Glenda and Fernandes gripped Neil by the shoulders, and Hanna and Jake each grabbed a leg—they couldn’t have the remaining Thorndike sisters doing this—and they carried him outside, up the hill where the trail curved past three yew trees, venerable evergreen giants she remembered and identified from happier times. They took him to the same spot where Ashley had been buried. Jake and Fernandes hollowed out a shallow grave through all the dead leaves, having to cleave through some roots with the ends of their shovels. And as Jake and the airman dug, Glenda wondered about the nature of luck. As she had once told Gerry, Neil, a spectacularly successful academician, an investor of consummate skill, a presidential advisor, the man appointed to save the world, had been born with a golden horseshoe up his butt. But now it was up to Gerry—a reformed alcoholic who never had any luck, and who had faced setback after setback in both his professional and financial lives—to get them out of this mess. She decided Neil had to be overdrawn at the bank of good luck. The gods of misfortune had cashed in big-time.
They buried Neil. Morgan, Melissa, and Hanna gathered some limestone from the surrounding area and made a crude marker similar to Ashley’s: just a pile of stones—hardly worthy of this great Nobel prize winner, with his five homes, eighteen cars, and magazine-perfect family.
Glenda said a few words. She didn’t know much of the Bible, especially as it pertained to death, but she parroted the most obvious phrase that everyone knew: “Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.” And thought she’d better improvise something more so the girls wouldn’t feel shortchanged. “May the Good Lord take our brother Neil into His arms.” What else, what else? There had to be something solemnly appropriate she could say about Neil. “He was a loving father, and a good husband…and he was kind to me when I needed help…and I could always talk to him…”
She had such mixed feelings about Neil. On the one hand, she couldn’t understand why Neil deserved to be so lucky, and got all the plum appointments, and was able to make such a killing on the stock market.
Envy was a sin, she knew that, but it didn’t seem fair that Gerry, who was really an extremely smart man, should have to suffer through a lackluster academic career, chronic financial embarrassment, and a serious bout of alcoholism that had nearly killed him.
So how to wrap it up? Melissa and Morgan wept. Hanna, emotional in any situation, had tears running down her cheeks. Jake was like a stone. Fernandes kept staring into the forest, on guard as always.
Glenda looked at the grave. In this final hour, in this desperate last chapter, when Neil had been handed his greatest challenge and the stakes had never been higher, the gods of misfortune had indeed cashed in.
And Neil’s luck had finally run out. Her eyes moistened.
“May God bless him,” she intoned, and then said what she really wanted to say. “He was like the rest of us after all.”
A hot west wind rustled through the forest a day later, bringing with it the scent of a dead, dry land. The temperature had to be over a hundred. The sky was darker than ever. And the air seemed thin.
Glenda sat on the ledge overlooking the forest. The wind was so strong it kept blowing her hair in front of her face. Hanna and Morgan slept inside. Melissa and Jake were in position up and down the path.
Fernandes was somewhere out in the forest doing reconnaisance again. Jake came running up the hill, breathless, skinny, and as pale from lack of sunlight as a fresh mushroom. She thought he was coming to tell her that Fernandes was returning. But it wasn’t that at all.
“Three Tarsalans are coming up the path. They’ve got strange lights over their heads. They’re unarmed.”
Thirty seconds later, she saw the glow from down the hill.
Three Tarsalans, one in a jumpsuit made of papery material, another in something that looked as if it were stitched from orange and brown silk, and a third who wore blue jeans with the legs cut short to fit his short limbs, came up toward the cave. An egg-shaped beacon of light shone over each one, hovering in the air above them like halos.
As they got closer, the one in the middle shone an Earth-made flashlight up the path. Glenda immediately lifted her Montclair and pointed it at the Tarsalans. Hard getting used to them, the way they looked. In God’s image, so to speak, as if human anatomical con-figuration was the evolutionary ideal for sentient beings throughout this sector of the galaxy, but with huge, bicephalic heads—big bulbs right and left on top of their craniums, each covered with shaggy black hair, so that, not for the first time, she was reminded of ostrich feathers. And the eyes. So large now, the special genetic part of their makeup actually changing the shape of them so they could see better in the dark—like loris eyes. Hard also getting used to the pale blue skin, a result, Neil had once told her, of a cyanogenic component in their blood.
The middle one had a headset and mike over his ears and mouth, one of those translating things. A small speaker-receiver apparatus hung around his neck, so small that it was like a piece of faucet mesh.
The Tarsalan spoke and the translation thing translated. “Please, my child, put your weapon down. We mean no harm. We’ve come to”—and here the translation device took a few seconds—“palaver, or at least to offer you an ultimatum.”
Her face settled. She kept her Montclair trained on the middle one. So, an ultimatum. Just like the phytosphere.
The middle one was obviously the oldest, with thick crow’s-feet around his eyes, a bushy black brow, and a steadiness about him that the other two didn’t possess. The three kept coming, but they advanced slowly and it was hard to read their expressions. As they got closer, their approach became downright cautious, and she could tell they were frightened, wary of her the same way they might be of a wild animal.
“We don’t accept ultimatums,” she said, feeling as if she were speaking for the whole human race.
“Haven’t you learned that yet?”
She heard the faint sound of the Tarsalan language bubbling through the translation device, and it sounded not unlike a human language because the Tarsalan mouth, glottis, and pharynx, though producing a timbre a lot different than the human voice, were fundamentally based on the same design.
“Then let us palaver,” came the response at last.
“You back off. You withdraw. And I might let you live.”
She couldn’t stop her anger. Louise dead. Ashley and Neil dead. And her children and remaining nieces threatened. The Tarsalans obviously had no idea what a human mother was capable of. Even as she spoke, a plan formulated itself in her mind. If they wanted Armageddon, they would get Armageddon.
“Human, you underestimate the forces ranged against you. We are over a thousand strong. And we are hungry. We demand that you give over your food and fresh water. We’ll leave you with a day’s supply of each. With this food of yours, we can feed our survivors in the command area for a week. Our metabolism utilizes food resources much more efficiently than the human metabolism. The human metabolism is a wasteful thing.”
She was galled by the alien’s hubris. “And this is a reason I should give you all our food?”
“In an absolute moral sense, yes, it is. It’s better that you keep more individuals alive longer than a few individuals alive for a shorter period of time.”
“And you’re the experts on absolute moral sense?”
“When creatures such as yourselves fail to see reason—and we will admit that we ourselves failed to see just how vastly reasonless your psychology is—it is incumbent upon us, as the more advanced society, to try to teach you what is just and right.”
“So murder is just and right. You see these girls here? They’re orphans. And they’re orphans because of you.”
“That was a choice you made for yourself. Human, I give you this opportunity to save yourself. We are by nature negotiators. We have proven this to you over the last nine years. We are not fighters.”
“No. You simply put us all in a big plankton bag and watch us fight each other.”
“It is you who choose to fight. Cooperation would have gotten you much further. Cooperation is the model for all other civilized worlds, and a model we mistakenly assumed for you. Yet you are creatures of choice, just as all creatures are. Don’t blame others for the choices you have made.”
“You’re trespassing on the property of Dr. Neil Thorndike. Does that name mean anything to you?”
A pause as the translator did its thing, and then, “Yes.”
“Dr. Thorndike has died, and all his property has passed to me.”
It took the Tarsalan a moment, but finally, through his translation thing, he said, “Ah, yes…his last will and testament. We don’t have such customs where I come from.”
