It's finished.
Now let's finish the rest of it.
Come on, you bastards.
EPILOGUE
Some time during my lonely vigil I fell asleep on the couch. I didn't dream. But when I woke up, muttering to myself and wiping imaginary cobwebs from my face, there were two nightmares in the living room with me: two of the aliens stood before me with Toby between them.
The air was chilly. They had turned off the heating system long before they'd entered the house. I shivered uncontrollably.
I sat up and rubbed at my eyes and grimaced at the awful taste in my mouth. 'It's finished,' I told them.
As before they spoke to me through Toby. 'We have read the manuscript.'
'Already?'
'You have slept for more than twelve hours.'
'Oh.' I stood up, no longer intimidated by them. My face was within inches of one alien's clacking mandibles. 'Have you learned anything from it?'
'Yes.'
'What?'
'You would not understand.'
'Try me.'
'There are no concepts in your language-or mind.'
'I see.' But I didn't.
'Mr. Johnson and Mrs. Johnson cannot be restored. That was a mistake of ours. But he did kill one of us first,' Toby-alien said.
Having a bit of trouble adjusting to the sudden change of topics, I said, 'Well? What are you saying this for? Are you trying to absolve yourselves of guilt?'
'We do not comprehend the concept of guilt,' Toby-alien said. 'We merely wish, for whatever reasons, to set the record straight.'
'Why are you on earth?'
'You could not understand.'
'Why did you kill the horses-and strip them of flesh?'
'You have no concept of our motivations or purposes-and we barely understand the bizarre behavior you display.'
I was getting nowhere fast, but the questions came compulsively. 'Did you understand, at the start, that we were intelligent creatures?'
'We don't believe you are intelligent creatures,' Toby-alien said as mandibles rattled noisily on both sides of him.
'What?'
'You do not conform in any way to our concept of intelligence. You are-barbaric, crude, disgusting. We believe that you are only extremely clever animals, able to feign activities and attitudes that would indicate the most basic periphereal intelligence.'
'Then why are you bothering to try to communicate?'
Toby-alien said, 'Because there is the slightest chance that we may be wrong. You may be intelligent, some exceedingly strange manifestation of the universal force of awareness.'
Hope seeped back into me. 'Then we will be allowed to live?'
'Yes,' Toby-alien said. 'We will leave this world within the hour. We have no desire to learn more of your culture, real or just contrived, whichever it may be.'
'I think that's the wrong attitude.'
Changing the subject again, Toby-alien said, 'Your wife is upstairs, in the master bedroom, sedated.'
My legs trembled. I thought I was going to col lapse. 'My wife is dead.'
'She was dead.'
'Then she still is.'
'Why must that be so?'
'Death is final.'
'This proves your race is not intelligent.'
'Death is final, dammit!'
'It never is.'
'I killed four of your people,' I said. The corpses had been removed days ago; all that remained as evidence of the battle was the broken glass.
'We have removed their brains, which reside in impregnable pods beneath the carapace. The brains were put into newly cultured bodies. They live.'
'And you built a new body for Connie?'
'That was not necessary. There are other methods.'
'Tell me. I must know them.'
'If you were an intelligent creature, you would already know them,' Toby-alien said. 'And since you are an unintelligent beast, the concept would do you no good. You would not understand it.'
The aliens turned and stalked out of the room.
They were finished with me, and they never looked back.
Toby said, 'Dad? What's going on here? I'm scared.'
His voice trembled.
'It's over,' I assured him. I picked him up and hugged him.
'There's nothing to be afraid of now.'
'Where's Mom?'
'Let's go find her,' I said, a lump rising in my throat.
I carried him upstairs.
She was sitting up in bed when we got there. She was as beautiful as ever. 'Don?'
'I'm here.'
'Toby?'
'Hi, Mom.'
Death is not final.
But the universe is still a madhouse. There is meaning in it, yes, but random meaning, a lunatic's planning, the purpose of a spastic Planner.
And we are lunatics in this madhouse, but we have learned to live with it-a necessity, since there is no hope of being released from it. As Toby and I sat on the edge of the bed and the three of us hugged one another, the night was filled with our maniacal but undeniably happy laughter.
