never make a try for her food. She maneuvered back to her spot by the satellite dish and waited.
After about fifteen minutes, she saw two men at the back. They inspected the ground. Checking for buried food maybe? Then they came along the fence, crouched over. One of them was Maynard, the other Brennan. She had half a mind to let them break into the house and have their look around. When they found it empty, they might go home and never bother her again.
But then she decided it was best to end it once and for all.
“Maynard,” she called, “I’d stop exactly where you are. One step further and you’re going to have a bullet through your head.”
The two men stopped.
“You’re up on the roof?” called Fulton.
“Where’s your brother?” she called. “Are there other men?”
“Glenda, why don’t you come down from there and talk to us? We might as well try to be reasonable.”
“Why don’t you get off my property? You’re trespassing.”
“You know what we come for, Glenda,” called Brennan. “We know you been hoarding. Just give us your food, and we’ll be on our way. No one will get hurt.”
“I don’t think so, Brennan.”
“Why don’t you come down to the detachment office and join us?” said Fulton. “We’ve made quite a little place down there. I could protect you.”
“For what price, Maynard?”
“Glenda… Glenda, I’m going to give you to the count of three to come down. I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to hurt your kids. But I got to do what I got do. We’re talking survival here, Glenda.
You know how it is. Don’t say I didn’t give you fair warning. One…”
And suddenly it made complete sense to her, in the way anything can possibly make sense after such a long time in the dark.
“Two…”
Fulton was the enemy. The county’s principal purveyor of death.
“Three…”
Yes, he was the heart and brains of the whole operation, and it was monstrous that he should have the county’s women under his “protection,” and it was up to her to stop all that….
“Glenda, you leave us no choice but to—”
And before he could say another word she targeted the sheriff’s head—and it all came back to her, those weekends on the Smoky Hill River with her father, when the sun went down and the sky turned orange, and the partridges leaped into the sky. She took a bead on the sheriff’s head with automatic reflexes and hands as steady as iron, and caressed the trigger so that the rifle fired by itself, adding her own bit of Armageddon to the Apocalypse, the shot rocketing through the air with a roar that echoed in the hills, the bullet hitting its mark as if foreordained.
She heard the sheriff grunt, and he went down like a cow in a slaughterhouse, just so much meat thumping against the poor, dead grass.
Brennan did an odd little jump, his legs splaying, his arms jerking, like he was on thin ice and had just heard a crack. Then he ran toward the back, and she had the oddest sensation that she was floating, because she suddenly felt invincible—but so worried, so terrified for her children, because Brennan was running toward the woods where they were hiding.
So she shot Brennan too, and she must have got him in the spine because his legs gave out from under him, and his handgun flew off toward the shed, a speck of darkness in the gathering moonlight. He dragged himself along with his hands, grunting and groaning, until she lost sight of him in the woods.
22
Gerry knew Kafis from Marblehill, but every time he saw the alien—and Kafis was here on the Moon with a contingent of five other aliens—he had to get used to the Tarsalan’s appearance all over again, especially the bicephalic nature of his cranium. Under the alien’s coarse, dark hair the impression of two separate casings was disconcertingly unmistakable.
Kafis’s face was blue, the color of a robin’s egg. The quality of his skin was like the quality of human flesh, with all the imperfections of pores, wrinkles, and blemishes.
His eyes were a little over twice human size, and were divided into sclera, iris, and pupil, like human eyes. His irises were amber, like Stephanie’s were today, the color of a fine scotch whiskey, and his pupils, black like human pupils, were highly reactive, but not necessarily to light. The way the alien’s pupils dilated and contracted reminded Gerry of the way a hummingbird dances around a bloom, in sudden shifts, so that when Malcolm Hulke burped after a particularly capacious gulp of synthi-beer, Kafis’s pupils twitched open, then twitched closed, then twitched to the halfway point, the changes in aperture occurring with lightning quickness.
The alien’s lips were delicate, a dark shade of blue. Kafis’s teeth, though white, weren’t really so much teeth as upper and lower semicircular serrated blades fitted along his gums like a mouth guard. Below his mouth was a delicate, pointed chin, impossibly small considering the size of the rest of his head.
As for his body, it was about the size of a Vietnamese man’s, smallish and agile-looking.
And his hands… interesting… six digits—like those cats with six toes.
These particular Tarsalans spoke English. Physiologically, their tongues, mouth cavities, and larynxes were equipped for verbal language.
Kafis spoke English best of all—those summers at Marblehill with the Thorndike family had taught him well. And because he had learned most of his English from Neil, Gerry occasionally heard Neil’s phrases in the alien’s voice.
“It’s a wisdom your negotiators should embrace,” he was telling Hulke, who was halfway to getting drunk and arguing for the sake of arguing. “Think of it. As a species, you’ve been confined to this one system ever since you evolved from apes. What if something were to happen to this system? And something eventually will, of course. Your sun will, in a few billion years, go into its red-giant phase, and that will be the end of you. We’ve already talked to at least ten worlds, and they would be willing to welcome you as emigres.”
“I don’t think you’ll get many takers,” said Hulke. “You may get a few screwballs.”
“But then you might at least have a handful of humans on other worlds. The future of your race would be assured. And that’s all we want as well. To plant some of our people on Earth. There’s plenty of room on Earth, and my colleagues and I are at a loss to explain your intransigence.”
“It’s not
“We would prefer you talk to Earth for us. It’s been more than apparent these last nine years that our own negotiators aren’t getting anywhere with them.”
“Uh… Kafis… it’s their ball of wax, not ours.”
Kafis stared at the mayor as if he hadn’t understood a word. Then he rubbed his long, delicate, six-fingered hands together, and glanced at his five silent colleagues.
Kafis turned back to the mayor, and stared at Hulke for a long time, his eyes inscrutable. It really was hard to tell what he was thinking because it was like staring into the eyes of a cat or fish, especially because, characteristically, there wasn’t much play of muscle around his eyes. But at last the alien seemed to dismiss the mayor. He focused on Gerry instead. Some of the muscles around the alien’s small mouth twitched.
“Why do you attack us?”
Here it was, what Gerry had seen so often at Marblehill, the human mind confronting the alien mind, unable to traverse the gulf between.
Kafis continued.
