The Grays

being, all of his experience, all of his knowledge, all that he was, to Conner.

An outline of the child’s body stretched across their strange sky, a body filled with stars, and with it came the wind and the night and the snow.

Slowly, as they listened and felt, one of them and then another, then more and more, raised his head and came to his feet. The tall, gracile ones, the short, squat ones, all of them in their unimaginable billions, raised their heads.

Then they ascended from their white cities, rose into the air, and began to fly like so many soaring eagles, and it became clearer what was happening. These creatures, who could neither laugh nor smile, were doing the only thing they could to express an emotion they had not known in many a long age: they were dancing with happiness.

THE STRANGE FIGURE WENT ROUND and round Conner, its head getting smaller, its legs and arms thicker, its body like a fluid of stars, taking on a different shape, the shape of a human being, and getting brighter, too.

Each snowflake that touched the thing now went up in a tiny puff of steam, and it was beautiful, the smoking snow and the brightness, and the humming of the thing as if the wind itself had learned to sing.

Conner began to quake down inside his stomach and up his spine and everywhere, even in his toes and in his eyes, and he realized that the thing was vibrating, too.

“Momma…”

The thing came closer to him.

“MOMMA!”

Then the humming was all around him, it was in him and his chest was vibrating with it, and he felt as if he had risen off the ground or gotten very large, and for an instant the snowflakes that had looked like stars around the thing were around him, and were, instead, a whole tremendous universe of stars.

Then it was dark again and Conner had fallen down in the snow. He could not rise. He was completely weak, and when he closed his eyes, he saw the universe in his head, and he saw it, too, when he looked at his palms, in his hands, stars swirling inside his skin.

The three grays pushed at the tall one until his body closed up again. Then he rose in the air between them, and the four of them ascended, wobbling and buzzing, into the storm.

“Hey! Hey, you! I am still willing to negotiate!”

It got cold again. Conner could no longer see stars inside himself. The wind howled around him and he screamed in agony and clutched his pajamas around him.

Whump whump whump whump.

Up in the snowy sky, a shadow, black and huge. Then light shining down, a glaring blue-white searchlight beam.

The light shone so bright on Conner that he could hardly look into it. He knew that it was a helicopter, and that it must be here to rescue him, and he got up and wallowed in the snow, into a clearing among the pines, waving and waving and yelling with all his might, “I’m here, I’m here!”

Wind from the rotors hit him and with it came ferocious, lung-shattering cold. He screamed, covered his head, and turned away from the blast.

“Conner! Conner Callaghan!” a voice shouted, barely audible over the churning of the helicopter blades and the screaming of the wind.

It was a man in a helmet, not a gray, coming down a rope ladder from the chopper. He had on a faceplate so you couldn’t see his face, but he sounded strong and, above all, normal.

The helicopter roared off into the storm and was gone. The guy knelt before Conner on one knee, and quickly wrapped a space blanket around him. “I’m going to take you home, boy.”

Conner threw his arms around the man, who held out his big gloved hands. “Come on, buddy.” Conner was not a small kid, but the guy was really tall, and picked him up easily. “We need to warm up those feet real quick.”

It felt so good to be carried that Conner just leaned his head against the guy’s shoulder, and let himself be cozy in the space blanket. As the guy strode along, he watched the woods slip away behind them.

“Conner, lots of new things are going to happen to you, I suppose you’ve realized that.”

“I’m sort of getting that feeling.”

“You’re going to have a teacher. You met her earlier tonight. Lauren Glass. I want you to know that you can count on her absolutely.”

“Who are you?”

“Somebody else who’s concerned with your well-being.”

He could feel that it was true, that there was goodness radiating from this man like heat. “Man, I’m glad you found me.” He closed his eyes.

“Sleep, child,” the man said, and held his head against his shoulder.

Then somebody was shaking him. He stirred, pulled at the blanket—and shot straight up in bed. “Dad!”

“You’re having a nightmare, son.”

“I was… outside. I was outside and—” It felt so good to see Dad there that he just threw his arms around him. “Listen, it was no dream. No dream! I was out in the woods, with—”

Conner no!

“What?”

“Conner? Out in the woods? Go on.”

“I mean, uh, in the dream. Obviously. Look, let’s go back to sleep.”

Conner lay back in the bed. Dad lingered. Good, let him stay.

Why not tell him? Conner asked.

In time, Conner, in all good time.

The voice was different, Conner noticed, bigger, somehow, echoing.

Who are you?

The collective.

Okay. What is the collective?

Conner, we are nearly seven billion, and we need your help.

“You’re kidding!”

Shh!

“What? Kidding about what?”

“Let’s go to sleep, Dad, okay?”

“Sure, Conner… of course.”

He could hear singing, then, the same tune that he had heard in the woods. He sensed, but in an indistinct, unformed way, an immense shadowy sea, that seemed to be made up of numbers and words and this deep, fleeting song. It was knowledge, he decided, so high and fine that it was a music, totally simple, utterly pure.

“Something’s happening to me, Dad.”

Dad had tears in his eyes. “Conner, you look like stars.”

“I do?”

DAN COULD NOT UNDERSTAND. HE saw his son, but his son now appeared to be a child made of the stuff of the night sky, a child whose body was somehow shining out of the planetarium of his own boyhood, and he heard a song from his boyhood, a beautiful voice humming “Suo Gan,” the song by which his own mother had seen him off to sleep when he was scared, just come back from a journey into the dark.

He sat on the bedside, and met the music with the words in the old Welsh tongue of his mother’s people: Huna blentyn yn fy mynwes, Clyd a chynnes ydyw hon… sleep, my child, at my breast, ’tis love’s arms around you.

Slowly, as Conner fell into sleep, the stars in his body faded as if with the coming of morning, and Dan was left with his boy gently breathing, lost in the deep sleep that blesses and heals childhood.

Katelyn came, and he stood up. “A miracle,” he said. “Katelyn, a miracle.” He embraced her.

“What do you mean?”

He could not explain it, not as it had been. “I just think you gave me such a grand kid.”