understand.”
He looked doubtful.
To the alien presence, she said, “You understand the problems I’m having
with this, don’t you?”
On the tablet: YES.
She ripped away that page, revealing a fresh one. Increasingly restless
and nervous, but not entirely sure why, Holly got to her feet and turned
in a circle, looking at the play of light in the walls as she formulated
her next question. “Why is your approach marked by the sound of bells?”
No answer appeared on the tablet.
She repeated the question.
The tablet remained blank.
Holly said, “Trade secret, I guess.”
She felt a bead of cold sweat trickle out of her right armpit and down
her side, under her blouse. A childlike wonder still worked in her, but
fear was on the rise again. Something was wrong. Something more than
the disjointed nature of the story the entity was giving them.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on what spooked her.
On his own tablet, Jim quickly wrote another question, and Holly leaned
down to read it: Did you appear to me in this room when I was ten years
old?
YES. OFTEN.
Did you make me forget it?
YES.
“Don’t bother writing your questions,” Holly said. “Just ask them like
I do.”
Jim was clearly startled by her suggestion, and she was surprised that
he had persisted with his pen and tablet even after seeing that the
questions she asked aloud were answered. He seemed reluctant to put
aside the felttip and the paper, but at last he did. “Why did you make
me forget?”
Even standing, Holly could easily read the bold words that appeared on
the yellow tablet: YOU WERE NOT READY TO REMEMBER.
“Unnecessarily cryptic,” she muttered. “You’re right. It must be
male.”
Jim tore off the used page, put it with the others, and paused, chewing
his lip, evidently not sure what to ask next. Finally he said, “Are you
male or female?”
I AM MALE.
“More likely,” Holly said, “it’s neither. It’s alien, after all, and
it’s as likely to reproduce by parthenogenesis.”
I AM MALE, it repeated.
Jim remained seated, legs folded, an undiminished look of wonder on his
face, more boylike now than ever.
Holly did not understand why her anxiety level was soaring while Jim
continued to bounce up and down-well, virtually-with enthusiasm and
delight.
He said, “What do you look like?”
WHATEVER I CHOOSE TO LOOK LIKE.
“Could you appear to us as a man or woman?” Jim asked.
YES.
“As a dog?”
YES.
“As a cat?”
YES.
“As a beetle?”
YES.
Without the security of his pen and tablet, Jim seemed to have been
reduced to inane questions. Holly half expected him to ask the entity
what its favorite color was, whether it preferred Coke or Pepsi, and if
it liked Barry Manilow music.
But he said, “How old are you?”
I AM A CHILD.
“A child?” Jim responded. “But you told us you’ve been on our world
for ten thousand years.”
I AM STILL A CHILD.
Jim said, “Then is your species very long-lived?”
WE ARE IMMORTAL.
“Wow.”
“It’s lying,” Holly told him.
Appalled by her effrontery, he said, “Jesus, Holly!”
“Well, it is.”
And that was the source of her renewed fear-the fact that it was not
being straight with them, was playing games, deceiving. She had a sense
that it regarded them with enormous contempt. In which case, she
probably should have shut up, been meekly adoring before its power, and
tried not to anger it.
Instead she said, “If it were really immortal, it wouldn’t think of
itself as a child. It couldn ‘t think that way about itself Infancy,
childhood, adolescence, adulthood-those are age categories a species
concerns itself with if it has a finite lifespan. If you’re immortal,
you might be born innocent, ignorant, uneducated, but you aren’t born
young because you’re never really going to get old.”
“Aren’t you splitting hairs?” Jim asked almost petulantly.
“I don’t think so. It’s lying to us.”
“Maybe its use of the word child’ was just another way it was trying to
make its alien nature more understandable.”
YES.
“Bullshit,” Holly said.
“Damn it, Holly!”
As Jim removed another page from the tablet, detaching it neatly along