The fourth man stays and questions me: what did the alien say, what did I say. I tell him, but then he starts asking the exact same questions all over again, like he didn’t believe me the first time, and that gets me mad. Also he has this snotty voice, and I see how his eyebrows move when I slip once and say, “He don’t.” I might not know what John’s muscles mean but I sure as hell can read those eyebrows. So I get miffed and pretty soon he leaves and the door bangs behind him.
I finish the catsup and mustard bottles and Kathy finishes the coffee machine. The radio in the ceiling plays something instrumental, no words, real sad. Kathy and me start to wash down the booths with disinfectant, and because we’re doing the same work together and nobody comes in, I finally say to her, “It’s funny.”
She says, “What’s funny?”
“Charlie called that guy ‘him’ right off. ‘I don’t got to serve him,’ he said. And I thought of him as ‘it’ at first, leastways until I had a name to use. But Charlie’s the one who threw him out.”
Kathy swipes at the back of her booth. “And Charlie’s right. That thing scared me half to death, coming in here like that. And where there’s food being served, too.” She snorts and sprays on more disinfectant.
Well, she’s a flake. Always has been.
“The National Enquirer,” Kathy goes on, “told how they have all this firepower up in the big ship that hasn’t landed yet. My husband says they could blow us all to smithereens, they’re so powerful. I don’t know why they even came here. We don’t want them. I don’t even know why they came, all that way.”
“They want to make a difference,” I say, but Kathy barrels on ahead, not listening.
“The Pentagon will hold them off, it doesn’t matter how much firepower they got up there or how much they insist on seeing about our defenses, the Pentagon won’t let them get any toeholds on Earth. That’s what my husband says. Blue bastards.”
I say, “Will you please shut up?”
She gives me a dirty look and flounces off. I don’t care. None of it is anything to me. Only, standing there with the disinfectant in my hand, looking at the dark windows and listening to the music wordless and slow on the radio, I remember that touch on my arm. And I think, they didn’t come here with any firepower to blow us all to smithereens. I just don’t believe it. So why did they come? Why come all that way from another star to walk into Charlie’s diner and order a green salad with no dressing from an ordinary Earth person?
Charlie comes out with his keys to unlock the cash register and go over the tapes. I remember the old couple who stiffed me and I curse to myself. Only pie and coffee, but it still comes off my salary. The radio starts playing something else, not the sad song, but nothing snappy neither. It’s a love song, about some guy giving and giving and getting treated like dirt. I don’t like it much.
“Charlie,” I say, “what did those government men say to you?”
He looks up from his tapes and scowls. “What do you care?”
“I just want to know.”
“And maybe I don’t want you to know,” he says, and smiles nasty-like. Me asking has put him in a better mood, the creep. All of a sudden I remember what his wife said when she got the stitches: “The only way to get something from Charlie is to let him smack me around a little, and then ask him when I’m down. He’ll give me anything when I’m down. He gives me shit if he thinks I’m on top.”
I think again about the blue guy. John.
I do the rest of the clean-up without saying anything. Charlie swears at the night’s take—I know from my tips that it’s not much. Kathy teases her hair in front of the mirror behind doughnuts and pies, and I put down the breakfast menus. But all the time I’m thinking, and I don’t much like my thoughts.
Charlie locks up and we all leave. Outside it’s stopped raining but it’s still misty and soft, real pretty but too cold. I pull my sweater around myself and in the parking lot, after Kathy’s gone, I say, “Charlie.”
He stops walking toward his truck. “Yeah?”
I lick my lips. They’re all of a sudden dry. It’s an experiment, like, what I’m going to say. It’s an experiment.
“Charlie. What if those government men hadn’t come just then and the…the blue guy hadn’t been willing to leave? What would you have done?”
“What do you care?”
I shrug. “I don’t. Just curious. It’s your place.”
“Damn straight it’s my place!” Through the mist I can see him scowl. “I’d of squashed him flat!”
“And then what? After you squashed him flat, what if the men came then and made a stink?”
“Too bad. It’d be too late by then, huh?” He laughs and I can see how he’s seeing it: the blue guy bleeding on the linoleum and Charlie standing over him, dusting his hands together.
Charlie laughs again and goes off to his truck, whistling. He has a little bounce in his step. He’s still seeing it, almost like it really had happened. Over his shoulder he calls to me, “They’re built like wimps. Or girls. All bone, no muscle. Even you must of seen that,” and his voice is cheerful. It doesn’t have any more anger in it, or hatred, or anything but a kind of friendliness. I hear him whistle some more, until the truck engine starts up and he peels out of the parking lot, laying rubber like a kid.
I unlock my Chevy. But before I get in, I look up at the sky. Which is really stupid because of course I can’t see anything, with all the mist and clouds. No stars.
Maybe Kathy’s husband is right. Maybe they do want to blow us all to smithereens. I don’t think so, but what the hell difference does it ever make what I think? And all at once I’m furious at John, furious mad, as mad as I’ve ever been in my life.
Why does he have to come here, with his bird calls and his politeness? Why can’t they all go someplace else besides here? There must be lots of other places they can go, out of all them bright stars up there behind the clouds. They don’t need to come here, here where I need this job and so that means I need Charlie. He’s a bully, but I want to look at him and see nothing else but a bully. Nothing else but that. That’s all I want to see in Charlie, in the government men—just small-time bullies, nothing special, not a mirror of anything, not a future of anything. Just Charlie. That’s all. I won’t see nothing else.
I won’t.
“I make so little difference,” he says.
Yeah. Sure.
Afterword to “Out of All Them Bright Stars”
This was a “gift story,” one of those rare occasions where the whole story occurs to me at once, I wrote it in one sitting, and little editing was required. In another sense, however, a lifetime had prepared me to write it: I had been a waitress in a diner, and since childhood I had hoped to meet an alien. So far this has not happened (although I do know some pretty strange people).
“Out of All Them Bright Stars” won the 1986 Nebula. I had not expected to win; the buzz (such as it was in those pre-Internet days) favored someone else. But I went to San Francisco for the award ceremony, and at lunch that day at Maxwell Plum’s, Connie Willis was appalled that I had not written any sort of acceptance speech. She pushed a napkin toward me, produced a pen, and said, “You write something right now, just in case!” So I did. It does not do to argue with Connie.
PATHWAYS
The Chinese clinic warn’t like I expected. It warn’t even Chinese.
I got there afore it opened. I was hoping to get inside afore anybody else came, any neighbors who knew us or busybodies from Blaine. But Carrie Campbell was already parked in her truck, the baby on her lap. We nodded to each other but didn’t speak. The Campbells are better off than us—Dave works in the mine up to Allington—but old Gacy Campbell been feuding with Dr. Harman for decades and Carrie was probably glad to have someplace else to take the baby. He didn’t look good, snuffling and whimpering.
When the doors opened, I went in first, afore Carrie was even out of the truck. It was going to take her a while. She was pregnant again.
“Yes?” said the woman behind the desk. Just a cheap metal desk, which steadied me some. The room was nothing special, just a few chairs, some pictures on the wall, a clothes basket of toys in the corner. What really surprised me was that the woman warn’t Chinese. Blue eyes, brown hair, middle-aged. She looked a bit like Granmama, but she had all her teeth. “Can I help you?”
“I want to see a doctor.”
“Certainly.” She smiled. Yeah, all her teeth. “What seems to be the problem, miss?”
“No problem.” From someplace in the back another woman came out, this one dressed like a nurse. She warn’t Chinese either.
“I don’t understand,” the woman behind the desk said. From her accent she warn’t from around here—like I didn’t already know that. “Are you sick?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then how can I—”
Carrie waddled into the door, the baby balanced on her belly. Now my visit would be table-talk everywhere. All at once I just wanted to get it over with.
“I’m not sick,” I said, too loud. “I just want to see a doctor.” I took a deep breath. “My name is Ludmilla Connors.”
The nurse stopped walking toward Carrie. The woman behind the counter half stood up, then sat down again. She tried to pretend like she hadn’t done it, like she warn’t pleased. If Bobby were that bad a liar, he’d a been in jail even more than he was.
“Certainly,” the woman said. I didn’t see her do nothing, but a man came out from the back, and he was Chinese. So was the woman who followed him.
“I’m Ludmilla Connors,” I told him, and I clenched my ass together real hard to keep my legs steady. “And I want to volunteer for the experiment. But only if it pays what I heard. Only if.”
The woman behind the desk took me back to a room with a table and some chairs and a whole lot of filing cabinets, and she left me there with the Chinese people. I looked at their smooth faces with those slanted, mostly closed eyes, and I wished I hadn’t come. I guess these two were the reason everybody hereabouts called it the “Chinese clinic,” even if everybody else there looked like regular Americans.
“Hello, Ms. Connors,” the man said and he spoke English real good, even if it was hard to understand some words. “We are glad you are here. I am Dr. Dan Chung and this is my chief technician Jenny.”
“Uh huh.” He didn’t look like no “Dan,” and if she was “Jenny,” I was a fish.
“Your mother is Courtney Connors and your father was Robert Connors?”
“How’d you know that?”
“We have family trees for everyone on the mountain. It’s part of our work, you know. You said you want to aid us in this research?”
“I said I want to get paid.”
“Of course. You will be. You are nineteen.”
“Yeah.” It warn’t a question, and I didn’t like that they knew so much about me. “How much money?”
He told me. It warn’t as much as the rumors said, but it was enough. Unless they actually killed me, it was enough. And I didn’t think they’d do that. The government wouldn’t let them do that—not even this stinking government.
“Okay,” I said. “Start the experiment.”
Jenny smiled. I knew that kind of smile, like she was so much better than me. My fists clenched. Dr. Chung said, “Jenny, you may leave. Send in Mrs. Cully, please.”
I liked the surprised look on Jenny’s face, and then the angry look she tried to hide. Bitch.
Mrs. Cully didn’t act like Jenny. She brought in a tray with coffee and cookies: just regular store-bought Pepperidge Farm, not Chinese. Under the tray was a bunch of papers. Mrs. Cully sat down at the table with us.
“These are legal papers, Ms. Connors,” Dr. Chung said. “Before we begin, you must sign them. If you wish, you can take them home to read, or to a lawyer. Or you can sign them here, now. They give us permission to conduct the research, including the surgery. They say that you understand this procedure is experimental. They give the university, myself, and Dr. Liu all rights to information gained from your participation. They say that we do not guarantee any cure, or even any alleviation, of any medical disorder you may have. Do you want to ask questions?”
I did, but not just yet. Half of me was grateful that he didn’t ask if I can read, the way tourists and social workers sometimes do. I can, but I didn’t understand all the words on this page: indemnify, liability, patent rights. The other half of me resented that he was rushing me so.
I said something I warn’t intending: “If Ratface Rollins warn’t president, this clinic wouldn’t be here at all!”
“I agree,” Dr. Chung said. “But you Americans elected a Libertarian.”
“Us Americans? Aren’t you one?”
“No. I am a Chinese national, working in the United States on a visa arranged by my university.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I grabbed the pen and signed everything. “Let’s get it over with, then.”
Both Dr. Chung and Mrs. Cully looked startled. She said, “But….Ludmilla, didn’t you understand that this will take several visits, spread out over months?”
“Yeah, I know. And that you’re going to pay me over several months, too, but the first bit today.”
“Yes. After your interview.”
She had one of those little recording cubes that I only seen on TV. They can play back an interview like a movie, or they can send the words to a computer to get put on screen. Maybe today would be just talking. That would be fine with me. I took a cookie.
“Initial interview with experimental subject Ludmilla Connors,” Dr. Chung said, and gave the date and time. “Ms. Connors, you are here of your own free will?”
“Yeah.”
“And you are a member of the Connors family, daughter of Courtney Ames Connors and the late Robert Connors?”
“Did you know my dad at the hospital? Were you one of his doctors?”
“No. But I am familiar with his symptoms and his early death. I am sorry.”
I warn’t sorry. Dad was a son-of-a-bitch even afore he got sick. Maybe knowing it was coming, that it was in his genes, made him that way, but a little girl don’t care about that. I only cared that he hit me and screamed at me—hit and screamed at everybody until the night he took after Dinah so bad that Bobby shot him. Now Bobby, just four months from finishing doing his time at Luther Luckett, was getting sick, too. I knew I had to tell this foreigner all that, but it was hard. My family don’t ask for help. “We don’t got much,” Granmama always said, “but we got our pride.”
That, and the Connors curse. Fatal Familial Insomnia.
It turned out that Dr. Chung already knew a lot of my story. He knew about Dad, and Bobby, and Mama, and Aunt Carol Ames. He even knew which of the kids got the gene—it’s a 50-50 chance—and which didn’t. The safe ones: Cody, Patty, Arianna, Timothy. The losers: Shawn, Bonnie Jean, and Lewis. And me.
So I talked and talked, and the little light on the recording cube glowed green to show it was on, and Mrs. Cully nodded and looked sympathetic so damn much that I started wishing for Jenny back. Dr. Chung at least sat quiet, with no expression on that strange ugly face.
“Are you showing any symptoms at all, Ms. Connors?”
“I have some trouble sleeping at night.”
“Describe it for me, in as much detail as you can.”
I did. I knew I was young to start the troubles; Mama was forty-six and Bobby twenty-nine.
“And the others with the FFI gene? Your mother and Robert, Jr. and” —he looked at a paper “—Shawn Edmond and—”
“Look,” I said, and it came out harsher than I meant, “I know I got to tell you everything. But I’m not going to talk none about any of my kin, not what they are or aren’t doing. Especially not to a Chinaman.”
Silence.
Then Dr. Chung said quietly, “I think, Ms. Connors, that you must not know how offensive that term is. Like ‘spic’ or ‘nigger.’”
I
didn’t know. I felt my face grow warm.
He said, “I think it’s like ‘hillbilly’ is to mountain people.”
My face got even warmer. “I…I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
But it warn’t. I’m not the kind to insult people, even Chinese people. I covered my embarrassment with bluster. “Can I ask some questions for a change?”
“Of course.”
“Is this Chi—did this clinic come to Blaine and start treating people for what ails them, just to get my family’s trust so you all can do these experiments on our brains?”
That was the scuttlebutt in town and I expected him to deny it, but instead he said, “Yes.”
Mrs. Cully frowned.
I said, “Why? Because there are only forty-one families in the whole world with our sickness? Then why build a whole clinic just to get at us? We’re just a handful of folk.”
He said gently, “You know a lot about fatal familial insomnia.”
“I’m not stupid!”
“I would never think that for even a moment.” He shifted in his chair and turned off the recorder. “Listen, Ms. Connors. It’s true that sufferers from FFI are a very small group. But the condition causes changes in the brain that involve neural pathways which everybody has. Memory is involved, and sleep regulation, and a portion of the brain called the thalamus that processes incoming sensory signals. Our research here is the best single chance to gain information beyond price about those pathways. And since we also hope to arrest FFI, we were able to get funding as a medical clinical trial. Your contribution to this science will be invaluable.”