Alien Gifts Read online

  But I'm not afraid, Evie thought. Her own heart thrummed like the motor of Galileo's purr, but not from fear.

  The shape in the night sky hovered, how far from her window Evie couldn't tell. White brilliance washed over her. The yard outside and her room remained draped in shadow. Galileo stood like a creature petrified, every hair of his fur distended like a porcupine's quills.

  Her hands shook and sweat pricked at her palms. The invisible light—was there such a thing?—touched her hair, her mind, her heart. Her mind, unguarded with only the cat for company, reached out and felt—another? Evie gasped. The cover of one of her new books flipped open and the pages shuddered as if swept by a sudden wind. The cat shrieked, once, and collapsed.

  Evie wrenched her eyes away from the strange illumination and gathered Galileo into her arms with a cry. His heartbeat thudded gently against her hand. Tears of relief stung her eyes, and when she looked up again, the lights, the shape, were gone. The room was still.

  She understood with startling clarity that something—it—he—had been looking for her. She'd been visited by an old friend...one she'd never actually met. And although she still didn't feel it herself, she finally understood some of her mother's fear.

  -3-

  Close Encounters of the Third Kind:

  Entities are seen in or near UFO's

  This time Scout stayed away longer, while Evie's planet completed twenty-six long, graceful revolutions around its yellow sun. He had no intention of going back, but he could not forget that unexpected, inexplicable mind that had touched his, that had drawn him back to Earth the second time. It tormented him, awake or asleep. Always he expected...waited...to feel that touch again, no matter how far he was from Evie's planet. In dreams he lingered above her house, letting her wild, tumultuous mental energy wash over him like a cleansing storm.

  And so inevitably, he went back. He'd never left the Scouts. Risk his life in a war zone or on some ridiculous mission? Not if it meant he might never get back to Evie. When the yearning became unbearable, he scheduled another follow-up survey of Evie's planet and nosed his craft toward the small spiral galaxy that rarely left his thoughts. His hearts felt lighter than they had in years.

  Ship must have accessed the course charts.

  Scout ignored Ship and entered the solar system, fighting to quell a burgeoning excitement.

  "Not as if you're actually going to make contact with her," he scolded himself. "She might have lost the talent anyway, having to suppress it all these years."

 

  "Nothing. I just want to check up on...the planet."

  Ship made a sound that, had it come from any living creature, could only have been called a snort.

  Scout stubbornly kept his mind open, not caring what Ship read, waiting for that gentle jara touch that would tell him he had found her.

  It did not come.

  Closer and closer he flew to her spot on the globe, anxiety instilling a tremble in his long-fingered hands.

  Ship reprimanded.

  Scout flushed and adjusted the holochrom slides distractedly. "Scan for any technological advancements the inhabitants might have made since our last visit." That should keep Ship busy for a few minutes. Finally Evie's house resolved on the viewscreen. Still nothing.

  Evie was not there.

  Scout felt a sharp clench of dread. Shaking, he urged the craft up beyond the exosphere of the planet, where the spacedark lay like a blanket around him, and shut down all nonessential systems. He blocked his jara from Ship's meddlesome AI and settled his thoughts.

  He refused to consider the possibility that she might be dead. Therefore she must have moved. This race did not yet have interstellar or even routine interplanetary travel. He should be able to find her.

  "Ship," he said, "Calculate a circumnavigation route that lets us pass closely over all the inhabited areas of this planet. But make sure we'll avoid the current monitoring systems."

 

  "Just do it."

  While Ship ran the calculations, Scout lit the tachee, his meditation lanterns, and settled in his skimchair. When the spiced tachee fragrance intensified, he opened his mind as he would have opened it at home, in his private, protected space. He wasn't worried about his own jara reaching the planet from this distance, and Ship wasn't listening. He wanted to be ready to receive any sign of Evie.

  The meditation refreshed him. He had not released his mind so completely in a long time. Now he would be open to the slightest mental touch.

 

  Scout calmly set the piloting threads and let Ship drop toward the planet again.

  "Please be there, Evie," he breathed, as the colors of the planet intensified. "Please."

  They'd traversed almost half the course when it came, a humming undercurrent of jara activity that plucked at his own. The mental signature was muted, nothing like the unfettered tumult of his first visit, nor even the resolutely damped-down energy of the last time. This was a mind more settled, in better control of its singular powers. It pained Scout to think how hard-won that control must have been for Evie, coping alone.

  A strange distortion buzzed around the edges of Evie's thoughts, which puzzled Scout at first. As he pinpointed her location the explanation became clear.

  Evie had travelled a long way from her childhood home, to a hot, dry place where blunt saucers pointed their monolithic noses to the sky. Scout knew from his previous visits that the inhabitants of this planet called them "radio telescopes." Evie's proximity to the things seemed to both garble and boost her jara output.

  Scout smiled. Evie had not forgotten the sky.

  He parked in a high orbit where detection was unlikely, this time not even bothering to run the planetary scans right away. He could do that later, to justify his visit here, but for a while he wanted simply to bask in the sensation of contact with Evie's mind. There was still nothing one could call a conversation or even the most rudimentary message, but the mere touching of her mind to his was pleasurable. He had to concentrate to keep his jara from responding eagerly to hers. He ached to know for certain if she was aware of him at all, but it did not seem so.

  When night fell upon the planet, however, Scout had cause to doubt that estimation. As the dark hours passed he knew that Evie's mind did not settle into sleep. She was wakeful on the planet far below him, as wakeful as he was here.

  Intrigued, he engaged the ship's stealth field and dropped down through the layers of atmosphere, down to where the telescope facility was clear on his viewscreen. Only a few windows cast thin yellow fingers across the ground outside. Evie's mind was still shrouded, but active. She must work here. Her thoughts were concentrated, logical. Did her own kind recognize her genius?

  Much later she emerged into the moonlit night. Scout watched, his mind quivering with excitement, as Evie strolled down a winding, brush-lined path to the telescope array, glancing occasionally at the clear, starry sky as she went. A furry creature stalked elegantly beside her, stopping occasionally to sniff the air or the dusty ground.

  "How is it possible," Scout asked himself in a low voice, "That one so strange could seem so...familiar?" Their races were enormously dissimilar. It made no sense to him that he could find Evie attractive to look at, no matter how the touch of her mind intrigued him. But there it was.

  Ship asked dryly.

  "Oh, shut up, Ship." Scout still had Ship blocked from reading his thoughts, but he'd forgotten himself and spoken aloud.

  Evie apparently reached her destination a moment later, stopping between two of the huge, concave dishes. She suddenly threw her arms wide, turned her face up to the night sky, and mentally drew the shroud away from her thoughts.

  The blast of jara waves was shattering. Scout flinched back as if he had been st
ruck a physical blow. Evie's mind was like a wild thing suddenly freed. There was still no form, no message, no signal, only the joy of release from a prison, the mad exultation of freedom. It washed over Scout like a roiling wave, knocking him breathless.

  Then, as she had done before, Evie looked directly at the Ship. Her jara energy faltered; doubt, wonder, shock overriding the joy before it was quickly damped down.

  "No!" Scout cried. He must not be the cause of more mental anguish for her, must not be the reason she clamped down on that wonderful mind. Without thought for consequences, he changed the settings on the holochrom, altering the light-reflecting character of the front viewscreen to transparency, raising the level of illumination inside the bridge.

 

  Scout stood and walked to the viewscreen, knowing she would see him, knowing his silhouette would be clear and unmistakable, not caring about any of that. He would not try and contact her mentally yet. He didn't understand her jara well enough and would not risk damaging it.

  When he reached the window, he raised a hand.

  Hello, he hoped the gesture said. Be calm.

  Evie's arms had dropped to her sides, her gaze locked on the ship. Now she raised a tentative hand in reply. And with it came a mental bubble of recognition. As if she remembered him. As if he were...a friend.

  Then she turned and sprinted for the building, her furred companion darting ahead along the starlit path.

  Scout leapt across the bridge, hearts thudding as if they would burst from his body. He was panting, tongue lolling out as he slammed instructions into the holochrom and got the ship moving.

  Ship's voice was stern.

  She hadn't minded.

 

  She hadn't minded.

  Scout shook his head. He had to think. Had to get away and think long and hard about this. He shielded his jara against Ship, leaned into the comforting pressure of his skimchair, and watched the solar system wink past outside the viewscreen.

  The only real question was when he'd be back.

  -4-

  Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind:

  UFO's abduct humans

  Evie sat back from the computer screen and rubbed her eyes. The building was nighttime quiet, the silence broken only by the hum of computer fans and the occasional tick of fluorescent lights. It wasn't necessary to do radio astronomy at night. Radio astronomy happened all the time. But the rest of her team went home at night, and Evie was always more comfortable when she was alone.

  She glanced over at her office window, although it showed her only the reflection of her neat and uncluttered office. Beyond the window, Evie knew the stars winked down at her, offering to share all their secrets if she'd only come and ask them.

  A cat as black as the night outside her window leapt up on her desk with easy grace and she stroked a hand down its sleek back. It arched in pleasure and a purr rumbled under her touch.

  "Hello, Galileo," she said. All her succession of cats had been named Galileo, after her childhood friend. Evie had never been a dog person. Dogs were nervous around her, and she always wondered if they could pick up on her thoughts, just a little. Cats never seemed to. Or perhaps they just didn't care.

  "So, tomorrow," she said to the cat. "My birthday." Evie sighed, and Galileo twitched his ears as if he were paying attention. "Oh, I don't really mind turning forty, you know. Age is just a number anyway. The number of times the earth has orbited the sun since I was born."

  The cat climbed into her lap, kneading her legs with his paws.

  "It's completely arbitrary, Leo. Just another artificial construct for human convenience."

  She was just so...tired. Almost four decades of mental stress will do that to you.

  Anyway, tomorrow. Caroline, Amin, and the others in her department were planning a party for her. It was nice of them, of course. Evie squeezed her eyes shut until the afterimage of monitor glow faded. Crowds were hard, had always been hard, seemed to grow harder every year.

  The window drew her gaze again, and she shook her head and rose from her desk, dumping the cat gently to the floor. What was wrong with her tonight? She felt anxious, anticipatory—but for what? It wasn't her approaching birthday. It wasn't work.

  It was...the alien.

  There, she'd admitted it.

  Evie shrugged into her lambswool jacket and strode down the hallway, her footsteps echoing in the empty building. The night air brushed her cheeks like a cooling hand when she pushed open the door, a welcome relief from the stuffiness of her office. She stood uncertainly on the steps with her hands in her pockets. Should she walk down to the array?

  She shivered. Not tonight. Not when she was already thinking about him—him? she didn't even know—not when he seemed so close.

  The cat wound around her ankles and she bent to pick him up.

  "You were there, Galileo," she whispered into his twitching ear. "It's our little secret, right? But what do you think it meant? And if they're out there, why don't we ever pick up any signals?"

  The cat lay still just long enough for Evie to think he was content, green eyes glinting in the moonlight, then leapt from her arms. Evie shoved her hands back into the pockets of her jacket. They had to be missing something. She was always looking, always trying to think outside the box. She'd made some notable discoveries that way. But she'd never come up with an explanation to satisfy herself.

  Those were only the questions she let herself think about. There were others, buried much deeper, where she rarely let her mind venture. Was her encounter with the alien linked to the others, long ago and fuzzier in her memory? Lights in the sky, and then later, outside her window. Her strange, inexplicable brain and the abilities she struggled to control. She'd travelled the world when she was younger, searching for another mind like her own, and never had a word in reply. Sometimes that frustrating twitch, like a sleeping consciousness that almost awoke at her call, but in the end, silence. What did it all mean?

  Was this what turning forty meant? Focusing on all the unanswered questions in one's life?

  "If that's it," she muttered, "I'm not interested." Evie gathered Galileo up again, turned on her heel and went back inside, shut off the lights in her office, and went home.

  She awoke in the night to the sensation that she was in a strange room, not her own. She lay in the darkness, perfectly still, collecting her thoughts. A familiar presence hovered at the edge of consciousness, familiar but vague, like a face at a darkened window. An impression without detail, like her room, filled with colorless shapes in the moonlight.

  She became aware of more lights outside her bedroom window, flickering in a steady cadence. Their presence was no surprise—they seemed right, as if she had expected them. Evie rose and stood a long moment at the window, looking out as the familiar craft settled to the ground in her open yard. Evie's natural tendency to isolation meant no near neighbors, no-one to notice the intrusion. Galileo stalked the length of her bed, hackles stiff, mewling plaintively.

  As she watched, a panel in the side slid open, just like in all the old science fiction movies. Evie's heart fluttered, feeling too large in her chest.

  It felt like an invitation.

  She dressed slowly. I should be shocked, or terrified, she thought, stifling the urge to laugh. Why am I so...relieved?

  The house around her lay still, almost as if it held its breath, waiting. Waiting for me, she realized. This is the moment of choice. She stroked the agitated cat absently, and tucked him up under her arm, one hand resting lightly on his head as she looked around. She liked her house; it had long been her sanctuary—but it was nothing she couldn't bear to leave. Her parents were dead, other connections lapsed over her years of self-enforced solitude.

  There was nothing, really, to keep her here.

  But what might wait beyond? Evie returned to the window. Now a creature stood silhouetted in th
e warm glow that spilled through the open panel and onto the hard-packed earth. A silhouette Evie recognized. Still he had made no effort to contact her, mentally or otherwise.

  A choice. And clearly hers alone.

  Still carrying the cat, Evie left the house, locking the door carefully behind her. She barely noticed the chill night air that raised goosebumps on her skin.

  The visitor held up a hand as it had that night above the array, and Evie returned the gesture, probing tentatively with her mind. He responded with what felt like caution, a presence strengthening in her mind, not words, not even wordless messages, not hello or I come in peace or take me to your leader. Language would come later. For now, it was simpler than that, simpler and so much more relevant. Emotions. Friendship. Joy.

  Love.

  As she neared the ship she made out his features. Copper skin, dark lobed eyes. Completely alien. Completely unimportant. Galileo struggled out of her arms and stopped behind her, his tail stiff and bristling.

  She allowed herself to be drawn into the alien's spindly arms and wrapped hers around him in return. His skin was cool and smooth. He smelled of rain. He pressed his forehead to hers silently. Their minds met in what could only be described as a kiss. A kiss that could not be reduced to words, but encompassed every language. She released her mind as she had that night at the array and felt the alien shudder, his clasp tightening around her.

  The cat hung back for a moment longer, whiskers twitching as he observed this strange embrace. Then he stalked cautiously past the pair and into the craft, his tail high.

  Evie did not look back as the open panel slid closed behind them.