Cold Fire (39 page)

“As a beetle?”

YES.

Without the security of his pen and tablet, Jim seemed to have been reduced to inane questions. Holly half expected him to ask the entity what its favorite color was, whether it preferred Coke or Pepsi, and if it liked Barry Manilow music.

But he said, “How old are you?”

I AM A CHILD.

“A child?” Jim responded. “But you told us you’ve been on our world for ten thousand years.”

I AM STILL A CHILD.

Jim said, “Then is your species very long-lived?”

WE ARE IMMORTAL.

“Wow.” “It’s lying,” Holly told him.

Appalled by her effrontery, he said, “Jesus, Holly!”

“Well, it is.”

And
that
was the source of her renewed fear—the fact that it was not being straight with them, was playing games, deceiving. She had a sense that it regarded them with enormous contempt. In which case, she probably should have shut up, been meekly adoring before its power, and tried not to anger it.

Instead she said, “If it were really immortal, it wouldn’t think of itself as a child. It
couldn’t
think that way about itself. Infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood—those are age categories a species concerns itself with if it has a finite lifespan. If you’re immortal, you might be born innocent, ignorant, uneducated, but you aren’t born young because you’re never really going to get old.”

“Aren’t you splitting hairs?” Jim asked almost petulantly.

“I don’t think so. It’s lying to us.”

“Maybe its use of the word ‘child’ was just another way it was trying to make its alien nature more understandable.”

YES.

“Bullshit,” Holly said.

“Damn it, Holly!”

As Jim removed another page from the tablet, detaching it neatly along its edge, Holly moved to the wall and studied the patterns of light churning through it. Seen close up, they were quite beautiful and strange, not like a smooth-flowing phosphorescent fluid or fiery streams of lava, but like scintillant swarms of fireflies, millions of spangled points not unlike her analogy of luminous, schooling fish.

Holly half expected the wall in front of her to bulge suddenly. Split open. Give birth to a monstrous form.

She wanted to step back. Instead she moved closer. Her nose was only an inch from the transmuted stone. Viewed this intimately, the surge and flux and whirl of the millions of bright cells was dizzying. There was no heat from it, but she imagined she could feel the flicker of light and shadow across her-face.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?” she asked.

After a few seconds, Jim spoke from behind her: “No answer.”

The question seemed innocent enough, and one that they should logically be expected to ask. The entity’s unwillingness to answer alerted her that the ringing must be somehow vitally important. Understanding the bells might be the first step toward learning something real and true about this creature.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

Jim reported: “No answer. I don’t think you should ask that question again, Holly. It obviously doesn’t want to answer, and there’s nothing to be gained by aggravating it. This isn’t The Enemy, this is—”

“Yeah, I know. It’s The Friend.”

She remained at the wall and felt herself to be face-to-face with an alien presence, though it had nothing that corresponded to a face. It was focused on her now. It was right
there.

Again she said, “Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

Instinctively she knew that her innocent question and her not-so-innocent repetition of it had put her in great danger. Her heart was thudding so loud that she wondered if Jim could hear it. She figured The Friend, with all its powers, could not only hear her hammering heart but see it jumping like a panicked rabbit within the cage of her chest. It knew she was afraid, all right. Hell, it might even be able to read her mind. She had to show it that she would not allow fear to deter her.

She put one hand on the light-filled stone. If those luminous clouds were not merely a projection of the creature’s consciousness, not just an illusion or representation for their benefit, if the thing was, as it claimed, actually alive in the wall, then the stone was now its flesh. Her hand was upon its body.

Faint vibrations passed across the wall in distinctive, whirling vortexes. That was all she felt. No heat. The fire within the stone was evidently cold.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

“Holly, don’t,” Jim said. Worry tainted his voice for the first time. Perhaps he, too, had begun to sense that The Friend was not entirely a friend.

But she was driven by a suspicion that willpower mattered in this confrontation, and that a demonstration of unflinching will would set a new tone in their relationship with The Friend. She could not have explained why she felt so strongly about it. Just instinct—not a woman’s but an ex-reporter’s.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

She thought she detected a slight change in the vibrations that tingled across her palm, but she might have imagined it, for they were barely perceptible in the first place. Through her mind flickered an image of the stone cracking open in a jagged mouth and biting off her hand, blood spurting, white bone bristling from the ragged stump of her wrist.

Though she was shaking uncontrollably, she did not step back or lift her hand off the wall.

She wondered if The Friend had sent her that horrifying image.

“Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”

“Holly, for Christ’s sake—” Jim broke off, then said, “Wait, an answer’s coming.”

Willpower
did
matter. But for God’s sake, why? Why should an all-powerful alien force from another galaxy be intimidated by her unwavering resolution?

Jim reported the response: “It says... ‘For drama?’”

“For drama?” she repeated.

“Yeah. F-O-R, then D-R-A-M-A, then a question mark.”

To the thing in the wall, she said, “Are you telling me the bells are just a bit of theater to dramatize your apparitions?”

After a few seconds, Jim said, “No answer.”

“And why the question mark?” she asked The Friend. “Don’t you know what the bells mean yourself, where the sound comes from, what makes it, why? Are you only guessing when you say ‘for drama’? How can you not know what it is if it always accompanies you?”

“Nothing,” Jim told her.

She stared into the wall. The churning, schooling cells of light were increasingly disorienting her, but she did not close her eyes.

“A new message,” Jim said. “‘I am going.’”

“Chicken,” Holly said softly into the amorphous face of the thing in the wall. But she was sheathed in cold sweat now.

The amber light began to darken, turn orange. Stepping away from the wall at last, Holly swayed and almost fell. She moved back to her bedroll and dropped to her knees.

New words appeared on the tablet: I WILL BE BACK.

“When?” Jim asked.

WHEN THE TIDE IS MINE.

“What tide?”

THERE IS A TIDE IN THE VESSEL, AN EBB AND FLOW, DARKNESS AND LIGHT. I RISE WITH THE LIGHT TIDE, BUT HE RISES WITH THE DARK.

“He?” Holly asked.

THE ENEMY.

The light in the walls was red-orange now, dimmer, but still ceaselessly changing patterns around them.

Jim said, “Two of you share the starship?”

YES. TWO FORCES. TWO ENTITIES.

It’s lying, Holly thought. This, like all the rest of its story, is just like the bells: good theater.

WAIT FOR MY RETURN.

“We’ll wait,” Jim said.

DO NOT SLEEP.

“Why can’t we sleep?” Holly asked, playing along.

YOU MIGHT DREAM.

The page was full. Jim ripped it off and stacked it with the others.

The light in the walls was blood-red now, steadily fading.

DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

“What are you telling us?”

The same three words again: DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

“It’s a warning,” Jim said.

DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

No, Holly thought, it’s a threat.

The windmill was just a windmill again. Stones and timbers. Mortar and nails. Dust sifting, wood rotting, iron rusting, spiders spinning in secret lairs.

Holly sat directly in front of Jim, in powwow position, their knees touching. She held both his hands, partly because she drew strength from his touch, and partly because she wanted to reassure him and take the sting out of what she was about to say.

“Listen, babe, you’re the most interesting man I’ve ever known, the sexiest, for sure, and I think, at heart, the kindest. But you do a lousy interview. For the most part, your questions aren’t well-thought-out, you don’t get at the meat of an issue, you follow up on irrelevancies but generally fail to follow up on the really important answers. And you’re a naive enough reporter to think that the subject is always being straight with you, when they’re almost never straight with an interviewer, so you don’t
probe
the way you should.”

He did not seem offended. He smiled and said, “I didn’t think of myself as a reporter doing an interview.”

“Well, kiddo, that’s exactly what the situation was. The Friend, as he calls himself, has information, and we need information to know where we stand, to do our job.”

“I thought of it more as ... I don’t know... as an epiphany. When God came to Moses with the Ten Commandments, I figure He just told Moses what they were, and if Moses had other questions he didn’t feel he had to grill the Big Guy.”

“This wasn’t God in the walls.”

“I know that. I’m past that idea now. But it was an alien intelligence so superior to us that it almost might as well be God.”

“We don’t know that,” she said patiently.

“Sure we do. When you consider the high degree of intelligence and the millennia needed to build a civilization capable of traveling across galaxies—good heavens, we’re only monkeys by comparison!”

“There, you see, that’s what I’m talking about. How do you know it’s from another galaxy? Because you believe what it told you. How do you know there’s a spaceship under the pond? Because you believe what it told you.”

Jim was getting impatient now. “Why would it lie to us, what would it have to gain from lies?”

“I don’t know. But we can’t be sure that it isn’t manipulating us. And when it comes back, like it promised, I want to be ready for it. I want to spend the next hour or two or three—however long we’ve got—making a list of questions, so we can put it through a carefully planned inquisition. We’ve got to have a strategy for squeezing
real
information from it, facts not fantasies, and our questions have to support that strategy.” When he frowned, she hastened on before he could interrupt. “Okay, all right, maybe it’s incapable of lying, maybe it’s noble and pure, maybe everything it’s told us is the gospel truth. But listen, Jim, this is not an epiphany. The Friend set the rules by influencing you to buy the tablets and pen. It established the question-and-answer format. If it didn’t want us to make the best of that format, it would’ve just told you to shut up and would’ve blabbered at you from a burning bush!”

He stared at her. He chewed his lip thoughtfully.

He shifted his gaze to the walls where the creature of light had swum in the stone.

Pressing her point, Holly said, “You never even asked it why it wants you to save people’s lives, or why some people and not others.”

He looked at her again, obviously surprised to realize that he had not pursued the answer to the most important question of all. In the lactescent glow of the softly hissing gas lantern, his eyes were blue again, not green as the amber light had temporarily made them. And troubled.

“Okay,” he said. “You’re right. I guess I was just swept away by it all. I mean, Holly, whatever the hell it is—it’s astounding.”

“It’s astounding,” she acknowledged.

“We’ll do what you want, make up a list of carefully thought-out questions. And when it comes back, you should be the one to ask all of them, ’cause you’ll be better at ad-libbing other questions if it says anything that needs follow-up.”

“I agree,” she said, relieved that he had suggested it without being pressured.

She was better schooled at interviewing than he was, but she was also more trustworthy in this particular situation than Jim could ever be. The Friend had a long past relationship with him and had, admittedly, already messed with his memory by making him forget about the encounters they’d had twenty-five years ago. Holly had to assume that Jim was co-opted, to one degree or another corrupted, though he could not realize it. The Friend had been
in his mind,
perhaps on scores or hundreds of occasions, when he had been at a formative age, and when he had been particularly vulnerable due to the loss of his parents, therefore even more susceptible to manipulation and control than most ten-year-old boys. On a subconscious level, Jim Ironheart might be programmed to protect The Friend’s secrets rather than help to reveal them.

Holly knew she was walking a thread-thin line between judicious precaution and paranoia, might even be treading more on the side of the latter than the former. Under the circumstances, a little paranoia was a prescription for survival.

When he said he was going outside to relieve himself, however, she much preferred to be with him than alone in the high room. She followed him downstairs and stood by the Ford with her back to him while he peed against the split-rail fence beside the cornfield.

She stared out at the deep black pond.

She listened to the toads, which were singing again. So were the cicadas. The events of the day had rattled her. Now even the sounds of nature seemed malevolent.