Specimen Days

She stood a moment in the shallows as the boy scrambled up the bank and got back into his robe. She turned and looked out at the water. Simon understood that she took intense pleasure in this: the water and the darkening land. He knew she was reluctant to leave it. He watched her. She was a thin black shape against the pond and the sky. She was, he thought, happy. She was suddenly and unexpectedly happy, or whatever she would call it if Nadians had a term for happiness.

"Beautiful," he said. He was not entirely sure what he meant by the word at that particular moment. It seemed almost like a new greeting he and Catareen had agreed to exchange a variation of common language, newly encoded.

She turned back at the sound of his voice. She was startled and shy. There was something about her at that moment. He could not describe it. There was perhaps no term for it in human language. He could not give it a name.

He said instead, "How beautiful and perfect are the animals! How perfect is my soul! How perfect the earth, and the minutest thing upon it!"

Catareen looked at him. A silence passed.

Luke said to Simon, "You smell slightly better now."

"Thanks," Simon said. He started getting dressed again.

Presently Catareen got out of the water, got dressed, and slipped away to hunt. She returned soon after with a pair of small, leggy creatures none of them could identify. Simon cooked them.

"I think we must be in western Kansas by now," Luke said as Simon poked the skinned haunches on the Winnebago's radiation pack. "We could reach Denver by late tomorrow."

"By midafternoon, I'd say," Simon answered.

What he thought but did not say: he wouldn't have minded driving on and on. There was something hypnotic about it, something deeply agreeable. Just driving.

Luke said, "Denver has gotten to be a sort of giant shanty town. It's probably a little like it was almost three hundred years ago. Except the people three hundred years ago didn't live in abandoned malls and franchise joints."

"The Christians don't run Denver, as far as I've heard."

"No, Denver's basically secular. Some goddess cults, and a big Buddha town on the east side. Jesus Christ, Our Lord and Savior, is small potatoes there."

"Did you say you believe in all that?"

"Yep."

"As part of the con."

"Started out that way. I went along with it so they'd keep feeding me. I said the prayers, I did the daily devotions. I meditated in the pathetic little shrine they'd built in the Wal-Mart parking lot. Just scamming. Then I understood that it's true."

"You're kidding."

"I'm totally serious. Something happened one day. I don't know how to describe it. Something arrived. It's like, okay, say you walked out of your house every day and shouted, 'Oh, come to me, Great Heffalump,' just to please somebody, just because it's the local custom, because your crazy old aunt won't take her medicine unless you call for the Heffalump every morning, and then one day this big hairy thing with a trunk and antlers comes lumbering up and says, Tm the Great Heffalump, what do you want?' What're you going to do? You don't believe in him, you don't like him, you don't want him, but there he is."

"I'm not sure if I believe you."

"I don't need you to believe me. Hey, are those groundhogs just about done?"

"I don't think they're groundhogs."

"Whatever they are. I'm starving, I don't mind if they're on the rare side."

Simon served the irradiated creatures. Catareen sat between him and the boy, quietly consuming her share of the hunt. After they'd eaten, she buried the remains, and the boy went to bed in the back of the Winnebago. Simon stayed outside a while with Catareen. They sat together on the grassy rise. The wind made a low rustling sound, and the stars shone hard in the deep black sky. The pond put out minute ghostly sparks that could have been reflections of the stars.

Simon said, "Do you miss Nadia?"

"No."

"It's your home. It's where you come from."

"Nothing there."

He hesitated over how to respond. There was something there. There was something everywhere. True, the people of Earth had hoped for more from their first (and possibly only) contact with an inhabited planet. All those zillions spent getting there, the decades of effort, and what do they find? A people who in ten thousand years had failed to come up with a written language. Who lived in huts made of dried mud and pulled one another around in wooden carts. Where were the golden cities, the shamans and scientists? Where were the great discoveries, the cures, the art?

He said, "It's a rough place, I hear." "Nothing for me."

"You know," he said, "maybe there's no real point in you being so mysterious about your past. Doesn't it seem just the tiniest bit unnecessary?"

She sat beside him in the dark. She exhaled the little song.

After an interval, he said, "So. Do you have any questions about me?"

"No."

"Are all Nadians like this?"

"Like how?"

The wind blew across his face. It had a dry green smell.