Page 84 of Going Home in the Dark

“Who wiped from our memories all that weird stuff that happened when we were fourteen?” Bobby asked.

“Alpha,” said Pastor Larry. “You’d seen things you were never meant to see, including Hornfly in my library. Beta would nothave allowed you to go on living. Alpha went to all that trouble to save you, an effort certainly not worth its time and energy.”

Britta said, “As I’ve been trying to convey to you, Alpha is a sentimental Goody Two-Shoes. But as usual you have proved slow on the uptake.”

“And I guess Alpha restored our memories. But why?”

“I suspect,” said Britta, “it wanted you to come back to Maple Grove and take Ernest away. It’s just the kind of nosy do-gooder who would think I’ve been a bad mother. Which is a scurrilous lie.”

“That night we were lying on the gurneys in the institute,” Rebecca said. “Those ... tentacles.”

“Alpha can semi-liquefy its tissue, creating appendages to manipulate and study things.”

Pastor Larry managed to rise from his armchair and throw back his shoulders to brag about Beta with ideological passion. “Our Beta is a brilliant sculptor of avatars. Hornfly is a manifestation made of fungus. When the day comes that Beta can fashion creations that are perfectly realistic, it will form an army that can pass among you without notice—until suddenly they attack and eat billions of human beings alive. That’ll be the day.” He shivered with delight, as though the day, if it came, would be an orgasmic experience. “I’m not going to tell you when that day will be upon you. Just know that it’s soon, very soon, with most people gone and the planet saved.”

Being a writer with a deep understanding of human psychology, which some writers have but not others, Bobby the Sham taunted the reverend with a cunning purpose. “It’s nine thousand years old, and it still hasn’t learned how to create trulyconvincing replicas of people? What—is it an intelligent fungus with a low IQ?”

Pastor Larry was incensed. “Funguses are nearly immortal. Their sense of time isn’t like yours. A thousand years is but a month to them. Beta is smarter than ten thousand of you, but it will work to its own timetable. It won’t be told how or when to act. You and your friends are as impertinent as you are foolish.”

“Yeah? Well, I bet Alpha can make replicas that don’t have wriggling hair, orange eyes, green teeth. I bet it can make replicas whose heads aren’t weirdly shaped like Hornfly’s stupid head.”

Pastor Larry was shaking with anger. He probably would have thrown a few punches if he had known how. “Alpha is two thousand years older. Give Beta a month, and it’ll be able to do everything better than Alpha.”

“Ha! A month. You mean a thousand years. As I thought—Alpha can already make perfect replicas.”

Britta shoved Pastor Larry back into his armchair and came face-to-face with Bobby. “Have you any inkling what is about to happen to you, Mr. Sham? Can we agree that indeed you have no inkling? Or is it your position that you aren’t a fool? What do you say? Are you confident enough to take the position that you aren’t a fool? It would be interesting to hear you defend that position in a debate. It would be most instructive.”

Rebecca said, “Before whatever happens that is going to happen, I have a few more questions.”

“‘Before whatever happens that is going to happen.’ I wonder, Ms. Crane, when filming a scene written even in puerile English, how many takes are required for you to deliver the needed words in any coherent fashion? How often do your despairing directorand fellow thespians have to be persuaded not to commit suicide on the set?”

Ignoring the insult, Rebecca said, “What are all the comatose people about?”

“I will answer your question, Ms. Crane, in the compassionate spirit of—and for the same reason as—a guard in a prison would bring you a meal shortly before escorting you to a room containing nothing more than a single metal chair and a long electric cord. The fungus known as Alpha inexplicably loves humanity so much that it wants to know everything it can possibly learn about our ridiculous and tedious species. Because everyone’s experiences and perceptions of events are different, Alpha regards each of us as an enthralling novel, and it feels the need to ‘read’ as many of us as possible. When it puts a person into suspended animation, it can leaf through our millions of memories as easily as we turn the pages of a book. In one to four days, even the most complex and richly experienced of lives can be read in detail, whereupon the subject is released from suspended animation. Why Alpha wishes to read the petty lives of individuals such as yourselves, lives as shallow and clichéd and poorly written as the average novel created as a movie tie-in, I cannot explain. Not when an elegant life, a life rich in stirring drama and accomplishment, a life of passion and keen perception, such as mine, remains on the shelf.”

“The damn, damn thing,” Pastor Larry cursed from the depths of the chair into which he had been shoved.

Exhibiting the dogged analytic curiosity with which an actress seeks to understand a character—in this case a fungus—Rebecca said, “Buthow? How does Alpha put people into suspended animation? How does it read memories as if they’re pages in a book?”

Britta Hernishen sighed wearily and covered her ears with her hands, as though she lacked the patience to continue talking to zoo animals with the hope they would understand what she told them in response to their gibbering and hooting. With another sigh, this one of the long-suffering variety, she lowered her hands and said, “Ms. Crane, I’m sure you saw a pair of pretty shoes in a shop window and can’t stop thinking about them, saw some ripped dude on the street who tickled your excitable libido, but I would be most grateful if you would put aside all such distractions and try your very best to think about what I tell you. Is that a possibility? Do you sincerely believe you can summon the concentration and possess the potential for comprehension to do such a thing?”

“I’ll try,” Rebecca said.

“You precious child, that’s all I ask of you—that you try. I am aware that the effort alone will exhaust you. If it develops that you are unable to grasp the implications of what I tell you, I will not be angry or even impatient. I will simply extend my best wishes to you and get on with my life.”

“Okay.”

“Very well. Here it is. I do not know how Alpha puts people in suspended animation or how it reads their memories. No one possesses an answer to those questions. No one. This is a world of mysteries. There are many things about the world that no one understands. You must accept the existence of the unknown—and even the unknowable—and just get on with wasting your life in foolish pursuits. As I have already told you, Alpha’s brain weighs as much as two and a half tons. It is therefore forty thousand times larger thanyourbrain. Over thousands of years, a brain that large will have evolved powers beyond our ability to imagine.And now that I have patiently endured questioning alike to the incessant badgering of a three-year-old, I have only one question of my own.What have you done with my son?”

To Rebecca, Spencer said, “She just implied that your brain weighs only two ounces.”

Britta said, “I am amazed and astonished—the first a condition of the mind, the latter of the heart—that any of you possesses the math skills just demonstrated.Now what have you done with my son?”

Even if there had been time to take offense, Rebecca wouldn’t have done so. What was the point? Anyhow, time had run out. Heavy footsteps sounded from the rear of the house, hobnail boots crashing against the floor. There could be no doubt who had arrived either through the back door or out of the kitchen-sink drain.

Bobby glanced at Rebecca. The look he gave her said,If I die here in the next few minutes or even an hour from now, maybe two hours, whenever, I want you to know that I love you like a friend, always have and always will, but recently I’ve realized that I also love you in the most profound romantic sense that a man can love a woman, and I will die for you if it comes to that.

This was considerably more information than the earlier glance had been meant to impart, but the amigos were so simpatico that Rebecca understood everything Bobby meant to convey, not just in a broad sense, but in every particular and nuance. Because the feeling was mutual, she almost teared up. However, when a monster is coming, the last thing one ought to do is tear up, for the creature might take satisfaction in the mistaken apprehension that you’re shedding tears of dread. By a nod and a smallsmile and a wink, Rebecca let Bobby know she felt toward him the very thing he felt toward her.

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