more like a dream than some of the actual dreams she’d been having
lately.
After so much mystery, there were answers-but they seemed to be coming
too easily. She did not know what she had expected, but she had not
imagined that the murkiness in which they had been operating would clear
as quickly as if a drop of a magical universal detergent had been
dropped into it.
“Ask her why she’s here,” Holly said, tearing off the second sheet and
putting it with the first.
Jim was surprised. “She?”
“Why not?”
He brightened. “Why not?” he agreed.
He turned to a new page in his own tablet and wrote her question: Why
are you here?
Floating up through the paper to the surface: TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO
HELP MANKIND.
“You know what this is like?” Holly said.
“What’s it like?”
“An episode of Outer Limits”
“The old TV show?”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn’t that before your time?”
“It’s on cable.”
“But what do you mean it’s like an episode of Outer Limits?”
She frowned at TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND and said, “Don’t
you think it’s a little. . . trite?”
“Trite?” He was irritated. “No, I don’t. Because I haven’t any idea
what alien contact should be like. I haven’t had a whole lot of
experience with it, certainly not enough to have expectations or be
jaded.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know. . . it’s just. . . okay, let’s see where
this leads.”
She had to admit that she was no less awed than she had been when the
light had first appeared in the walls. Her heart continued to thud hard
and fast, and she was still unable to draw a really deep breath.
She still felt that they were in the presence of something superhuman,
maybe even a higher power by one definition or another, and she was
humbled by it. Considering what she had seen in the pond, the pulsing
luminescence even now swimming through the wall, and the words that kept
shimmering into view on the tablet, she would have been hopelessly
stupid if she had not been awed.
Undeniably, however, her sense of wonder was dulled by the feeling that
this entity was structuring the encounter like an old movie or TV
script.
With a sarcastic note in his voice, Jim had said that he had too little
experience with alien contact to have developed any expectations that
could be disappointed. But that was not true. Having grown up in the
sixties and seventies, he had been as media-saturated as she had been.
They’d been exposed to the same TV shows and movies, magazines and
books; science fiction had been a major influence in popular culture all
their lives. He had acquired plenty of detailed expectations about what
alien contact would be like-and the entity in the wall was playing to
all of them. Holly’s only conscious expectation had been that a real
close encounter of the third kind would be like nothing the novelists
and screenwriters imagined in all their wildest flights of fantasy,
because when referring to life from another world, alien meant alien,
different, beyond easy comparison or comprehension.
“Okay,” she said, “maybe familiarity is the point. I mean, maybe it’s
using our modern myths as a convenient way to present itself to us, a
way to make itself comprehensible to us. Because it’s probably so
radically different from us that we could never understand its true
nature or appearance.”
“Exactly,” Jim said. He wrote another question: What is the light we
see in the walls?
THE LIGHT IS ME.
Holly didn’t wait for Jim to write the next question. She addressed the
entity directly: “How can you move through a wall?”
Because the alien seemed such a stickler about form, she was somewhat
surprised when it did not insist on hewing to the written question-reply
format. It answered her at once: I CAN BECOME PART OF ANYTHING, MOVE
WITHIN IT, TAKE SHAPE FROM IT WHENEVER I CHOOSE.
“Sounds a little like bragging,” she said.
“I can’t believe you can be sarcastic at a time like this,” Jim said
impatiently.
“I’m not being sarcastic,” she explained. “I’m just trying to