“Searching.”
Lehani appeared at the JungleLand door, looking furious. She spied me and ran over. “Lady sayed I can’t play!”
“I know, sweetie. Come sit on Grandma’s lap.”
She climbed onto me, buried her head in my shoulder, and burst into angry tears. I peered around her to see the handheld.
“Six matches.” It displayed them. Six? With a name like “Parmani” coupled with one like “Kyra”? I sighed and shifted Lehani’s weight.
“Call each of them in turn.”
Kyra was the second match. She answered the call herself, her voice unconcerned. She hadn’t heard. “Hello?”
“Kyra. It’s Amy, your cousin. Listen, they’ve just spotted an alien ship coming in. They’ll be looking for you again.” Silence on the other end. “Kyra?”
“How did you find me?”
“Lucky guesswork. But if you want to hide, from the feds or the press…” They might put her in jail again, and who knew this time when she would get out? At the very least, the press would make her life, whatever it was now, a misery. I said, “Do you have somewhere to go? Some not-too-close-but-perfectly-trusted friend’s back bedroom or strange structure in a cowfield?”
She didn’t laugh. Kyra never had had much of a sense of humor. Not that this was an especially good time for joking.
“Y es, Amy. I do. Why are you warning me?”
“Oh, God, Kyra, how do I answer that?”
Maybe she understood. Maybe not. She merely said, “All right. And thanks. Amy…”
“What?”
“I’m getting married again. I’m happy.”
That was certainly like her: blurting out the personal that no one had asked about. For a second I, too, was the old Amy, bitter and jealous. I had not remarried since my terrible divorce from David, had not even loved any one again. I suspected I never would. But the moment passed. I had Robin and Lem and Lehani and, intermittently when she was in the country, Lucy.
“Congratulations, Kyra. Now get going. They can find you in about forty seconds if they want to, you know.”
“I know. I’ll call you when this is all over, Amy. Where are you?”
“Prince George’s County, Maryland. Amy Suiter Parker. Bye, Kyra.” I broke the link.
“Who on link?” Lehani demanded, apparently having decided her tears were not accomplishing anything.
“Somebody Grandma knew a long time ago, dear heart. Come on, let’s go home, and you can play with Mr. Grindle’s cat.”
“Yes! Yes!”
It is always so easy to distract the uncorrupted.
The alien ship parked itself in lunar orbit for the better part of three days. Naturally we had no one up there; not a single nation on Earth had anything you could call a space program anymore. But there were satellites. Maybe we communicated with the aliens, or they with us, or maybe we tried to destroy them, or entice them, or threaten them. Or all of the above, by different nations with different satellites. Ordinary citizens like me were not told. And of course the aliens could have been doing anything with their ship: sampling broadcasts, scrambling military signals, seeding clouds, sending messages to true believers’ back teeth. How would I know?
On the second day, three agents from People’s Safety Commission, the latest political reincarnation of that office, showed up to ask me about Kyra’s whereabouts. I said, truthfully, that I hadn’t seen her in twenty years and had no idea where she was now. They thanked me politely and left. News cams staked out her house, a modest foamcast building in a small Pennsylvania town, and they dissected her current life, but they never actually found her, so it made a pretty lackluster story.
After three days of lunar orbit, a small alien craft landed on the upland savanna of East Africa.
Somehow it sneaked past whatever surveillance we had as if it didn’t exist. The ship set down just beyond sight of a Kikuyu village. Two small boys herding goats spotted it, and one of them went inside.
By the time the world learned of this, from a call made on the village’s only comlink, the child was already inside the alien ship. News people and government people raced to the scene. East Africa was in its usual state of confused civil war, incipient drought, and raging disease. The borders were theoretically sealed. This made no difference whatsoever. Gunfire erupted, disinformation spread, ultimata were issued. The robocams went on recording.
“Does it look the same as the ship you saw?” Lem said softly, watching the news beside me. His wife Amalie was in the kitchen with Lehani. I could hear them laughing.
“It looks the same.” Forty-five years fell away and I stood in Uncle John’s cow field, watching Kyra walk into the pewter-colored ship and walk out the most famous little girl in the world.
Lem said, “What do you think they want?”
I stared at him. “Don’t you think I’ve wondered that for four and a half decades? That everyone has wondered that?”
Lem was silent.
A helicopter appeared in the sky over the alien craft. That, too, was familiar-until it set down and I grasped its huge size. Troops began pouring out, guns were leveled, and orders barked. A newsman, maybe live but probably virtual, said, “We’re being ordered to shut down all reporting on this-” He disappeared.
A black cloud emanated from the helicopter, but not before a robocam had shown more equipment being off- loaded. Lem said, “My God, I think that’s a bombcase!” Through the black cloud ripped more gunfire.
Then no news came through at all.
The stories conflicted wildly, of course. At least six different agencies, in three different countries, were blamed. A hundred and three people died at the scene, and uncounted more in the senseless riots that followed. One of the dead was the second little boy that had witnessed the landing.
The first child went up with the ship. It was the only picture that emerged after the government erected visual and electronic blockage: the small craft rising unharmed above the black cloud, ascending into the sky and disappearing into the bright African sunlight.
The Kikuyu boy was released about a hundred miles away, near another village, but it was a long time before ordinary people learned that.
Kyra never called me after the furor had died down. I searched for her, but she was more savvy about choosing her aliases. If the government located her, and I assumed they did, no one informed me.
Why would they?
Sometimes the world you want comes too late.
It was not really the world anyone wanted, of course. Third world countries, especially but not exclusively in Africa, were still essentially ungovernable. Fetid urban slums, disease, and terror from local warlords. Daily want, brutality, and suffering, all made orders of magnitude worse by the lunatic compulsion to genocide. Much of the globe lives like this, with little hope of foreseeable change.
But inside the United States’s tightly guarded, expensively defended borders, a miracle had occurred. Loaves from fishes, something for nothing, the free lunch there ain’t supposed to be one of. Nanotechnology.
It was still an embryonic industry. But it had brought burgeoning prosperity. And with prosperity came the things that aren’t supposed to cost money but always do: peace, generosity, civility. And one more thing: a space program, the cause of all the news agitation I was pointedly not watching.
“It’s not fair to say that nano brought civility,” Lucy protested. She was back from a journalism assignment in Sudan that had left her gaunt and limping, with half her hair fallen out. Lucy didn’t volunteer details and I didn’t ask. From the look in her haunted eyes, I didn’t think I could bear to hear her answers.
“Civility is a by-product of money,” I said. “Starving people are not civil to each other.”
“Sometimes they are,” she said, looking at some painful memory I could not imagine.
“Often?” I pressed.
“No. Not often.” Abruptly Lucy left the room.
