Lightspeed: Year One

“It’s the TV,” I said, and tried to slam the door, but I couldn’t because he’d wedged his foot in there, and he was staring behind me, goggle-eyed. When I turned to look over my shoulder, I saw that one of the cucumbers had staggered out of the den, away from its friends and the nice warm heaters, and was hopping in pathetic circles around my living room, which makes it the first time in almost ten years that a cucumber’s moved from where I put it once it got into the house.

I was about to have a very bad day.

The space cucumbers started coming here a few months after Nancy Ann ran off. I don’t know why they picked this place—it’s just a ranch house out in the middle of nowhere, halfway between Reno and Gerlach, with nothing to look at but sagebrush and lizards and alkali dust, so flat that the mountains on the horizon seem like a mirage—and I never have figured out how they keep from attracting the attention of the air base in Stead. Those bastards are government, and I figure they have to have instruments that can tell if you throw a penny in the air, and the cucumbers have to come in some kind of ship, or come down through the atmosphere, anyway. And you see those air base planes and ’copters doing maneuvers out here all the time, so I don’t know why they’ve never picked up on what’s going on. I guess the cucumbers are smarter than they are. It’s not hard to be smarter than the government.

I call them space cucumbers because they look like a sea cucumber I saw once—or at least, they look more like that than like anything else. My parents took me on a trip to San Diego when I was a kid, and we went to the aquarium there. They had all kinds of animals, scary ones like sharks and smart ones like dolphins and whales who did tricks, but for some reason, the one I always remembered best was the sea cucumber. It was lying in a tank of water, in this kind of petting zoo they had, and you could reach in and touch it. It was brown and very, very soft, and if somebody had grabbed it and started cutting it into pieces, it couldn’t have fought back. It didn’t swim or do tricks. It didn’t do anything. It just sat there. The aquarium lady said it ate by filtering tiny bits of food out of the water. It was a really boring animal, and I never have known why it made such an impression on me. Probably because I couldn’t figure out how a creature like that could survive in the ocean with sharks and lobsters and stingrays. “I guess sharks don’t think they taste good,” the aquarium lady said, but you could tell she didn’t know either. That cucumber was a mystery.

Which is what mine are, too. They show up two or three at a time, every five or six weeks. I just open the door in the morning and there they are, waiting on my welcome mat. They’re much bigger than the sea cucumber in San Diego, about three feet tall and as thick around as a flagpole, and I can’t touch them because they’re wrapped in something like plastic. Like really thick shrink wrap. Or maybe that’s their skin, but I don’t think so: I think it’s some kind of spacesuit, and the animal’s the thing inside, the brown blobby cylindrical thing that hops along on nine stubby little legs, all clustered at the bottom of the cylinder, like tentacles. Hopping isn’t easy for them, you can tell—I don’t think it’s how they usually move around, wherever they come from—so I usually pick them up to carry them inside. Wherever they’re from, they’ve come a long way to get here, and I figure if there’s anything I can do to make it easier for them, why not? They’re always exactly air temperature, or the shrink wrap is, and they’re not as heavy as you’d expect from their size. I can just stick them under my arm, like pieces of firewood.

When the first ones came I was terrified, of course. The cucumbers would have been weird whenever they showed up, but Nancy Ann had just left, and I was out of my mind with grief and anger, smoking entirely too much of my own crop just to get to sleep at night. I felt like I was going crazy, and having space cucumbers on my welcome mat didn’t help. I didn’t know what they were or what they wanted. I didn’t know if they were going to kill me or take over the planet or poison the water supply, and I couldn’t ask anybody because that would have gotten the government involved, and even if I trusted the government I couldn’t have people tramping around my house and finding the plants and grow lights and sprinklers in the basement. I have one hell of a professional setup down there: no way I could argue personal use, even if possession weren’t still a felony for anybody without an approved medical condition.