The Starry Rift Part 6

"Calm down," Naomi said. "They're fruit bats. Or something."

I don't know how many bats there were. It's hard to count bats when they're agitated. At least two hundred, probably a lot more than that. But as the people in the hangar got more and more upset, the bats seemed to get calmer. They really weren't that interested in us. One or two still went scissoring through the air every now and then, but the others were somewhere up in the roof now, hanging down above us, glaring down at us with their malevolent, fiery little eyes. I imagined them licking their pointy little fangs. The man with the music turned it off. No more sad love songs. No more dancing. The card parties and conversations broke up.

My father and Zuleta-Arango walked up and down the makes.h.i.+ft aisles of the hangar, talking to the other pa.s.sengers. Probably explaining about bats. People turned off the worklights, lay down on their cots, pulling silver foil emergency blankets and makes.h.i.+ft covers over themselves: jackets, dresses, beach towels. Some began to make up beds under the cots, where they would be safe from bats if not the spiders, lizards, and c.o.c.kroaches that were, of course, also sharing our temporary quarters.

Half a soccer field away, Lara sat on a cot leaning back against her mother as her mother brushed her hair. She'd taken off her mask. She was even better looking than I'd thought she'd be. Possibly even out of my league.

Naomi was looking, too. She said, "Your parents are divorced, right? That's why your father kidnapped you? Have you called your mom? Does she know where you are now?"

"She's dead," I said. "She and my brother lived out on a dude ranch in Colorado. They caught that flu three years ago when it jumped from horses."

"Oh," Naomi said. "Sorry."

"Why be sorry? You didn't know," I said. "I'm fine now." My father was headed our way. I took off my mask and lay down on my cot and pulled the foil blanket over my head. I didn't take off my clothes, not even my shoes. Just in case the bats turned out not to be fruit bats.

All night long, people talked, listened to newsfeeds, got up to go to the bathroom, dreamed the kind of dreams that woke them up and other people, too. Children woke up crying. Naomi snored. I don't think that my father ever went to sleep at all. Whenever I looked over, he was lying on his cot, thumbing through a paperback. An Alfred Bester collection, I think.

We settled into certain routines quickly. Zuleta-Arango's committee set up a schedule for recharging googlies and palmtops and cell phones from the limited number of outlets in the hangar. After some discussion, the Hans Bliss people rigged up a kind of symbolic wall out of foil blankets and extra cot frames. That was the area where you went if you wanted to hang out in the nude and talk about aliens. Of course you could just wander by and get an eyeful and an earful, but after a while nude people just don't seem that interesting. Really.

My dad spent some of the day in the clinic and some of his time with Zuleta-Arango. He hung out with the Hans Bliss people, and he and Naomi sat around and argued about Hans Bliss and aliens. Somebody started an English/Spanish-language discussion group, and he got involved in that. He set up a lending library, pa.s.sing out his sci-fi books, taking down the names of people who'd borrowed them. There were plenty of movies and digests that people were swapping around on their googlies, but the paperbacks had novelty appeal. Science fiction is always good for taking your mind off how bad things are.

I still wasn't speaking to my father, of course, unless it was absolutely necessary. He didn't really notice. He was too excited about having made it this far, impatient to get on with the next stage of his journey. He was afraid that while we were quarantined, the thing he'd been waiting for would arrive, and he'd be stuck in a hangar less than a hundred miles away. So close, and yet he couldn't get any closer until the quarantine period was over.

I figured it served him right.

Most of the pa.s.sengers in quarantine were returning to Costa Rica. The foreign pa.s.sengers were almost all in Costa Rica because of tech industry stuff or the aliens. Mostly aliens. Because of Hans Bliss. Some of them had waited years to get a visa. There were close to a thousand Star Friends in Costa Rica, citizens of almost every nation, true believers, currently living down along the Pacific coastline, right next to Manuel Antonio National Park; Lara had been to Manuel Antonio a few times on camping trips with friends. She said it was a lot nicer than camping in a hangar.

The first day, the Star Friends quarantined in the hangar got through, on their cell phones and on e-mail, to friends already out with Hans Bliss. My father even managed to speak to Hans Bliss himself for a few minutes, to explain that he had made it as far as San Jose. The Star Friends community was under quarantine as well, of course, and Hans Bliss was somewhat put out that his doctor was stuck at the airport. Preparations for the imminent return of the aliens were being hampered by the quarantine.

Like I said, I saw Hans Bliss speak in Philadelphia once. He was this tall, good-looking blond guy with a German accent. He was painfully sincere. So sincere he hardly ever blinked, which was kind of hypnotic. When he stood on the stage and described the feeling of understanding and joy and compa.s.sion that had descended upon him and lifted him up as he stood out on that beach, in the middle of that ferocious storm, I sat there gripping the sides of my chair, because I was afraid that otherwise I might get up and run toward the stage, toward the thing that he was promising. Other people in the audience did exactly that. When he talked about finding himself back on that beach again, abandoned and forsaken and confused and utterly alone, the man sitting next to me started to cry. Everyone was crying. I couldn't stand it. I looked up at my father and he was looking down at me, like what I thought mattered to him.

"What are we doing here?" I whispered. "Why are we here?"

He said, "I don't like this any better than you do, Dorn. But I have to believe. I have to believe at least some of what he's saying. I have to believe that they'll come back."

Then he stood up and asked the crying man to excuse us. "What were they like?" someone yelled at Bliss. "What did the aliens look like?"

Everybody knew what the aliens looked like. We'd all seen the footage hundreds of times. We'd heard Bliss describe the aliens on news shows and in doc.u.mentaries and on online interviews and casts. But my father stopped in the aisle and turned back to the stage and so did I. You would have, too.

Hans Bliss held out his arms as if he was going to embrace the audience, all of us, all at once. As if he was going to heal us of a sickness we didn't even know that we had, as if rays of energy and light and power and love were suddenly going to shoot out of his chest. The usual agents and government types and media who followed Hans Bliss everywhere he went looked bored. They'd seen this show a hundred times before. "They were beautiful," Hans Bliss said. People said it along with him. It was the punch line to one of the most famous stories ever. There had even been a movie in which Hans Bliss played himself.

Beautiful.

My father started up the aisle again. We walked out and I thought that was that. He never said anything else about Hans Bliss or Costa Rica or the aliens until he picked me up at soccer practice.

I put on my running shoes. I stretched out on the concrete floor and ran laps around and around the hangar. There were other people doing the same thing. After breakfast, I went over to an area where no one had set up a bed and started messing around, kicking the ball and catching it on the rebound. Nice and high. Some people came over and we played keep-away. When there were enough players, we took two cots and made them goals. We picked teams. Little kids came and sat and watched and chased down the ball when it went out-of-bounds. Even Naomi came to watch. When I asked her if she was going to play, she just looked at me like I was an idiot. "I'm not into being athletic," she said. "I'm too compet.i.tive. The last time I played organized sports, I broke someone's nose. It was only kind of an accident."

Lara came up behind me and tapped me on the back of the head.

"Como esta ci arroz? What's up?"

"You ever play soccer?" I said.

She ended up on my team. I was pretty excited about that, even before I saw her play. She was super fast. She put up her hair in a ponytail, took off her mask, and zipped up and down the floor. Our team won the first match, 3-0. We swapped some players around, and my team won again, 7-0, this time.

At lunch, people came by the table where I was sitting and nodded to me. They said things in Spanish, gave me the thumbs-up. Lara translated. Apparently they could tell how good I was, even though I was being careful on the concrete. I didn't want to strain or smash anything. This was just for fun.

After dinner there was some excitement when the bats woke up. Apparently n.o.body had really been paying attention that first night, but this time we saw them go. They bled out into the twilight in a thin, black slick, off to do bat things. Eat bugs. Sharpen their fangs. n.o.body was happy to see them come back, either, except some of the little kids, and Naomi, of course. This whole one corner of the hangar floor was totally covered in bat guano. My dad said it wasn't a health risk, but as a matter of fact, one of the joggers slipped on it the next day and sprained an ankle.

The next day: more of the same. Wake up, run, play soccer. Listen to Naomi rant about stuff. Listen to people talk about the flu. Flirt with Lara. Ignore my father. I still wasn't ready to check in with Sorken, or to check e-mail. I didn't want to know.

That afternoon we had our second invasion. Land crabs, this time, the size of silver-dollar pancakes, the color of old scabs, and they smelled like rotting garbage. There were hundreds of them, thousands of hairy, armored legs, all dragging and scratching and clicking. They went sideways, their pincers held up and forward. Everybody stood on their cots or tires and took pictures. When the crabs got to the far wall, they spread out until they found the little cracks and gaps where they could squeeze through. A boy used his s.h.i.+rt to catch three or four crabs; some of the kids had started a petting zoo.

"What was that about?" I said to Naomi.

"Land migration," she said. "They do that when they're mating. Or is it molting? That's why they're so stinky right now."

"How do you know so much about all this?" I said. "Bats and crabs and stuff?"

"I don't date much," she said. "I stay home and watch the nature feeds online."

By lunch that second day we knew about outbreaks of flu in New New York, Copenhagen, Houston, Berlin, plenty of other places. The World Health Organization had issued the report my father had been predicting, saying that this was a full-on pandemic, killing the young and the healthy, not just the very young and the very elderly. We knew there were hopeful indications in India and in Taiwan with a couple of modified vaccines. The mood in the hangar was pretty unhappy. People were getting calls and e-mails about family members or friends back in the States. Not good news. On the other hand, we appeared to be in good shape here. My father said that in another two or three days, Costa Rican health officials would probably send a doctor out to sign off that we were officially flu-free. The two children with the dry coughs turned out just to have allergies. Besides that, the most pressing health issues in the hangar were some cases of cabin fever, diarrhea, and the fact that we were going through our supply of toilet paper too fast.

On the third day in the hangar we built better goals. Not quite regulation, but you'd be surprised what you can do with some expensive fis.h.i.+ng gear and the frames from a couple of cots. Then practice drills. I sat out the first quarter of the first game, and a Tico with muscle-y legs took the goal. We still won.

The hangar guards changed over every twelve hours or so. After a while they were kind of like the bats. You didn't even notice them most of the time. But I liked watching them watch us when we played soccer. They were into soccer. They took turns coming over to watch, and whistled through their teeth whenever I blocked a goal. They placed bets. On the third day a guard came over to me during a time-out, and pushed up his N95 mask. "jQue cache!" He made enthusiastic hand gestures. "jPura vida!" I understood that. He was a young guy, athletic. He was talking fast, and Naomi and Lara weren't around to translate, but I thought I had a pretty good idea what he was saying. He was trying to give me some advice about keeping goal. I just nodded, like I understood what he was saying and appreciated it. Finally he clapped me on the shoulders and went back over to his wall like he'd finally remembered that he was a guard.

Naomi was working her way through Roger Zelazny and Kage Baker. She was a pretty fast reader. First a Baker novel, then Zelazny. Then Baker again. I kept catching her reading the endings first. "What's the point of doing that?" I said. "If you cheat and read the end of the book first, why even bother reading the rest?"

"I'm antsy," she said. "I need to know how certain things turn out." She turned over so she was facing the wall, and said something else in Spanish.

"Fine," I said. I wasn't really all that invested. I was rereading some Fritz Leiber.

About fifteen minutes later, Lara came over and sat down on the cot next to Naomi. She picked up the stack of books that Naomi had already read, commenting in Spanish on the covers. Naomi laughed every time she said something. It was annoying, but I smiled like I understood. Finally Lara said, in English, "All of these girls have the large b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I did not know science fiction was about the b.r.e.a.s.t.s. I like the real stories. Stories about real astronauts, or scientific books."

"My father doesn't really go in for nonfiction," I said. I didn't see what was so bad about b.r.e.a.s.t.s, really.

"It makes for depressing reading," Naomi said. "Look at the s.p.a.ce program in the old disunited States. Millionaires signing up for outer s.p.a.ce field trips. The occasional unmanned flight that conks out somewhere just past Venus. SETI enthusiasts running a.n.a.lysis programs on their personal computers, because some guys blew up the Very Large Array, and guess what, when the real aliens show up, some guy named Hans Bliss says something and they go away again. Poof."

"Our s.p.a.ce program is state of the art," Lara said. "Not to brag, like Dorn is always saying. But we will be sending a manned flight to Mars in the next five years. Ten years tops. If I keep my grades up and if I am chosen, I will be on that flight. That is my personal goal. My dream."

"You want to go to Mars?" I said. I'm sure I looked surprised.

"Mars, to begin with," Lara said. "Then who knows? I'm in an accelerated science and physical education course at my school. Many of the graduates go into the program for astronauts."

"There are advanced cla.s.ses at UCR doing some work with your s.p.a.ce program," Naomi said. "I don't know much about it, except that it all sounds pretty cool."

"We sent a manned flight to the moon last year," Lara said. "I met one of the astronauts. She came and spoke at my school."

"Yeah, I remember that flight," I said. "We did that, like, last century." I was just joking, but Lara didn't get that.

"And what have you done since?" she asked me.

I shrugged. It wasn't really anything I was interested in. "What's the point?" I said. "I mean, the aliens showed up and then they left again. Not even Hans Bliss is saying that we ought to go around chasing after them. He says that they'll come back when the time is right. Costa Rica getting all involved in a s.p.a.ce program, is, I don't know, it's like my father deciding to leave everything behind, our whole life, just to come down here, even though Hans Bliss is just some surfer who started a cult. I don't see the point."

"The point is to go to s.p.a.ce," Lara said. She looked at Naomi, not at me, as if I were too stupid to understand. "To go to s.p.a.ce. It was a good thing when the aliens came to Costa Rica. They made us think about the universe, about what might be out there. Not everybody wants to sit on a beach and wait with your Hans Bliss to see if the aliens will come back."

"Okay," I said. "But not everybody gets a chance to go to Mars on a s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, either. Maybe not even you."

I was just being reasonable, but Lara didn't see it that way. She made this noise of exasperation, then said, emphatically, like she was making a point except that she was saying it in Spanish and really fast, so it didn't really tell me anything: "jTurista estupido! jUsted no es hermoso como usted piensa usted es!"

"Sorry?" I said.

But she just got up and left.

"What? What did she say?" I asked Naomi.

Naomi put down her paperback, The Doors of His Face, the Lamp of His Mouth. She said, "You can be kind of a jerk, Dorn. Some advice? Hazme caso-pay attention. I've seen you play soccer and you're pretty good. Maybe you'll get back to the States and get discovered and maybe one day you'll save some goal for some team and it will turn out to be the block that wins the World Cup. I'll go out to a bar and get drunk to celebrate when that happens. But my money's on Lara. I bet you anything Lara gets her chance and goes to Mars. I don't know if you've noticed, but when she isn't playing soccer or hanging out with us, she's studying for her cla.s.ses or talking with the pilots about what it's like to fly commercial jets. And she also knows how to get along with people, Dorn. Maybe you don't have to be a nice guy to do well in team sports, but does it hurt?"

"I am a nice guy," I said.

"Stupid me," Naomi said. "Here I was thinking that you were arrogant, and, um, stupid, and what was the other thing? Oh yeah, short." And then she picked up the Zelazny again and ignored me.

Lara didn't speak to me for the rest of the day. She didn't come back when we played soccer in the afternoon, and even though it was the Tucancillos' turn to do the dishes, she didn't turn up.

We still had plenty of surgical masks, but by the fourth day hardly anybody was wearing them. Just the sticklers and the guards in their N95s. I think everybody else was using the remaining supply for toilet paper. I wore one like a headband during soccer. I kind of needed a haircut. I couldn't do anything about that, but I did have a bath on the fourth night, after dinner, in one of the makes.h.i.+ft bathing stalls. Some of the people on the flight didn't have a lot of clothes in their suitcase, and so some borrowing had been going on, and there were clothes and various species of underwear draped over tires. I leaned against the outside wall of the hangar, away from the latrines, and admired the sunset for a bit. Not that I was a huge fan of sunsets, but the ones here were bigger, or something. And it smelled better out here. Not that you noticed how bad it smelled in the hangar most of the time, but once you came outside you realized you didn't want to go back in, not immediately, at least.

And the guards didn't seem to mind. There wasn't really anywhere for us to go. Just asphalt and runways. Still no planes coming in. n.o.body to watch the sunset with me, which was an odd thing to think, since I'm usually pretty comfortable being alone. Even out on the field, during the game, the goalie is alone more often than not. Lara wasn't talking to me. I wasn't talking to my dad. Naomi and I weren't talking to each other. The sun went down fast, regardless of how I felt about the whole thing, and yeah, I know that's a melodramatic way to think about a sunset, but so what? Universe 1, Dorn 0.

When I came back into the hangar, Lara was over in the petting zoo, just sitting there. A dog was curled up on her legs and she was thumping its belly, softly, like a drum.

The petting zoo was an ongoing project. There were the three smelly crabs and a skinny brownish snake in a plastic makeup case that the kids fed beetles to. Some girl had caught it when she went out to use the bathroom. There were lizards in recycled food containers and a smallish iguana one of the guards had donated. There were even two dogs who got spoiled rotten.

I wandered over, trying to come up with something interesting to say. "What's up?" was all I came up with.

She looked up at me, then down again. Petted the dog.

"Watching the iguana," she said.

"What's it doing?" I said.

"Not much."

I sat down next to her. We didn't say anything else for a while. Finally I said, "Naomi says I shouldn't be such a jerk. And also that I'm short."

"I like Naomi," Lara said. "She's pretty."

Really? I thought. (But I knew better than to say that out loud.) "What about me?"

Lara said, "I like watching you play soccer. It's like watching the soccer on television."

"Naomi's pretty brutal, but she's honest," I said. "I may never get tall enough to be a world-cla.s.s goalie."

"You'll be taller. Your father is tall. Sometimes I have a temper," she said. "I shouldn't have said what I said to you."

"What did you say exactly?" I asked.

"Learn Spanish," she said. "Then when I say the awful things to you, you'll understand." Then she said, "And I am going to go up one day."

"Up?" I said.

"To Mars."

She wasn't wearing her mask. She was smiling. I don't know if she was smiling at me or at the idea of Mars, but I didn't care all that much. Mars was far away. I was a lot closer.

My father was on his cell phone. "Yes," he said. "Okay. I'll talk to him." He hung up. He said, "Dorn, come sit down for a minute."

I didn't say anything to him. I just sat down on my cot.

I realized that I was looking around, as if something had happened. Naomi was over against the wall, talking to the HANS BLISS FOR WORLD PRESIDENT guy, the one with the big nose. He was a lot taller than Naomi. Did Naomi mind being short?

My father said, "Your coach. He wanted to talk to you."

"Sorken called?" I said. I felt kind of sick to my stomach already, even though I wasn't sure why. I should have listened to those messages.

"No," my father said. "I'm sorry, Dorn. It was Coach Turner. He was calling about Sorken."

And I understood the difference immediately. "Sorken's dead."

My father nodded.

"Is everybody else okay? On the team?"

"I really don't know," my father said. "Mr. Turner hasn't been able to reach everyone. A lot of people around Philadelphia came down with flu, just like everywhere else. If I'd had more time to plan, I don't think I would have booked that flight. You were right, you know. I got an e-mail from a colleague out in Potlatch who thought something was coming, and meanwhile I'd been in touch with Hans Bliss off and on, and the visas had just come, and it seemed like a minor risk, getting us onto the flight, getting us through the airport. I thought if we didn't leave right then, who knew when we'd get here?"

I didn't say anything. I was remembering how Sorken used to come down on me when I was being a showoff, or not paying enough attention to what was going on, on the field, during practice. Sorken wasn't like my dad. If you weren't paying attention to him or you were sulking, he'd throw a soccer ball at your head. Or one of his shoes. But I'd just left those messages from him on the phone. I didn't even know where my phone was right now.

I'd never really thought about Sorken getting the flu and dying, but it had always seemed like there was a good chance that my father would catch something. A lot of hospital workers died during the last pandemic.

My father said, "Dorn? Are you okay?"

I nodded.

"I'm sorry about Sorken," he said. "I never really sat down and talked to him."

"He didn't have much time for people who didn't play soccer," I said.

"It always looked like he was riding you pretty hard."