Specimen Days

Catareen looked at him. A silence passed.

Luke said to Simon, 'You smell slightly better now.'

'Thanks,' Simon said. He started getting dressed again.

Presently Catareen got out of the water, got dressed, and slipped away to hunt. She returned soon after with a pair of small, leggy creatures none of them could identify. Simon cooked them.

'I think we must be in western Kansas by now,' Luke said as Simon poked the skinned haunches on the Winnebago's radiation pack. 'We could reach Denver by late tomorrow.'

'By midafternoon, I'd say,' Simon answered.

What he thought but did not say: he wouldn't have minded driving on and on. There was something hypnotic about it, something deeply agreeable. Just driving.

Luke said, 'Denver has gotten to be a sort of giant shanty town. It's probably a little like it was almost three hundred years ago. Except the people three hundred years ago didn't live in abandoned malls and franchise joints.'

'The Christians don't run Denver, as far as I've heard.'

'No, Denver's basically secular. Some goddess cults, and a big Buddha town on the east side. Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, is small potatoes there.'

'Did you say you believe in all that?'

'Yep.'

'As part of the con.'

'Started out that way. I went along with it so they'd keep feeding me. I said the prayers, I did the daily devotions. I meditated in the pathetic little shrine they'd built in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Just scamming. Then I understood that it's true.'

'You're kidding.'

'I'm totally serious. Something happened one day. I don't know how to describe it. Something arrived. It's like, okay, say you walked out of your house every day and shouted, 'Oh, come to me, Great Heffalump,' just to please somebody, just because it's the local custom, because your crazy old aunt won't take her medicine unless you call for the Heffalump every morning, and then one day this big hairy thing with a trunk and antlers comes lumbering up and says, Tm the Great Heffalump, what do you want?' What're you going to do? You don't believe in him, you don't like him, you don't want him, but there he is.'

'I'm not sure if I believe you.'

'I don't need you to believe me. Hey, are those groundhogs just about done?'

'I don't think they're groundhogs.'

'Whatever they are. I'm starving, I don't mind if they're on the rare side.'

Simon served the irradiated creatures. Catareen sat between him and the boy, quietly consuming her share of the hunt. After they'd eaten, she buried the remains, and the boy went to bed in the back of the Winnebago. Simon stayed outside a while with Catareen. They sat together on the grassy rise. The wind made a low rustling sound, and the stars shone hard in the deep black sky. The pond put out minute ghostly sparks that could have been reflections of the stars.

Simon said, 'Do you miss Nadia?'

'No.'

'It's your home. It's where you come from.'

'Nothing there.'

He hesitated over how to respond. There was something there. There was something everywhere. True, the people of Earth had hoped for more from their first (and possibly only) contact with an inhabited planet. All those zillions spent getting there, the decades of effort, and what do they find? A people who in ten thousand years had failed to come up with a written language. Who lived in huts made of dried mud and pulled one another around in wooden carts. Where were the golden cities, the shamans and scientists? Where were the great discoveries, the cures, the art?

He said, 'It's a rough place, I hear.' 'Nothing for me.'

'You know,' he said, 'maybe there's no real point in you being so mysterious about your past. Doesn't it seem just the tiniest bit unnecessary?'

She sat beside him in the dark. She exhaled the little song.

After an interval, he said, 'So. Do you have any questions about me?'

'No.'

'Are all Nadians like this?'

'Like how?'

The wind blew across his face. It had a dry green smell.

He said, 'Do you mind listening to me? Do I bore you when I talk?'

'No. I like.'

'Nice of you to say so.'

Silence, and the breath song.

He said, 'It's just that I seem to have a few questions. For a biological.'

'Ask.'

'I know a lot of it may not apply. The whole human-versus-Nadian question, I mean.'

'Ask.'

'Okay. Dreams. Can I ask you something about dreams?'

'Yes.'

'I have these little flickers when I sleep. There are sounds and images. They don't seem exactly random, but they don't hold together, either. I can't really tell if they're dreams at all or just my circuits discharging. As I understand it, biologicals have dreams that involve whole stories. Mysterious stories, often oblique, but coherent and full of meaning. True?'

'No,' she said.

'Would it be painful for you to give me a little more detail?'

'Not whole stories. Change.'

'You mean, as you're dreaming? The stories change as they progress?'

'Yes.'

'But don't you wake up feeling like you've seen something important? Even if its meaning isn't clear. Don't you feel in the morning like something has been explained to you as you slept?'

'No.'

'Well. Okay. Let's try another subject. The voice I'm speaking in right now, what you know as my voice, and by extension my, shall we say, personality, is programmed. Cadences, vocabulary, modulation, slang, all of it designed by Emory Lowell to make me seem more human. Plus, of course, these involuntary fits of poetry. What's in my brain is different. I listen to myself speak I'm listening to myself right now and it's strange to me. It doesn't match what I hear inside my head. The impulses are my own, I make a decision to say this or say that, but the expression is beyond my control. I suspect that if you could somehow see inside my head, if you could see the circuitry going through the motions, you'd recoil. You'd understand that I'm mechanical. And heartless.'

'I am same,' she said.

'What you say doesn't match what's in your head?'

'Yes.'

'Of course it doesn't. You're speaking a foreign language.'

'In my language.'

'You mean, back on Nadia, you felt this divide between who you appeared to be and who you knew yourself to be?'

'Yes.'

'Sweet of you to say so.'

'True.'

They sat for a while in silence. Simon felt the withdrawal of her, which had become familiar, though this time it seemed deeper, as if she had removed her attention more thoroughly than ever before. He thought for a moment