Alien Artifacts Read online

  “The warlords’ troops have moved into Colombia now,” Zawadi said in his rolling, melodious voice. “People are fleeing to the ports and sailing north. They are hiring fishing boats, and some have stolen rich men’s yachts.”

  Armando’s heart clenched.

  In the Roades office, he traded his ship’s registration codes for a payment chit. “Just enough to pay for a shuttle to the surface,” he sighed to his friends. “But it doesn’t matter. I will be relieved to see my wife and children.”

  Only one shuttle to Cartagena remained. Armando was the last of three passengers to board. His hands shook as he secured his seat harness, and his jaw ached from gritting his teeth. He couldn’t pull his eyes from the darkened continent partially visible below. Blessed Mother Mary, he prayed, fingering the rosary in his pocket, let us arrive before the invaders reach the city!

  The shuttle was on descent, skimming a hundred feet or so above the treetops on approach to Cartagena’s spaceport, when an eye-searing flash ripped across the horizon. Armando blinked at afterimages even through the tinted pane, glimpsed a roiling, expanding mushroom cloud, as the shuttle yawed into a roll, then a tumble.

  A rending shriek filled his ears as the falling machine sundered branches and stripped trunks. It struck on its side, hard enough to pop the aft passenger hatch, rocked briefly, then jumped with the force of an explosion.

  Armando came to lying face down in dank jungle loam. Pain roused him: the throbbing ache of a broken nose, the heat of burns from shoulders to calves. Rolling onto his back, pressing his body to the damp earth, seemed to extinguish the searing, at least for the moment. He sat up gingerly, head swimming, and probed his face with one hand. His nose had swollen, his puffy eyes allowed only slits through which to see, and his hand came away slick with blood, which appeared black in the darkness.

  Several yards beyond his feet, a twisted heap of wreckage still glowed red and orange as it smoldered. Charred, stripped trees leaned precariously over it. After a few moments, to let his head clear, Armando dragged himself to his feet, using a tree trunk for support, and discovered that one of his shoes was missing.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he whispered through swollen lips, tasting blood on them. “I am alive to find my family. Thank you, Blessed Mother.”

  He limped through thinning trees, carrying his remaining shoe, to the outskirts of Cartagena. Fires lit the night sky to brilliant orange beyond crumbling buildings. But the alleys will be dark enough to conceal me from soldiers.

  Two hours of picking his way through rubble brought him to an area he recognized, in spite of the destruction. His jaw tightened at the sight of a swinging street sign and the bullet-riddled façade of a familiar shop. I am only a mile from home now. Please let them be there, please let them be safe!

  He stumbled on a broken slab of pavement as he ducked into the alley. More exhausted than he’d realized until that moment, he thrust out a hand to catch himself, seized only a cindered support post. It crumbled at his grip, bringing down a sagging balcony with a crash.

  Armando toppled clear, except for one foot. It twisted under the weight of a beam. He bit off his own yell when a shouted order echoed through the ruins.

  He didn’t stir, just lay listening to his heart pound far too quickly against the stones beneath him. If I lie very still, maybe they will think I am a corpse and move on.

  In moments, bootfalls clattered at the alley’s mouth. Lights, three or four of them, swept the area. Armando stared blankly between the boots, mouth lolling open a little, and held his breath. If only they don’t hear my heart!

  “That one is not dead,” said a very familiar voice. “There are life signs on my scope.”

  “I can change that quickly enough.” Armando heard the click of a weapon.

  “No!” A third voice, also familiar, enough that Armando felt a name floating just beyond reach of his tongue. “I know him. Don’t shoot!”

  Two shapes dropped to their heels beside him, heads still in shadow, but hands lifted the beam off his foot and eased him onto his back. In the play of flashlights, Armando saw the young men’s faces and he gasped. “I know you. I’ve known you since you were children. But…I bumped my head. I can’t remember your names.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” one youth said. “You’re hurt. We must take you to our leader.”

  The squad leader motioned toward two of his men. “Help him walk,” he ordered, “one on each side, and be kind to him. This man was like a second father to me.”

  They took Armando’s arms across their shoulders, raised him to his feet, and one of them murmured, “I remember you, too.”

  They brought him into the ancient walled part of the city, to the historic hotel that had been a mansion hundreds of years ago. Armando, as a poor man, had never been inside, but he had heard of its splendor.

  “The General has his headquarters here, sir,” the squad leader explained. “It is more secure, inside the wall.”

  Dismay dropped Armando’s heart into his stomach as his two assistants guided him inside. The rumored splendor of the ancient mansion had succumbed to bombs and the heavy peppering of small-arms fire. The once-grand entry appeared no better than the rubble of the streets.

  One of the young soldiers who knew him crept away through the shadow of a wide, but wrecked, arched doorway. The others remained about Armando, slipping him affectionate smiles as if he were a beloved uncle. In truth, Armando felt that each one of them might have been nephews he hadn’t seen since they were infants.

  Boots clattered on tile in an unseen passage and an officer appeared from the doorway through which the soldier had disappeared. Armando recognized the rank of captain on the man’s shoulders, a man in his early thirties, about his own age, and he drew himself up between his two supporters.

  The captain cast a scant glance at him. “The General will not see him. He is doubtless a spy. Take him to the swimming pool and prepare him to be executed.”

  Shock paled the young soldiers’ faces, but Armando admired their discipline. Not one of them gasped. The squad leader said only, “Yes, sir,” in a clipped tone.

  They marched him through a short passage into a courtyard. Are they going to drown me? Armando wondered.

  As they drew up to the pool he saw that it was empty. Empty but for bullet holes in the wall at the deep end, dark streaks down shattered tiles, and a stained puddle about the drain, not entirely washed away by the hose that lay tangled on the deck, like a malnourished constrictor from the Amazon.

  His newfound nephews marched him, with no less gentleness, down the steps at the shallow end and up to the bullet-pocked wall. One bound his hands with a cord, his water-rimmed eyes relaying an apology he couldn’t speak.

  “Would you like a blindfold?” the youth asked.

  Armando hesitated. Then: “No. I wish to look my executioners in their faces, though I would rather see my wife and children one more time.”

  The moon, veiled with curling smoke so it appeared russet in the sky, reached its zenith while they waited for the rifle squad. Then someone called the courtyard to attention. The young soldiers snapped to the same rigidity as the fractured statues set about the courtyard.

  The general strode to the far end of the pool, peered down its length, drew his sidearm from its holster. “We have caught the elusive spy at last,” he gloated. His voice carried across the courtyard, rang from balustrades once hung with graceful planters. “All of you will receive commendations for this.”

  Armando watched, unflinching, as the general sprang down the steps, paced down the pool’s length. He stopped mere yards before Armando, so close that Armando saw his thumb release the safety, his finger slip into the trigger well. The general leveled the pistol between Armando’s eyes and bared his teeth.

  He loves this. He loves killing, Armando thought. He has always loved killing.

  A breath of wind parted the smoky film. The moon broke through, a silver light upon the tableau. Armando saw the
other’s eyes dilate with recognition at the same moment he felt it himself. “Perfecto,” he whispered.

  He knew the man. The “battle model” chimera, to be correct. Knew about the genetic modifications that enhanced his strength, his speed, and enlarged his bones. Armando knew about his full-spectrum vision, his hearing as keen as a wolf’s, and the more subtle changes that made him immune to neurotoxins and diseases.

  In a flash, Armando remembered the general’s history: how he had struggled to succeed, how he had become so discouraged, so broken from the lack of praise for doing well, that he had become a mercenary. He had taken payment for evil deeds and sought respect from people he should have found to be contemptible. Armando glimpsed all of it in those deep, black eyes. He murmured again, “Perfecto, what has happened to you, my friend?”

  Generalissimo Perfecto Gonzalez wrenched upright from his shooting stance. His right arm sagged so that the pistol almost slipped from his grasp. Armando watched him fumble it into his holster, watched his face contort with shock and shame. “My brother?” he said. “My brother whom I have missed since...”

  He cut the cords about Armando’s wrists with the knife from his belt. “Go home,” he said, his voice a rasp. “Go home and hug your wife and children.”

  * * *

  The afternoon sun warmed Armando’s back as he leaned on his hoe. The bean plants in his garden had blossomed early this year, and now the stalks bent under the weight of large, full pods.

  Movement down the road caught his eye. He squinted to see who might be coming, deepening the laugh-lines acquired over many years. Perhaps it would be Yazmin and her husband, bringing their three children to hear him tell stories, or perhaps Tomaso, with his athletic sons, to help weed the bean field.

  No matter who it was, Armando already knew them, as deeply and personally as he knew his own soul. And he loved them.

  The figure who crested the rise cast a bulky silhouette against the cloudless blue sky. When Armando spotted the rocking gait, his heart leaped with joy in his chest. He swept off his straw hat and waved it above his head. “Perfecto, my brother!”

  The former general returned a wide grin with a wave of his broad hand. “Armando! Come rest from your beans for a while and see what I have brought you.”

  They met at the road’s verge, flung arms about each other to heartily clap each other’s backs, before retiring to the shade and the bamboo chairs on Armando’s front porch. “Cigars from Cuba,” Perfecto said with near awe, and produced two from his shirt pocket. “The finest ever made. Too good not to share.”

  Usually they spoke of their families, of crops growing, or soccer teams and horse racing.

  “There’s a new resort on Europa,” Perfecto said, “for those who enjoy winter sports.” His eyes held a teasing glint.

  “I have no desire to go see it,” Armando replied. “I didn’t want to go the first time. But I had little choice then.” He shuddered at a dimming memory of poverty and pain, and fear for the safety of his family on war-torn Earth. Yazmin and Tomaso, they had no memory of the war at all.

  That had been the last war, the one that ended thirty years ago in the heart of Cartagena. With that war had gone crime and violence and cruelty of all kinds. With its end had come a bond of intimacy and compassion so strong that Armando scarcely knew where his own soul ended and others’ began.

  That bond had spread to everyone, everyone on this world, and all others.

  “But it is good that you went,” Perfecto said. “Good for the whole world. Everyone on Earth knows that you are the one who found the artifact.

  “Perhaps it was an alien’s shrine, after all,” Perfecto continued, “but they left it there for us. They knew that, as a species, humans weren’t yet ready to go into space. We were too aggressive; we needed to become better.”

  Armando raked his cigar-free hand through his silver, shaggy hair. “We are better now.”

  But restlessness stirred in his soul. Peace and enough for all has brought too much…contentment. We have become complacent. There are no new Mozarts or Einsteins or Rembrandts in an age when such gifts should flourish.

  That was why, in secret, he had begun to study advanced mathematics. He controlled a wry smile at the thought. And I seem to have a gift for it.

  At his side, Perfecto nodded. “Yes, we are getting better. They will come to meet us soon. Or maybe we will go to find them.”

  “And when we see them,” Armando said, “whether they look like dragonflies or cuttlefish, or white gassy entities, they will seem familiar.”

  ME AND ALICE

  Angela Penrose

  Back in 1972, when I was nine years old, June twenty-sixth was the day my toad Alice died. I’ve always remembered that day, and so has Alice; I give her a fat cricket for dinner every year, to kind of celebrate her getting over it.

  Alice was my dad’s toad first, and she was twenty-five when he gave her to me. He said she was pretty old for a toad, and that she probably wouldn’t live very much longer. I remember overhearing Mom and Dad arguing about it, when I was supposed to be in bed. Mom said it was cruel to give me a pet that was going to die soon. Dad said that that was the best kind of pet to give a six-year-old, and better to have me accidentally kill a toad than the puppy I’d been wanting.

  I was pretty mad at him for saying that. I mean, he must not have loved Alice very much, if he thought I’d kill her. I hadn’t really liked her much myself at first—you can’t play ball with a toad, after all—but the thought that my dad didn’t care if she died made me promise myself that I’d take the best care of her and show him.

  Three years later, though, she was really old, and she finally stopped eating. I tried feeding her worms and beetles and some big ants, and I caught her some spiders even though I was kind of afraid of spiders, but she wasn’t hungry. On the twenty-sixth, that Monday, I woke up and found her still in her den in her tank, a plank laid over a big rock to make a little hide-out underneath. She usually came out in the morning to wait for her breakfast.

  That morning she was still under the plank, though. I picked her up and petted her some, carefully because toads are squishy and you don’t want to be too rough with them, but she didn’t move or croak. I put her back into her tank and gave her a beetle, but she didn’t even try to catch it. She just sat there by the glass where I’d put her, sort of staring at nothing.

  I watched her for a little while, trying not to think about her dying. I knew she was going to, but I didn’t want her to and I kept hoping she’d get better. Maybe she was just sick—I never felt like eating either, if I had stomach flu or something. It could’ve been just a twenty-four-hour bug and she’d be all right the next day. I hoped so, anyway.

  Mom called me down to breakfast. I was kind of glad to leave; I felt like I should stay with Alice, but I didn’t really want to. Watching her just sit there and thinking about how old she was made me sad, and you’re not supposed to cry when you’re nine.

  Mom talked barn business, about lessons and turn-out and the farrier coming that morning. Dad said he and Rob, the man who worked for us, were going to go replace fence posts in the east pasture that day. It was all boring stuff and I didn’t really listen; they hurried to eat and then left to go work.

  I finished my eggs and toast, did the dishes, watched some cartoons on TV, then headed outside to watch the horses for a while. Mom eventually chased me away—she said if I didn’t get out of her hair she was going to stake me out for the coyotes—and I ended up climbing the path to Carver’s Grove.

  Dr. Valdez and her students were up there digging, looking for an old Indian settlement, and I went to watch sometimes. Mom and Dad had taken me up to Mesa Verde the summer before; that was pretty cool, sort of like a whole bunch of apartments built out of clay bricks in the side of a canyon. Dr. Valdez said this wouldn’t be the same.

  She thought there’d be a campground the same band would’ve used every year, someplace older than Mesa Verde, like 12,000 years o
r more. When she’d come in February to talk to Mom and Dad about getting permission to dig, she’d brought some pictures taken from a plane that showed there’d been a stream running through where Carver’s Grove was now.

  That’s what she said, anyway. I got a look at the picture, and even when she ran her finger over the place where she said the stream had been, I couldn’t see anything that looked like water.

  Dad took her up walking by the grove, though, with me tagging along, and she found rocks she said had been split in camp fires. She was pretty excited, and since Carver’s Grove is a sort of a plateau with a bunch of rocks and sandy dirt and not even many trees anymore, nothing we used for anything, he said she could dig there if she wanted.

  * * *

  Dr. Valdez had come up with her team, mostly students, about a week before I got out of school. I’d gone up before, to watch them set up and dig and all. At first I thought it’d be fun, but it was actually pretty boring. They did lots of measuring and drawing and wrote stuff down and took pictures, even when nothing was happening. And when they finally started digging, they dug really slow. I stayed out of the way so no one yelled at me to go away, but I didn’t go up there very often.

  That morning, though, I was trying to avoid thinking about Alice, so I climbed up to the dig. Dennis, a young colored man who was Dr. Valdez’s main assistant, said, “Hey, Chris.” He gave me a Space Food Stick out of a box that seemed to be his breakfast.

  “What are you going to do today?” I asked. I was hoping it might be something interesting that’d take my mind off Alice sitting by herself in my room.

  “I’m going to be digging on the outside curve of a bend in the stream,” he said. “We think the camp site was upstream of that, but items sometimes get washed downstream and get hung up in a bend. That’s where I’m looking.”