Henry didn’t move while he spoke. His hands stayed still as he watched the setting sun.
Elizabeth floundered for a moment, unsure of how to reply. When they’d started this project a month ago (“No, a thousand years ago,” she thought), he would have never spoken to her like this, and she would have had no trouble telling him what she thought, but this wasn’t the same Henry, not by any measure. “I’m sorry, Henry. I didn’t think you would mind, really. They were changes for your own good.”
“I loved you once, but you have a mean sense of perfection, Eliza.”
The sun’s last glimmer dropped out of sight. “Watch now,” he said. The horizon glowed like a campfire coal, then, as sudden as a sunset can be sudden, low clouds that had been invisible until now picked up red edges, their middles pulsating cherry gold, and the air from the horizon line all the way to nearly directly overhead turned a deep purple with scarlet streaks, changing shades even as she realized they were there.
A half hour later, still in silence, they watched. Stars appeared in the moonless sky. A boat left the quay, trailing a bioluminescent streak behind it.
Elizabeth found she was crying again. “My, god, it’s beautiful, Henry, but it’s not what I was trying to make. It’s not better than Earth.”
“It’s Venus,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be better.”
By now, night had completely fallen. There were no board room meetings to attend. No calls to make. No projects to shepherd to success. Elizabeth felt very small sitting in the car with Henry. Her muscles ached. She suspected she would never be physically as capable as she once was. A thousand years of long sleep had taken their toll.
“What about you, Henry. You said you loved me once. Will you stay with me?”
She couldn’t tell in the dark if he turned to look at her or not.
“You couldn’t shape me into what you wanted either.”
He started the car, which turned on the dashboard controls, but made no noise. The light revealed his hands on the wheel.
“My days of shaping are done, Henry.”
He drove them the long way home, over hills and around the lake. They didn’t speak. Neither knew what to say to the other, yet.
DIFFERENT WORLDS
Ten-year-old Jenny crossed the street first, staying low until she reached the broken wall and had to clamber over. Robbie cleared the rubble in one clean leap, then looked at her, eyes wide, panting, ready for the next adventure. Then his ears flicked up, and he cocked his head to one side. His tail quit wagging. Jenny watched closely. He was her early warning system.
In a moment, from up the street, came a familiar hum. “Don’t bark,” she whispered. If they caught her, all would be lost: Robbie, her dad, herself.
Heart in her throat, she stood. Visible above the broken rooftops a block away, the top of one of the alien’s vehicles lumbered toward them, its legs moving. Across the street, Dad peeked through the busted door. She waved her hand in a frantic stop sign.
“Don’t come, Dad. Don’t come,” she mouthed.
For a second he paused as if he didn’t understand, and Jenny had a vision of him wandering into the street in clear view. Earlier in the day he’d walked off, talking to himself when she found him. “It’s a states’ rights issue. Just like the old South,” he had been saying. She’d held his hand as she led him away from the open where he could be spotted so easily.
This time, though, he nodded, then dropped out of sight.
Jenny knelt, holding Robbie. The dog pressed a wet nose under her chin and licked her once. “You’re safe with me. They won’t get you,” she said.
The house had no roof, and the sun was a light spot, low in the smoke-filled sky. Jenny crawled to the shattered frame where the picture window had once been. Grit and ash permeated the carpet, itching at her palms; the air tasted oily in the back of her throat, and it burned her nose to breathe. From the window, she could see smoke rising from several ruined houses, but no flame.
The humming grew louder.
Jenny pushed back out of sight, then drew herself in tightly. I’m a little stone, she thought. They can’t see me if I’m just a little stone.
The alien craft, with glassy-eyed monitors gyrating this way and that, stepped between her and her father. Jenny stared through a crack in the wall. None of their vessels looked right. They were too broad at the top, inverted pyramids slapped together with wrinkled metal, supported by six spindly legs. They should tip over.
“Don’t be scared,” she murmured. The vessel stopped. It lowered itself until its narrow base almost touched the street, while its mirrored legs reached above its top, as if the machine had been modeled on a cricket. The metal eyes rotated in their sockets. Jenny trembled, holding the dog close.
After a long moment, the machine stood tall and resumed its march down the street.
Jenny peeked both ways, then beckoned Dad across. He stepped gingerly over glass shards on the sidewalk before crossing the asphalt, bent double, holding his book close.
“It almost got us,” Dad said. “If you hadn’t stopped me, I’d have been in the street.” He squeezed the book to his chest.
“No it didn’t. We just have to be careful.” But she couldn’t tell if he had heard. His focus, like it had been more and more over the last few days, was on some middle distance. Hardly ever on her.
Dad cleared rotten sheet rock off the floor before sitting down on the carpet so stained that Jenny had no idea what color it had once been. He leaned against the remains of a couch, its stuffing bursting from a dozen places, oozing a mildewy, fetid smell. Robbie sniffed at it, decided there were no rats, then put his snout on his front paws.
He was a white dog with black patches and a black head. When Mom gave him to Jenny, she’d said he would be “medium sized,” but he turned out rather small. She’d brought him home in a shoe box from the small animal clinic she ran. A mix between a spaniel and a terrier. Short haired. Prone to running circuits around Jenny’s back yard that wore ruts eventually. When Jenny still had a back yard.
Dad shifted uncomfortably against the couch.
Jenny said, “Does it hurt?”
He moved his shoulder. The bandages under his jacket gave him a humped look. “It’s fine. If we find a doctor, it will be fine. But I need to rest. Can I rest, Delaney?”
Jenny winced. “I’m Jenny, Dad. Sure, take a nap.”
Within seconds he was breathing deeply. She put her palm against his forehead and then against her own. He felt warm. She studied his face. Under his eyes were dark smudges, like bruises, and his beard was black and fierce, as if he’d become a Viking. She’d teased him a week earlier for not shaving. Most of the men they saw now needed shaves, and the women needed their hair done. Jenny looked down at her own smudged hands and dusty jeans. I could use a bath myself, she thought before closing her eyes.
Robbie’s whining woke her. The sky had grown darker. Whether it was more smoke or the sunset, she couldn’t tell. Dad was awake too and thumbing through his book.
“I remember this one,” he said. His finger rested on a picture of Jenny standing at the end of a pier, a fishing pole in one hand and an empty net in the other. Robbie sat at her feet, tongue out.
“That was just last summer, Dad. Of course you remember it.” But the memory eluded her. So much had happened. She wrinkled her brow. “That was before the fighting started?”
Dad turned the page to the pictures from the anniversary party. Jenny remembered the cake. It had been white with chocolate letters on it: “Happy Twentieth, Dan and Delaney.” Mom held a piece to the cameraman in one picture, the cake huge and blurry in the foreground; her face glowing and white behind it. During the party, Jenny had caught her finger in a door. She remembered how she sat on Dad’s lap while Mom held ice against her swollen knuckle. She remembered how solid his hands were, wrapped around her, how Mom took the ice away and blew on the hurt. “Is that better, Jennybird?” she said. The memory wasn’t fuzzy like the days they spent fishing. Those mostly blended one to the next. In her memory, she could almost touch her mother’s cheek. She could smell the little bit of wine Mother had on her breath.