“Can you at least tell me whether there is any information?”
“I’m sorry, sir, I’m not at liberty to—”
“I refuse to believe,” Carmichael said, “that that ship is just sitting there, that nothing at all is being done to make contact with—”
“A command center has been established, Mr. Carmichael, and certain efforts are under way. That much I can tell you. I can tell you that Washington is involved. But beyond that, at the present point in time—”
Another kid, a pink-faced one who looked like an Eagle Scout, came running up. “Your plane’s all loaded and ready to go, Mike!”
“Yeah,” Carmichael said. The fire, the fucking fire! He had almost managed to forget about it. Almost.
He hesitated a moment, torn between conflicting responsibilities. Then he said to the officer, “Look, I’ve got to get back out on the fire line. I want to look at that tape of Cindy getting captured, but I can’t do it now. Can you stay here a little while?”
“Well—”
“Maybe half an hour. I have to do a retardant dump. Then I want you to show me the tape. And then to take me over to that spaceship and get me through the cordon, so I can talk to those critters myself. If my wife’s on that ship, I mean to get her off it.”
“I don’t see how it would be possible for—”
“Well, try to see,” Carmichael said. “I’ll meet you right here in half an hour, okay?”
She had never seen anything so beautiful. She had never even imagined that such beauty could exist. If this was how their spaceship looked, Cindy thought, what could their home world possibly be like?
The place was palatial. The aliens had taken them up and up on a kind of escalator, rising through a seemingly endless series of spiral chambers. Every chamber was at least twenty feet high, as was to be expected, considering how big the aliens themselves were. The shining walls tapered upward in eerie zigzag angles, meeting far overhead in a kind of Gothic vault, but not rigid-looking the way Gothic was. Instead there was a sudden twist and leap up there, a quick baffling shift of direction, as though the ceilings were partly in one dimension and partly in another.
And the ship was one huge hall of mirrors. Every surface, every single one, had a reflective metallic sheen. Wherever your eye came to rest you saw a million ricocheting shimmering images, receding dizzyingly to infinity. There didn’t seem to be any actual sources of illumination in here, just a luminous glow that came out of nowhere, as though being generated by the back-and-forth interaction of all those mirror-bright metal surfaces.
And the plants—the flowers—
Cindy loved plants, the stranger the better. The garden of their little Laurel Canyon house was dense with them, ferns and orchids and cacti and bromeliads and aloes and philodendrons and miniature palms and all manner of other things from the abundantly stocked nurseries of Los Angeles. Something was in bloom every day of the year. “My science-fiction garden,” she called it. She had picked things for their tropical strangeness, their corkscrew stems and spiky leaves and unusual variegations. Every imaginable shape and texture and color was represented there.
But her garden looked like a dull prosaic bunch of petunias and marigolds compared with the fantasyland plants that grew everywhere about the ship, drifting freely in mid-air, seemingly having no need of soil or water.
There were forking things with immense, fleshy turquoise leaves, big enough to serve as mattresses for elephants; there were plants that looked like clusters of spears, there was one that had a lightning-bolt shape, there were some that grew upside down, standing on fanned-out sprays of delicate purple foliage. And the flowers! Green blossoms with bright inquisitive magenta eyes at their centers; furry black flowers, tipped with splashes of gold, that throbbed like moth-wings; flowers that seemed to be made out of silver wire; flowers that looked like tufts of flame; flowers that emitted low musical tones.
She loved them all. She yearned to know their names. Her mind went soaring into ecstasy at the thought of what a botanical garden on Planet Hesteghon must look like.
There were eight hostages in this chamber with her, three male, five female. The youngest was a girl of about eleven; the oldest, a man who looked to be in his eighties. They all seemed terrified. They were sitting together in a sorry little heap, sobbing, shivering, praying, muttering. Only Cindy was up and around, wandering through the immense room like Alice let loose in Wonderland, gazing delightedly at the marvelous flowers, looking in wonder at the miraculous cascades of interlacing mirror images.
It weirded her out to see how miserable the others all were in the presence of such fantastic beauty.
“No,” Cindy told them, coming over and standing in front of them. “Stop crying! This is going to be the most wonderful moment of your lives. They don’t intend to harm us.”
A couple of them glared at her. The ones who were sobbing sobbed harder.
“I mean it,” she said. “I know. These people are from the planet Hesteghon, which you could have read about in the Testimony of Hermes. That’s a book that was published about six years ago, translated from the ancient Greek. The Hesteghon people come to Earth every five thousand years. They were the original Sumerian gods, you know. Taught the Sumerians how to write on clay tablets. On an earlier visit they taught the Cro-Magnons to paint on cave walls.”
“She’s a lunatic,” one of the women said. “Will somebody please shut her up?”
“Hear me out,” Cindy said. “I promise you, we’re absolutely safe in their hands. On this visit their job is to teach us at long last how to live in peace, forever and ever. We’ll be their communicants. They’ll speak through us, and we’ll carry their message to all the world.” She smiled. “You think I’m a nutcase, I know, but I’m actually the sanest one here. And I tell you—”
Someone screamed. Someone pointed, stabbing her finger wildly into the air. They all began to cower and cringe.
Cindy felt a glow of sudden warmth behind her, and looked about.
One of the aliens had entered the huge room. It stood about ten yards to her rear, swaying gently on the little tips of its walking-tentacles. There was an aura of great tranquillity about it. Cindy felt a wonderful stream of love and peace emanating from it. Its two enormous golden eyes were benign wells of serene radiance.
They are like gods, she thought. Gods.
“My name is Cindy Carmichael,” she told the alien straightaway. “I want to welcome you to Earth. I want you to know how glad I am that you’ve come to fulfill your ancient promise.”
The giant creature continued to rock pleasantly back and forth. It did not appear to notice that she had spoken.
“Talk to me with your mind,” Cindy said to it. “I’m not afraid of you. They are, but I’m not. Tell me about Hesteghon. I want to know everything there is to know about it.”
One of the airborne flowers, a velvety black one with pale green spots on its two fleshy petals, drifted nearer to her. There was a crevice at its center that looked remarkably like a vagina. From that long dark slit emerged a little tendril that quivered once and gave off a little low-pitched blurt of sound, and abruptly Cindy found herself unable to speak. She had lost the power of shaping words entirely. But there was nothing upsetting about that; she understood without any doubt that the alien simply did not want her to speak just now, and when it was ready to restore her ability to speak it would certainly do so.
A second quick sound came from the slit at the heart of the black flower, a higher-pitched one than before. And Cindy felt the alien entering her mind.
It was almost a sexual thing. It went inside her smoothly and easily and completely, and it filled her just as thoroughly as a hand fills a glove. She was still there inside herself, but there was something else in there too, something immense and omnipotent, causing her no injury, displacing nothing, but making itself at home in her as though there had always been a space within her large enough for the mind of a gigantic alien being to occupy.
She felt it massaging her brain.
That was the only word for it: massaging. A gentle soothing kneading sensation, as of fingertips lovingly caressing the folds and convolutions of her brain. What the alien was doing, she realized, was methodically going through her entire accumulation of knowledge and memory, examining every single experience of her life from the moment of birth until this second, absorbing it all. In the course of—what? Two seconds?—it was done with the job,
