Songs of Love and Death

There was no response for what seemed a very long while, as excited and impatient as he was. He tried to calm himself, thinking that he and the alien—his alien, if he was the first to discover her, like an island or a mountain—might likely be communicating over light-years, not mere miles. This was hardly Instant Messaging, after all. Even so, he was fidgeting like a child, unable to sit still, by the time the reply came back.You whatTalkWho no gone goneMe

The next word, which Martin thought must have been an attempt at a name, dissolved back into a flurry of words—or sounds? or mathematical symbols? or plain lunatic gibberish?—in the original possibly cosmic tongue. In turn he went back to his own first contact cry: I don’t understand.

“Story of your life, Gelber,” he said aloud to the computer. “Find a girl to go to the prom with, she lives too far away for a cab ride and she doesn’t speak English. Your life in one line, I swear.”

The computer said back to him in what was still a braver try at his language than any attempt he had yet made at hers:Me belong KaskiaBelong who you

Kaskia. Her name was Kaskia, or else she—belonged? a slave?—to someone of that name. Martin refused to believe that anyone who looked like that could be anyone’s servant, let alone a slave. He took a long breath and typed back Martin. My name is Martin.

He heard nothing back for the rest of the day, even though he forlornly pressed the One Key again and again. Lorraine came home in a good mood, the one benign side effect of her shopping expeditions, and they enjoyed a relatively placid evening, practically together. Martin yearned to get back to the laptop, and Lorraine clearly had phone calls to make—Martin knew the look—but instead they watched a public-television documentary on the history of the Empire State Building, even sitting still through the semi-annual fundraising supplications. Maybe having a special secret makes you nicer, Martin thought. Easier to get along with. He wondered what Lorraine’s secret might be.

When Lorraine went to bed, he booted up the laptop and tried, cautiously and apprehensively, to contact the being who called herself—itself?—Kaskia, but to no avail. Applying the One Key repeatedly summoned no starry crackle to his screen, nor did appealing directly to the computer’s elaborate message-tracing systems produce any unearthly footprints at all. The entire contact—the entire vision—might never have occurred.

Martin mourned it all through the next day’s work at the supermarket. Unlike the protagonists of any number of films and stories, he never for a moment took his encounter with the unearthly for a hallucination or a dream. There had been a connection, however fragmented, with a creature from another place or reality; and the idea of such a wonder never occurring again for the rest of his life made that life seem to him even duller and more pointless than he already knew it to be. “I won’t stand for it,” he said aloud to himself, while showing Jamil the proper way to stack the red cabbages. “I won’t.” Jamil took it as a slight to his cabbage-stacking technique, and was deeply wounded.

Three further days passed, during which Martin spoke less and less, both at home and at work, and spent more and more time trying to coax the strange laptop to find Kaskia’s world for him again. The computer remained not so much mutinous as regretfully firm, almost parental, as though it had decided that passing the borders of his own understanding was simply bad for him. The One Key remained so unresponsive that he came to fear that he might have damaged it by punching it in frustration when he lost contact with Kaskia. During that time, he could hardly endure to look at the laptop, which Lorraine noticed, teasing him about it. “What happened? Novelty wear off? Barry’ll sell you a new toy anytime, if you can find him.” Martin hardly heard her.

On the fourth night, sleepless, he finally wandered to his worktable, sat down at the laptop, and played several games of solitaire, as he could have done at any of the store computers. Then he reread his e-mail, browsed a favored newsletter, played a round of Battleship against himself, and tapped the One Key, almost diffidently, with his head turned away from the screen. He had not even put his earphones on.

When he heard the static of the spheres, he did not turn immediately, but moved very slowly, as though that other place were a wild bird he was trying not to startle away. The screen was, as before, aswarm with wheeling green sparks, and though Martin waited patiently, neither words nor the image of the wondrously alien beauty appeared. Finally he was unable to resist typing once again My name is Martin, and then, after some thought, adding boldly, Your name is Kaskia.

The reply was long in coming, leaving him to fear that he really had frightened her off; and then to speculate on whether an astronomer or mathematician could work out, just from the time it took his electronic missive to receive an answer, how distant Kaskia’s world actually might be. He vaguely recalled Barry as having been good with algebra and trigonometry in high school, and thought about setting him the problem.

Words shivered into place on the screen.Kaskia. You Martin. Where you.

Martin slapped his palms exultantly on the table, and then quickly deadened the vibrations, for fear of waking Lorraine. “It’s real!” he whispered, raising his head to look toward the ceiling, and far past it. “Oh, sonofabitch, it’s real!” And either her English or the transmission was clearly improving, along with her comprehension. She must have one of those universal translators, like on Star Trek and those other shows. Or maybe she was just a fast learner.

He was up most of that night, happily reenacting all the first contact scenes and dialogue he remembered from movies and television. He placed himself and his planet in the universe for her, as best he could (though she seemed, to his chagrin, to have little knowledge of her own world’s relation to any other); and even told her, out of his own small store, something of the Earth’s history and geography. Kaskia was rather less informative, which he put down to her continuing difficulties with the language and her consequently understandable reticence. He did learn that she lived in some sort of grandly sprawling extended-family setting, that she was a singer and musician —apparently quite well-known, as far as he could make out—and that she felt happy and fortunate (if that was what the word she used meant) to find him a second time. The galaxy was very big.

The contact began to break up toward morning, presumably due to the rotation of both worlds and the slow, endless drift of the entire cosmos. But he understood by now when it would be possible for them to speak again; and when he asked her shyly if he might see her image once more—it took her some little time to grasp the meaning of the request—the face that had so literally made him forget how to breathe reappeared for a moment, sparkling against the stars. Then it was gone, and the screen of the laptop went blank.

Sleep was neither an issue nor an option. He lay down on the living-room couch—not for the first time—and stared at the ceiling, consumed by a need to tell someone about his discovery, whether or not he was believed. Lorraine was out of the question, for a good many reasons, while Jaroslav was still avoiding him in the hall, and shopping elsewhere. As for his fellow workers, matters of authority forbade his taking any of them into his confidence… except perhaps for Ivan, the black security guard. Ivan read on the job, whenever he could get away with it—he had often been seen reading as he walked through the parking lot—and Martin, as management, should not have sympathized with him, or protected him, for a moment. But he did. Most of the books Ivan read were science fiction; and Martin had a growing feeling that, out of all the people he knew, Ivan might very well be the only one who might sympathize with him, for a change.

Ivan did. Ivan said, “Wow, man, that is a good story.” He slapped Martin’s shoulder enthusiastically. “That’s like Niven writing Bradbury. I didn’t know you were into that stuff. You got any others?”

Martin did not waste time protesting the complete truthfulness of his account. He said, “Well, I’m not a writer, you know that—I’m just fooling around. You think I ought to change anything? I mean, if you were writing it?”

Ivan considered. “One thing, I’d find a way for them to meet up. Not rocket ships, no Buck Rogers shit like that, I’m thinking transporters or some such. I mean, that’s exciting, man—that’s risky. Yeah, he’s seen her picture, he’s seen somebody’s picture, but what if she turns out to have a tail and horns and six-inch teeth? Mail-order brides, you know?”

“Well, I don’t think the guy’s thinking about getting together with her. I mean, she’s sort of famous on her world, and he’s married, and he could be a lot older—”

“Or she could. He don’t know how long it takes her planet to get around the sun, or anything about the biology. She could be seven hundred or something, you never know.” Ivan patted Martin’s shoulder again. “Tell you one thing, I’d sure like to have a laptop like the one you thought up. Dell ever makes that puppy, I’m first in line.”

Martin spent a good deal of time looking at the computer himself, even when the link to Kaskia was not open. His growing sense of the laptop’s true potential had, paradoxically, begun to distance him from the machine