Other Aliens Read online

  When the Stranger at last came to the road he stopped, and the horses milled around nearby. Such roads could be found, from time to time, in the farther reaches of the Escapement, and who, if anyone, had built them, or for what purpose, the Stranger didn’t know. They led from nowhere to nowhere, seldom in a straight line but rather in a crazy curlicue of a twisting and looping arabesque, like inscribed and secret messages in the landscape. In the Thickening, that part of the Escapement that had been partly subdued, or perhaps suborned, by the relative thickness of human population, there were no ghost roads, and the settlers had constructed new railway lines. And yet even those would often find themselves subject to the external forces of vastation and revel, and often loop upon themselves or terminate abruptly in a place where no terminal was.

  The Stranger waited, his hands resting on the butts of his revolvers, and watched the road. The solitary wagon traversed it along its path, never straying, and as it came closer, the Stranger could see that it was a small, wooden wagon, once brightly painted, but the paint had faded and flaked, the wooden wheels creaked, and it was only when it pulled to a halt, at the sight of him, that he saw the legend along the side of the wagon, which read TINKERERS.

  Two small figures sat up front in the wagon driver’s seat. They were both bundled in rags, as though to defend themselves vigorously against a cold snap, which could, they seemed to silently suggest, strike at any moment. One was male and the other was female, though it was hard to tell them apart. They were both watching the Stranger and neither said anything, nor did they appear to hold weapons, and the Stranger did not draw his own guns.

  The male tinkerer at last pulled out a long-stemmed pipe and stuck the bit between his teeth. He next reached for a small cloth bag, from which he extracted tobacco, which he proceeded to stuff into the bowl. Having done that, he struck a match, and a fragrant, cherry-flavored smoke rose into the air and turned it blue.

  “How goes it, stranger?” he called. His voice was surprisingly youthful and high, and not unpleasant. “I am, uh, going to assume you are not a highwayman or a horse thief”—his tone suggested that he was far from convinced on that score, but for lack of a better choice, was willing to give the Stranger the benefit of the doubt—“and anyway, as you can see, we are but, uh, poor tinkerers, with nothing worth stealing.”

  He made a desultory gesture at their wagon.

  “I heard gunshot,” the Stranger said. “Some distance back.”

  “Nothing to do with, uh, us, I’m sure,” the tinkerer said.

  “I can’t think where else it could have come from.”

  The tinkerer shrugged. The woman beside him cupped her hands and whispered into his ear. He nodded. “Ah, yes,” he said. “We ran into some problems a while back. That’s right. A wild, uh, snake. My, uh, sister had to shoot the creature. A shame, really. We value all life.”

  The woman measured out a span with her hands.

  “A big one,” the tinkerer added, unnecessarily.

  “A snake.”

  “It is, uh, so.”

  “What happened to it?”

  The woman whispered again. The man said, “We left it behind. I was, uh, asleep at the time. I sleep heavily, you see.”

  It was none of the Stranger’s business, and he did not press the point.

  “Why do you travel on the road?” he asked instead, curiously. “Would it not be quicker to follow a straight route to your destination?”

  “Ah,” the tinkerer said. “You would, uh, think so, wouldn’t you. But the straight route is seldom the quickest, on the Escapement. The roads follow, uh, an internal logic, I think. Yes. And, also, there is an old saying, uh, it is the journey that matters, stranger, not the destination.”

  The Stranger nodded politely. The man puffed on his pipe. In the wagon behind them, something banged sharply, and for a moment the wagon rocked from side to side. The woman ducked under the canvas and disappeared, and the Stranger heard a sharp crack, followed by silence. The woman reemerged and took her seat. She smiled at the Stranger and her teeth were white and even.

  “Rats,” she said.

  “I’m, uh, Fledermaus,” the man said. “This is Titania.”

  “Howdy, stranger,” Titania said. “And which way are you traveling, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Kellysburg,” the Stranger said. “I have horses to sell.”

  “You won’t get much for them there,” she said.

  The Stranger shrugged. “I’ll take what I can.”

  “Won’t we all,” she said, and laughed, a surprisingly coarse sound. “As it happens, we’re on our way there ourselves. Not by choice, you understand, but it’s the nearest habitation for miles, and bad trade is better than none, in my opinion.”

  “You’re, uh, welcome to travel with us,” Fledermaus said. “The road doesn’t go to the town but it passes nearby, or, uh, more correctly, it fades as it nears the outpost. Or so it was the last time we traveled this way.”

  The Stranger considered the two of them. At last he nodded, and the woman, Titania, took the reins and cracked them, and the two piebald donkeys began to pull the wagon without complaining, slow and sedate, as though they had all the time in the world. Fledermaus continued to draw on his pipe, and Titania hummed the same few bars of some wordless tune the Stranger didn’t recognize. He spurred his own horse, walking alongside them, and the other horses followed behind—though he noticed they gave the wagon itself a wide berth, and walked some distance from it by the side of the road, on which they seemed reluctant to step at all.

  Overhead, the sky’s hues deepened by degree, from azure to ultramarine; as the sun traversed the sky, the travelers cast sfumato shadows projected beyond the road, which lengthened as they trailed their originators like furtive ghosts. The road itself changed with the light, growing in turns ivory and snow, ghost white and smoky, until the Stranger found it easier to not look directly at the road at all, but ahead.

  “You came from out west?” he said.

  “That we did,” Titania said.

  “I saw signs of a battle there, two days back, on the horizon.”

  “That is, uh, true,” Fledermaus said. “Yes. Yes. We think. We were still some distance away and when we saw the coming storm we sought shelter.”

  “We reached the place after the battle had moved on,” Titania said. “But we are not scavengers, stranger. We didn’t dally there.”

  “You found nothing of value?”

  He saw them exchange a glance, though what it meant, if anything, he didn’t know.

  “What is of value to some is of no value to, uh, others,” Fledermaus said.

  “We do not trade in substance or matériel.”

  The sun dipped low in the sky when they caught sight of a dwelling in the distance. As they came closer, they saw it was an abandoned church. The weathered stone was dirty with dust, and the broken windows gaped open like empty eye sockets. Over the steeple only there remained a stylized balloon icon painted a vivid red, and it caught the reflected light of the sun as though it were a miniature sun itself. The travelers, by unspoken consent, halted there, near the old church.

  “A strange place for a mission,” the Stranger said.

  The others did not reply. The woman, Titania, disappeared again under the canvas, and could be heard moving around inside the wagon. The man, Fledermaus, climbed down from the bench and stretched, though it was hard to make him out under his layers of clothing. He looked like a short, fat mushroom.

  “It will do, stranger,” he said. “It will do.”

  That night, the travelers built a small fire and sat beside it. The horses grazed in a patch of grass nearby. Earlier, Titania had disappeared into the Escapement, and when she returned there was a bloodied hare held in her hands. The Stranger had heard no gunshots. The woman skinned the creature and her brother set a pot to boil over the fire, the two of them working in wordless unison. From within the wagon they fetched two shriveled onions and several
lumpy potatoes, dirt encrusted and hard. They added the vegetables to the pot and Titania flavored the soup with salt and dried herbs, the nature of which the Stranger didn’t know. The smell of the soup as it cooked made the Stranger’s stomach grumble. It had been weeks since he’d had a hot meal. Fledermaus relit his pipe and sat there content, puffing out clouds of smoke that more often than not resembled ghostly balloon animals. His sister sat warming her hands by the fire, and she hummed the same few bars of that song the Stranger didn’t know. Her mostly tuneless humming had a soporific effect on him, so that he found his thoughts kept wandering, trailing off, and returning, and every now and then he’d startle himself awake, and stare around him as though he were seeing the place and his companions for the first time.

  No sound came from within the wagon now. If there were indeed rats there, or something else entire, they were silent now, but the horses still did not approach the wagon or come close to it. The swishing of their tails merged with the crackling of the wood in the fire and with the whisper of the soup in the pot and with Titania’s humming. The smell of the cooking meat overwhelmed the Stranger’s senses.

  “It is kind of you,” he said, “to share your food.”

  “You look like you could use it,” Fledermaus said, and chortled. “If you don’t, uh, mind me saying so, there’s less meat on your bones than even on that, uh, hare in the pot.”

  “You’re very resourceful, to have found and trapped such an animal,” the Stranger said to Titania. She continued humming, staring into the fire.

  “We make do,” Fledermaus said. “When we must.”

  They ate out of wooden bowls, the meat tender and the potatoes soft and full of flavor. The liquid was subtly spiced, and it filled the Stranger’s body with warmth. When they had finished eating, the brother and sister both lapsed into silence, staring at the flickering flames. The Stranger found that his own limbs felt loose and heavy, and that a certain light-headedness threatened to overpower him. He excused himself, and rose with some effort from the warmth of the fire.

  Standing, he found it hard to balance. All felt peaceful and serene, and in the night sky the constellations shone brightly, moving and changing with a slow majesty. The Stranger felt dwarfed by the stars, which crowded the vast blackness from horizon to distant horizon, and so he sought refuge at last inside the old church.

  It was warm and dry there. The air hung undisturbed. Deflated whoopee cushions sat forlorn on the empty pews. The Stranger walked down the aisle. Under the open windows, shards of multicolored glass collected on the floor. The Stranger halted at the altar. It had sustained some damage in earlier time, the wood chipped and bent and the stylized balloon icon violently broken. He walked round the dais and discovered there, hidden in the chancel, a window of stained glass that somehow had remained unbroken, perhaps, he saw, because it didn’t look out over anything. The Stranger swayed gently on his feet as he studied the artwork, muted now as no light coursed through it. It was boarded up on the other side, and though the glass was dark the colors had remained vibrant.

  The picture portrayed the Harlequin, a creature perhaps male, perhaps female, with a sensuous, almost cruel mouth. It wore a checkered costume made of triangular patches of varying colors, and on its head it wore a three-pointed hat. In its hand it held a bright-red balloon.

  The Stranger studied the painting, and the creature bound within the bits of colored glass, or perhaps defined by them, seemed to him to sway and move, as though capering or dancing. The world around him grew fuzzy, then opaque. There was a saccharine taste in his mouth, and he realized what it must have been: the tinkerers had flavored the soup with substance. The Stranger swallowed but his lips and tongue were dry. He touched the glass, from which the harlequin had disappeared, and wiped it, and it was like wiping fog off a glass. Beyond, he now saw, was the other world. It was like looking through a clear glass window onto a hospital parking lot, where a man was standing staring into the night, and the lights of passing cars illuminated his face.

  He looked like he’d been crying.

  The Stranger violently wiped the glass, and the image, mercifully, faded. He breathed deep and filled his lungs with air and staggered out of the silent church and into the night, where the constellations continued to chase each other across the sky in a sort of fluid dance. The Stranger saw that the fire had burned down to embers, and they glowed faintly in the night. The two tinkerers were ensconced on the ground, covered in their multiple garments. He could not even make out their faces.

  Something moved inside the wagon.

  The Stranger froze. The sound came again, as though something heavy moved inside and hit the floor. It made metal pots and pans clang within. The two tinkerers hadn’t moved from their place by the fire. The Stranger drew his revolver. He edged toward the rear of the wagon.

  The broken moon hung in the sky. Under its light the Stranger’s shadow lengthened like a blade. The shadow looked furtive there, stealing to the encroaching shadow of the wagon. The Stranger hesitated, his finger on the trigger of his gun. The heavy thump from inside the wagon came again, and the wagon rattled on its wheels. Something fell off the wall and hit the floor with a bang. The Stranger reached for the thick cloth curtain that blocked the inside of the wagon. He parted the curtain and stared inside.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  The curtain snapped shut. The woman, Titania, stood in the moonlight, a nasty little sawed-off shotgun in her hands. She was without her heavy coverings, in nothing much more than a slip, and in the moonlight he saw that she was both younger and older than he thought, for she had a young woman’s body but an old woman’s hands. Her voice, however, and the simple fact of her finger on the trigger of the sawed-off, said she meant business.

  “I heard noise,” the Stranger said.

  “So? And you can put your gun back in the holster. Slowly.”

  The Stranger did as he was told.

  “You put substance in the soup,” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “It flavors the meat. What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing,” the Stranger said. “This isn’t my business.”

  “You’re damn right it’s not.” She gestured with the sawed-off. The Stranger took a step back from the wagon, and another, and his shadow hastened to match his steps.

  He looked at Titania. Her own shadow billowed behind her, a huge undulating mass that swallowed starlight in its wake. The Stranger took another step back and his own shadow hid behind him.

  “There was no offense meant,” he said.

  “Good.”

  Abruptly, she released her hold on the sawed-off, and with that she was gone. The Stranger took another breath and emptied his lungs slowly. When he returned to the fire he saw that both of the tinkerers were fast asleep, entwined in each other’s arms under their heavy coverings. He lay down himself, on his back, and stared at the distant stars. For a moment, as the curtain had twitched in his hand, he got a long, good glimpse into the glum interior of the wagon. He saw the hanging iron pots and pans, old and bent and blackened by countless fires. He saw the bags of nails, the hammered horseshoes, the beaten copper bowls, the kettles and coal irons, the heaps of badges and buckles, and the spurs with their rowels and chap guards.

  It was, then, just as described, a tinkerer’s traveling emporium, cramped and dark, smelling of rust and the road, filled with the debris of everyday life and its mundane demands. Nothing more, nothing out of the ordinary.

  On the floor, in the center of all that cramped space, a vast object lay partially covered in dirty blankets. From time to time it struggled feebly against the bonds that held it down, and its black and gold head would hit the floor with a powerful thump that shook the ironmongery all about it. It had two glass eyes and a mouth with many jagged teeth. It was about the size of a tuna. Its scales, even in that quick half glimpse of the Stranger’s, with the cloth flap only momentarily raised, and but little light coming in, nevertheless shone
a bright gold, and its intricate mechanism rattled and whirred as it flopped there on the floor. Behind the glass eyes, a look almost human had stared out at the Stranger in supplication. On the fish’s forehead, above the eyes, there was a nasty-looking dent, perhaps from a recent gunshot.

  No more sound came now from the wagon. The giant piece of matériel that he had witnessed moved no further within. The Stranger lay on his back and his limbs grew heavy. The embers whispered with dying fire. The stars streaked across the sky, forming sentences in a language he wanted to but couldn’t read. He felt himself dropping into sleep.

  The two impish figures that stood in the moonlight had shed their protective clothes, and in the broken light the Stranger saw them for what they really were, thin and delicate and with wide, clown-like mouths, mischievous eyes, and near-translucent skin under which their skeletons appeared as though composed of fragile fish bones. In the moonlight too, the old abandoned church and the road both seemed to glow a bright ivory white, while the wagon seemed bigger and near palatial.

  The Escapement spread outward from them in all directions, and the sky seemed never to end over the lit landscape. The road snaked in loops and curves across the land, and far in the distance, the Stranger felt more than saw, the movement of ghostly yet durable troops, marching. The male who had called himself Fledermaus stood there watching the Stranger with the curve of a smile, and his shadow, like his sister’s, grew behind him, immense and cephalopodan. It was as though the shadows were the real bodies, and the tiny human figures were merely the mouthpieces for the darkness beyond.

  In her hand, Titania held a small, dandelion-like flower. She blew on it gently and the tiny florets, startled by her breath, detached from their anchorage and took flight, one by one, until they dispersed to all corners and Titania remained holding only the bald stem of the flower.