Dark

I interrupted her.  “And what can I do about that?”

“Adam,” she began.

“What?” interrupting her again.  A hectic red bloomed on her face: frustration.  The story of our lives as siblings.  “What can I do?  What can you do?  What will change if I make myself miserable?  Is there even something I can do to help someone who can make a difference?  Is there?”

“Fuck it.  Have a good honeymoon,” she snapped, and stalked away down the dark, her high heels sounding like they’d punch through the planks of the dock and into the water at any second.

“Call me if you find an answer,” I said to her retreating back.  Katrina looked at me and shrugged.

“She sort of has a point.  We should at least pay attention to this thing.  It doesn’t really sound like something we could be any help with, but how will we know if we don’t pay attention?”

“Fine, just keep me posted.  I don’t want to hear anything about the news until we get back,” I said irritably as we stepped aboard.

Aboard, we cast off into the gray of the sea.  Instead of following the coast as we had planned to do at first, Katrina and I agreed to go straight to our planned endpoint, Easter Island.  Originally we had planned to visit briefly at the end of the cruise, see the great stone heads (actually more like busts) and continue, but with big news brewing we felt we’d be happier starting off with five quiet days of cruising on autopilot, covering the 2,300 miles to the island, just the two of us and the sea.

As we approached the island, I cursed our luck.  Easing into a sheltered cove leeward of the prevailing currents, we could see two craft already on the beach, well above the line of driftwood and shells that marked the maximum reach of the waves at high tide.  We dropped anchor and lowered the skiff, pulling up on the beach between the two earlier arrivals, and Katrina helped me pull the small light shell of the boat up beyond the reach of the surf.

From the distance we had assumed the wide pearl gray object were inflatables, the large type made for a dozen passengers, semirigid, turned broadside to our view.  Up close, they were smooth and low discs, seamless and with a sheen suggesting both metal and glazed ceramic simultaneously.  The gray tone was highlighted by the wan illumination of the noticeably darker sun, floating high in the sky as if behind a sheet of smoked welders’ glass.  Katrina reached out, touched the hull of the one we had approached.  Her hair rose slightly and undulated faintly as on an unfelt breeze.  It made her hands tingle, she said.  The smell of ozone clung to her fingers.

We walked past the craft onto the low rise of the island proper.  The expected great stone figures dotted the landscape, but not nearly as many as we had expected.  There were at least as many dark, moist divots as mo’ai, bare spots like wounds in a mouth marking pulled teeth.  A pair of figures moved over the grass, and with a glance at each other we walked in their direction.  They were walking toward one of the remaining mo’ai; we and they reached it together.  One of the pair turned toward us, the other raised a yellow plastic device that looked like a large, elaborate child’s squirtgun, a double-barreled toy.  The ‘toy’ hummed raggedly, a sound I felt deep in my chest rather than heard with my ears.  The impassive stone figure it faced turned a drab, defeated yellowish hue and began to slough away into a fine, floating ash that clouded around all four of us, leaving Katrina and I choking and groping through our clothing for something to cover our mouths and noses.  She pulled her silk scarf loose for the task, I pulled my undershirt up through my shirt collar and hung it on my nose like a bandit.

The being facing us held its toylike—weapon?—at port arms.  Short, broad and human-shaped, the mirrored diver-style mask and respirator covered its face, its eyes if it had any.  I could have believed it was human if not for the triple lower arms, as if radius and ulna were separated and each given its own hand, and a third broader one ran beneath the two, bearing a thicker hand with four fat fingers opposed in pairs, two each to grasp and steady the radius and ulna.  The broad fingers of the—what would you call such a thing?— under-forearm tapped a slow regular beat on the rifle-bearing forearms, like a nervous tic.  Or a threat?  I stared at it, back at the disintegrating stone mass, now a speading featureless dust glob head-high and still deflating, and back at the being.

“What the hell are you doing?” I finally asked, at a loss for anything else to do.  Katrina plucked at my shoulder, urging me to shut up and leave the thing alone.  Low, curt, slurping tones issued from the vicinity of its mirrored mask, a language formed entirely of sharp inhalations from the sound of it.  A stilted, awkward English followed the inhalations, a computer generated translation, obviously.

“We are mapping and saving a few interesting things before the atmosphere snows out,” it said.

“Snows out?  What does that mean?”

“It means as solar radiation escaping the collector nears zero, the atmosphere will freeze and form crystals of ice which will gather on the surface of the planet,” it said with a helpful air.

“Collector?”

“The means by which we intercept the radiation of the star and convey it to a distribution center.”

“And we freeze?”

“Unless you leave.”

“Then don’t do it!  We need it, we live here, we can’t leave, it’s our star.”  I felt horribly inadequate.  I didn’t even watch Star Travel or whatever that show was with the pointy-eared aliens that people were always talking about.  Yocans?  Vuldas?  Something.  I wished my sister had come along.  She was the practical one, and she watched all the shows about alien nonsense.  Only it wasn’t nonsense, I was looking right at a pair of aliens.  I wished they’d stop tapping the fingers of their third forearms.  It was unnerving.

The mo’ai now reduced to a thin crust of ash clinging to the walls of the hole in the earth it had once occupied, the other alien lowered its absurd-looking device and slurped something at the one I was talking to.  The noises went untranslated.

“Look,” said the one I’d been talking to, “we bought it.  If you wanted to keep it, you should have bothered to secure the deed.”

“But—“ the pair turned their backs on my protest and walked back toward the coast.  We watched them go.  Eventually, their two craft rose smoothly, noiselessly into the air and sped off to the west, vanishing over the horizon, no doubt to disintegrate some other great monuments.

Katrina and I watched them go, then went back to the yacht.  We left the anchor in place, the radio off, and the heaters running full blast, determined to make as much love as we could before the snowflakes began to fall.

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