huge job; the
surface
area of the lake is over 450 square miles . . .

Like other such expeditions before them, they found no dinosaurs, giant sea serpents, or even the prehistoric whales some had predicted, but early last evening they had apparently located something else, something that made my eyes spring open pre-coffee.

One of the mini-subs had contained a kind of high-tech beachcombing device called a "proton magnetometer," which was highly sensitive to the presence of buried metal. The magnetometer had gone nuts over one of the deepest parts of the lake and when the boat reached the spot and applied its deep sonar, it got back a strange sonic "fingerprint."

There, buried beneath tons of muck, was evidently a large oval object, fifty meters across the widest part. The scientists weren't sure what the thing was or what kind of alloy it was made of, and they sure as hell didn't know how it got there or where it came from. But it was clearly something
manufactured
. Naturally, the TV hosts tried to make everyone on Team Champ use the word "spaceship," but none of the scientists would play along.

From the thickness of silt, one team member had estimated that the object had been sitting on the bottom for two hundred years. There was no saying how much longer it would keep sitting there. Champlain gets as deep as 400 feet and extracting such a monstrosity and getting it on dry land was a problem nearly as heavy as the artifact itself.

At the moment, scientists and engineers were modifying the mechanical arms on the mini-subs, adapting them for goo-removal and cleaning. With any luck, they'd soon have pictures of the object's surface.

Rich food for thought. Possibly too rich.

The report ended and I wasted some time flipping channels, hoping to find out more on the subject. Finally, when I chanced upon one of my own commercials, I decided that coffee couldn't wait.

I sprang to my feet and suddenly realized what I'd just done. Then I shouted with joy and started dancing around the room like a maniac.

After settling down and finally pouring myself the first cup of the day (and, I might add, the most important), I wasted an hour in useless speculations and another hour in chasing down the Lake Champlain story on the Internet. The only new thing I learned was that the latest side-scan sonar systems can detect objects as far away as two thousand meters, but only have good resolution up to a thousand meters.

Then it occurred to me that there were phone calls I should make. First, I cancelled the scheduled grocery delivery for the day. My legs weren't quite what they'd been the night before, but I could easily do my own damn shopping now. Then I rang up Dottie Kierkenbart who was this year's Resident Coordinator, told her my condition had suddenly improved, and asked her to include me in the "food-bucket brigade." She said she was delighted I was better and that, starting in two weeks, I could bring Uncle Joe his lunch on Tuesdays and his dinner on Saturdays if it wouldn't be too inconvenient.

The one person I should have called but didn't was my therapist, Deborah Bloom. I wanted to see the expression on her beautiful face when I jogged around the room. I have to admit it: I had hopes for a different kind of future relationship with Ms. Bloom.

After one last call (to the office to see if the clients had been subjected to the commercial yet—they hadn't), I strolled back to the beach. This time the trip seemed as short as it was.

The weather was sending mixed messages today. It was warm enough when the wind wasn't blowing, but the frequent gusts seemed to come straight from the Arctic Circle.

The Cloudman owned several extra layers of clothing he would don in subfreezing weather, but a mild chill like this was nothing to him. He was still dressed in the familiar gray pullover that had seen better decades.

In the daylight, I noticed something I'd missed the night before: Joe hadn't changed much, if at all, in eighteen years. Of course, he'd always looked about as old as anyone could get . . .

"Ah, young Gregory. How are the legs this glorious morning?"

Joe was working on a new painting but I spotted some of the same negative-space shapes I'd seen the night before. Most were upside-down or sideways to their previous orientation, but—

"Gregory?"

"Sorry, Uncle Joe, I got distracted. My legs? You're a wonder worker; that's for sure! I'd still like to learn how you—"

Joe was shaking his head ruefully, "Yet you are still in some pain?"

"It's trivial, really. Absolutely nothing compared to what I've been going through. I figured maybe a few more of your . . . treatments?"

"No. What your legs require now is
use
. I'm certain your friend will know just the right exercises."

"My friend? You mean Deborah? Who told you about
her?
"

"People here are so interested in each other. Isn't it comforting to live somewhere where neighbors look after their own?"

"Oh, they
look
all right! Sometimes I think this place is more like a damn fishbowl than a community! Which reminds me . . . there was the strangest story on the news this morning. Did any of the local gossips happen to mention a big object found up at Lake Champlain?"

"No. What kind of object?"

"Something huge and oval although they can only ‘see' it with sonar at the moment. It's buried in the muck below one of the deepest parts of the lake."

Joe actually stopped painting and turned to face me. That might not seem like a big deal to you, but to me it was like the sun suddenly turning blue.

"Please, Gregory. Tell me everything about this." He returned to the canvas
slowly
. His usual motion, if he had to step away from his work for a few seconds, was closer to a rubber band snapping back.

So I repeated what little I knew and the Cloudman painted as if he wasn't listening. But he was breathing unevenly and his hands were trembling slightly; I've seen rocks less steady than Joe's hands. When I was done, he asked only one question:

"What do these scientists believe they have uncovered?"

"They aren't saying, but the
way
they're not saying it . . ."

"Yes?"

"The media people are obviously hoping it's a real live flying saucer. Fat chance! But the scientists look nervous, as if they know damn well they've stumbled onto some top-secret government project. One professor claimed that from the amount of silt on top, the ‘spaceship,' whatever it is, could have been there for two centuries."