It hadn’t moved, although she was in easy attack distance by now.
DO IT! it shrieked.
There was a long frozen moment, as though time itself had stopped. For some reason, she found herself thinking about something she hadn’t allowed herself to consciously think about for decades: her husband’s coffin, shipped by air back from Vietnam, being lowered into a hole dug into the raw red earth on a blustery wet spring morning, a flag draped over it, while people in uniform stood stiffly next to the grave and saluted and little Stephanie fidgeted impatiently by her side, too young to understand…the incongruously cheerful sound of birds singing somewhere off in the trees (and she realizing how incongruous it was even at the time, and hating herself for noticing something like that at a time like this, no matter how ironic it was)…her thinking how much Steve would have hated having his coffin wrapped in a flag, how he would have disliked the solemnity of this whole ceremony, the priest droning pious platitudes about somebody he’d never met and how Steve was now going to walk with Jesus in A Better World…looking at her own mother beside her, leaning heavily on Uncle Henry’s arm, noticing with a shock how old and frail and tired she looked…. The photo that had stood on the mantelpiece in the living room as long as she could remember, her father in a World War II Army uniform, the father she’d never met, a black star on the glass frame, the photo gathering dust for years, never touched, never moved…. Her own daughter Stephanie, laughing and hugging her at the airport gate, kissing her husband and her baby goodbye, telling them that she’d send them all postcards and maybe some souvenirs if she could find a moment to steal from the sales conference, only minutes before her airplane was blown to pieces in midair by a terrorist’s bomb…. The military jets screaming by outside, mean and black and predatory, on the way to the buildup for the next war, that would kill somebody else’s children….
As though it were reading her mind—and who knew, perhaps it was—it said, The Mission will succeed, even though I failed. Eventually. They will send someone else. It may take another hundred years for them to get here, but eventually they will, and we’ll help you heal this world of yours. I have to believe that. Eventually, my failure won’t matter. The Mission will succeed.
Another hundred years. How many children dead in that time, in how many wars?
She heard the sound of a siren, a thin wail still far away, on the edge of hearing. The ambulance coming.
Kill me, it said You have the right. I owe you that. I have nothing to pay with but my life.
Suddenly, she was very, very tired, unutterably weary, as though the marrow in her bones had turned to lead.
Hurry. They’re coming. Soon it will be too late. Kill me now. Don’t hesitate. I want you to do it. I don’t want to live. I can’t live with what I’ve done. It hurts too much.
A kind of weary revulsion seized her then, a nauseated rejection of everything and everyone. She stared at the alien for another long moment. “Then live, God damn you,” she cried bitterly. “Live and be damned!”
She flung the ax aside.
Her legs gave out, and she sat down abruptly on the cold floor. If this was a trick, then it had won. She no longer even cared. Let it kill her if it wanted to.
The wailing siren came closer and closer, the sound cutting sharply through the cold winter air.
One year later, on the anniversary of First Contact at Maple Hill Farm (as the scroll on the screen would say whenever they came back from the commercials), Alma Kingsley sat alone before the television set, listening to herself being praised on CNN. The commentators prattled on and on about the terrible tragedy of the Ambassador’s arrival, and of the even greater tragedy that would have occurred had it not been allowed to complete its Mission; one commentator, face radiating sincerity the way a potbellied stove radiates heat, spoke of Alma Kingsley as a secular saint for forgoing personal revenge for the Sake Of All Mankind.
The Ambassador had tried to attend Jennifer and Desmond’s funerals (Candy was buried elsewhere), but she had refused to allow it to attend, to the disappointment of the newsmen, although they were there filming everything in sight anyway, keeping tight close-ups on her face as the last remnants of her family were lowered into the ground, not wanting to miss the slightest nuance of expression. Later, at the UN, the Ambassador had insisted on giving an emotional eulogy for the people he had inadvertently killed, going on to say that Alma Kingsley’s greatness of spirit, in being willing to forgive even the very creature who had killed her own granddaughter, all by itself was enough to prove that humanity was worthy of inclusion among the great interstellar Community of Races, and would insure their admission.
Sometimes she wondered if the creature, who was certainly many times smarter than she or any other human being, had manipulated her psychologically into deciding not to kill it, using a sly variant of Br’er Rabbit’s “Don’t Throw Me In the Briar Patch!” routine to get her to act the way it wanted her to act. Certainly it had been easier for it to explain itself to the ambulance crew and the police with her there alive on the scene to vouch for it than it would have been if she were dead, and it was there alone to greet them with a houseful of murdered people at its back. And the forgiveness angle made for great press, just the spin to neutralize the unfortunate fact that the Ambassador had started its career on Earth by killing as many humans as possible. Or maybe it had been sincere. Certainly its people did seem to be highly ethical, concerned with Justice and Right Actions in a fussy, legalistic, rabbinical way that seemed almost prim. She would never know, one way or the other.
CNN was now running through a quick inventory of all that humanity’s new friends had given the Earth so far. Once the Ambassador had used the living fabric of its body to form and trigger an interstellar Gate, new technologies had poured through in a seemingly endless stream: Defensive weapons that really were defensive, for they couldn’t be used offensively…an end to disease…medicines to expand the human lifespan a hundred years or more…safe and plentiful energy…the transmutation of elements…gold from lead…lilacs from mud…silk purses from sows’ ears…a partridge in a pear tree…blah, blah, blah.
They were like children on Christmas morning, with bright wrappings strewn about and nothing but presents as far as the eye could see. To listen to them go on, it seemed that the entire human race was going straight to Heaven. Everybody was going to be healthy and beautiful and tall. They were all going to be transformed into gods.
Except Jennifer. She didn’t get to be immortal and go to the stars. She got to lie at the bottom of a grave in Brattleboro, rotting in the cold unforgiving ground, while worms ate her.
Alma Kingsley sat staring at the screen and listening as voices far older than any god spoke within her. Their words were dark and poisonous. They ate at her heart like acid.
She got up and fixed herself another Manhattan. Bitterly, she drank it down, wishing—as she would wish every day for the remaining two hundred years of her life—that she’d killed the damn thing when she had the chance.
FAIRY TALE
It wasn’t a village, as is sometimes said these days, when we’ve forgotten just how small the old world was. In those days, long ago in a world now vanished with barely a trace left behind, a village was four or five houses and their outbuildings. A large village was maybe ten or fifteen houses at a crossroad, and perhaps an inn or gasthaus.