Stories: All-New Tales

THEY SIT. SHE SETS aside the cardigan he’d handed her, and explains herself in a nervous rush. Why she had been in the Arctic, how she happened to drift over the station and accidentally jimmy the entry system with her oar. How she’d figured, at first, that it must be some military facility, American or Russian or Chinese, but then, as she spent hours exploring the interior—the peculiar materials and shapes and technology interfaces, the very peculiar quality of artificial light, the unrecognizable written language, the images displayed—how she had developed a new hypothesis. How she had photographed everything, including the mapping console with its one, tiny blinking light in the middle of North America, and then, on her computer back in Longyearbyen, had transposed a longitude and latitude grid over her image to find the precise location of the blinking light—41 degrees, 47 minutes, 54.1475 seconds north and 87 degrees, 35 minutes, 41.7095 seconds west, South Kimbark Avenue between 53rd and 54th Streets, Chicago. How she had taken a few things from the station—including a small plastic picture of him, which she had just shown to a lady downstairs in order to find his apartment. She hands him the picture.

“My goodness,” he says, “I was young. So young!” He puts the picture down and turns to look at her. They’ve talked for ten minutes, yet she hasn’t asked where he’s from or what he’s doing here. Which is fine by him. He’s in no particular hurry.

She’s a little flummoxed. “I have to tell you I am incredibly excited. This is beyond surreal. It’s like I’m having a stroke, or been drugged, or gone to heaven. It’s—it’s a new category of excitement.” She takes a deep breath. “I’m also scared.”

“Scared? Of me? Oh, don’t be. No, no, no.”

“No, scared that I haven’t told anyone about any of this—not my colleagues, not my bosses, not any government people, not my mom, no one. I don’t know what the rules are, but I sure as shit haven’t followed them.”

How interesting. “Why have you kept it secret?” He knows about keeping secrets.

“Well, I guess possibly I worried that…no, I’ll tell you why. Because I want to be the one who gets to reveal it, to tell the whole story. To be, you know, ‘the discoverer.’ Like Columbus or Magellan or Galileo or Einstein. I’m sorry—do you know who they are?”

He smiles. “Yes.”

“Before the rest of the world finds out and rushes in and pushes me out of the way, I want to learn as much as I can. I want to be the expert.”

He likes this girl. He will give her the gift she wants.

“Oh, Jesus.” She reaches into a bag, searching for her two tape recorders. “May I record our conversation?”

“Of course.” He spots something in the bag. “You found the gold? At the station?”

She blushes, and pulls out a half-pound golden cylinder the size of a lipstick. “You can have it back. I took one, as a research sample.”

He strokes the ingot with one finger. “And you said you saw images at the station?”

“Projected on those big spherical monitors in the, like, office.”

“To the left and straight back as you entered?”

“Hundreds of pictures on those monitors, 3-D photographs, in color, of huts and houses and towns and farm animals and pots and carts and soldiers and children and temples, it looked like from all over the world, Europe, Asia, Africa—”

He hates to seem smug, which he’s afraid is about to become his default affect, but he can’t suppress a knowing smile, and interrupts her. “I know. I took them.”

“Shot from overhead, mostly, I guess with a very long lens?”

“Intelligence gathering is supposed to be clandestine. And I tried to minimize the Hawthorne elect—people behaving differently when they know they’re being watched.”

“A lot of the images look extremely old. Unbelievably old. Not the pictures, I mean, but the people and buildings and so on.”

“They are.”

She hesitates before asking the next question. “So, you were taking photographs all over the world before…before photography was invented?” This is precisely what she’d hypothesized, that he must be at least two hundred years old. Incredible.

“And moving pictures as well—videos, more or less. From when I arrived until the day the camera was destroyed. By the time the technology existed…indigenously, it seemed pointless for me to start up again.”

“May I ask your age?”

This time it’s he who pauses, anticipating her reaction. “The station was established in 429, CE.”

She stares, saying nothing. Her skepticism races to catch up with her astonishment.

He restates his answer, trying to help her register the fact. “I arrived fifteen hundred and eighty-one years ago.”

“You’re sixteen hundred years old?”

“Eighteen hundred and seven. Which is fairly ancient even on my planet.”

Finally, she thinks, yes: “on my planet.” It had seemed impossible, but it also seemed like the only plausible explanation. She tries not to hyperventilate. “Where—what planet are you from?”