NELS HANSON
Web Olson’s Last Testament
Tonight the long ellipse of my life suddenly draws tight like an outlaw’s noose. In an hour I will ascend the stairway as the assault approaches and I begin a journey longer than the voyage aboard the Vrin, perhaps to join beloved Dana, the kindly Olsons, and my fallen brothers and sisters I could not save.
I now set down the facts of my and my daughter’s singular story, which will serve as our epitaph.
* * * * *
A light year beyond the constellation you call Orion and its bright double star Rigel lies a star slightly smaller than your Sun. Around Tir, our sun, four planets revolve.
My Earth was called Mebleferion, second closest to Tir. The Olson Bar-Circle brand is a stylized rendering of my planet. The upper hemisphere was composed of ice, the lower hemisphere burning sands. A thin temperate zone at the equator supported life, an advanced civilization, and abundant fauna and flora.
Telatroin physicists and astronomers had long calculated that Mebleferion was unstable on its axis—lacking a moon, our delicately poised world was prone to deviations, slight but sudden unpredictable shifts which doomed the zone of inhabitable land and air we had so carefully cultivated and nurtured.
Our precarious existence between fire and frozen cold required intelligent, humane cooperation. Crime was unknown to us, as was bloodshed or war. We were a people perpetually on the edge of the abyss, but also at the threshold of salvation. In the shadow of Death grew Love.
For three centuries our government had sent probes to other solar systems, seeking a suitable planet to receive our necessary exodus from Mebleferion.
I was part of one such mission.
I was engaged to the beautiful and brilliant Dana Gly, an astrophysicist in our research and relocation program. Ours was a love at first sight and word, an instant recognition of a fated bond. We had plighted our troth under the boughs of red trees, in silver grass beside a green river, and begun to make ambitious plans for our future. We had hoped that together we might visit new stars and distant worlds, but her great gifts in suggesting promising planets for Telatroin exploration required that she remain behind in her mountain observatory to direct our search.
Over a span of fifteen of your Earth years, our ship, with a captain and seven veteran crew members, examined the satellites of over forty stars, but found each lacking in the minimum requirements of atmosphere, soil, and water to support our physiological imperatives. Should my body survive intact and an autopsy be performed, you will learn that Telatroins are anatomically almost identical to human beings, except for a single glaring difference, a flaw in your world but not in mine, an Achilles heel . . . .
In the Earth year 1934 our ship, the Vrin, penetrated your solar system. Remarking wayward Pluto and sad Neptune and Uranus, we bypassed Saturn and mysterious Jupiter, approached Mars, and eagerly journeyed onward, toward Earth, a planet Dana had thought promising for tests and observation.
How can I describe the jubilation and relief of Captain Blethel and our crew as we examined your astonishing world and its beautiful moon? It was like an oasis to the sun-seared eyes and parched throat of a desert traveler who must find water and return to those dying of thirst.
Our instruments lit up in banks of azure and forest green as we made last-minute scans before sending our eagerly awaited news.
Worlds are many, but an Earth is rare. Dana and I would once again embrace, this time by green leaves and blue waters.
As we took final readings and prepared to send precise instructions, lights flashed and sirens rang our epitaph as the Vrin inexplicably began to break up. The call to abandon ship echoed through the white corridors and I leaped into a waiting ejection capsule and fired the trigger. The rocket’s thrust pinned me to my seat as the narrow cylinder rushed away from the Earth—for an instant I imagined I was bound for Mebleferion, that I saw Dana’s face beyond the porthole—before gravity ceased in a hush and I floated above my chair, then sat back as the craft swung under the open chute.
My small container came to rest softly on its side. I blew the hatch and crawled out into high sweet grass. I saw the empty night sky and turned quickly in a circle, searching the wide pasture and calling to my captain and the others.
There was only silence and I hurried toward the smoking wreck.
All was liquid, the metal bubbling in a pool. I trembled, managing the fragment of a prayer, and stumbled to my capsule, set the timer, and stood back as it flamed once and vaporized.
I looked up at the strange sky full of stars, past Orion and Riga toward Tir where Mebleferion still orbited and desperate Telatroins awaited rescue. I began walking across the darkened grasslands and low hills.
Antlered deer lifted their heads from the grass then bolted at my approach. In the moonlight, a mountain lion with shining eyes and lashing tail watched me pass. A great horned owl hooted and flew low overhead when I stopped and gazed toward my planet’s distant sector of darkened space.
Toward morning, from a treeless knoll, I saw a valley with a farmhouse and a barn covered with animal skulls. Dark smoke twisted from the house’s chimney. I stole down to the ranch along the bed of a dry creek, crept silently past the corral of horses. I took a pair of rough trousers and a shirt from a clothesline and made for the road, through a metal arch that said “Brofferd.”
In a dry irrigation ditch I quickly dressed and buried my suit in the sand, then climbed out and walked for an hour, until I heard a sudden roar and a voice called, “You on foot?”
The truck had come up before I could hide or run. A man sat at the wheel. He wore a black slouched hat and leather vest over a blue shirt. His words were slow and calm, and imitating him as best I could I replied that yes, I was walking.
“Well, you better get in.” He leaned across the seat and opened the door. “Folks in these parts don’t take to strangers.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Down on your luck, are you?” He glanced over at me as he steered down the gravel road.
I told him I was.
“Marge can give you some chow. You plan better on a full stomach. My name’s Travis Olson.”
I held his hand in a warm grip.
“My name is Webster Olson,” I replied. I remembered “Webster” from a broadcast criticizing the new American dictionary as we’d made our survey orbits. We had absorbed your languages and vocabularies quickly.
“Web Olson,” he said, smiling. “I guess we’re long-lost cousins.”
Soon we came to a gate with a crossbar which read “Olson Ranch.”
We climbed a hill, and I saw a white house with a brick chimney, a barn, and a square stone corral in which two horses with spotted hindquarters stood watching our arrival.
We entered the modest dwelling. In the kitchen, an attractive, slim woman in a red-checkered dress tended a wood stove. She turned as her name was called. She smiled, and offered her hand.
“Webster here is sort of at loose ends,” Olson told his wife. “Looking for work.”
“Well, we certainly have plenty of that.”
“How about it, Web?” Olson said. “Three squares a day, room and board, and fifteen dollars a month—and some duds,” he said, staring now at my silver flight boots.
“I’m honored,” I answered. I was ignorant of what would be asked of me and knew only that I required sanctuary while I devised a plan to contact Dana and signal the evacuation from Mebleferion.
I devoured the eggs, steak, hominy, potatoes, red-eye gravy, and warm rolls with butter and grape jam. I drank glasses of cold fresh milk followed by steaming mugs of coffee and cream.
“He’s an eater, isn’t he, Mother?”
“That’s all right,” Mrs. Olson said. “The boy’s hungry.”
Telatroins on Mebleferion had not consumed animal flesh for more than a thousand years and yet I ate all that was set before me. Perhaps it was an omen, that my very existence would depend on the raising of helpless creatures for slaughter, that I would engender a would-be killer as I myself became a murderer.
In the Clarksville Mercantile I was fitted out with new jeans, denim shirts, long underwear, wool socks, two pairs of high-heeled Western boots, one for dress and one for work, and a leather coat with fleece lining.
“This is the one,” Olson said, fitting a ten-gallon black Stetson onto my head as I stood before the mirror. “There’s a cowboy.”
Mrs. Olson turned her head, bringing a handkerchief to her eyes.
“He looks like Will,” she said.
Later, Olson told me that Will, the Olsons’ only child, had been killed in a great war. I began to pay courteous, special attention to Marge. I helped her with chores, chopped wood, and fetched the fresh eggs from the hen house. In the evenings after dinner I dried the dishes as she washed and handed me the wet plates. She seemed happier, grateful for my companionship, and soon we were close as any mother and son. Instinctively, we sensed our special bond. After all, hadn’t we both lost a beloved world?
The hours at the ranch were long. Travis Olson and I rose in the dark and returned after dusk. Yet life under the wide skies was to my liking, especially after the extended journey in the Vrin. With Olson’s patient guidance, I soon became a good husbandman, and an expert rider and roper, a crack shot with both revolver and rifle. I wore chaps and jingling spurs.
Olson grew his own fodder for the winter feeding of his stock, and his land’s weak yields of barley, oats, and alfalfa hay severely limited the number of animals he could raise for sale. My analysis of the soil and water and the prescription of certain obscure micro-mineral supplements allowed him to triple both his harvest of forage and the size of his herd.
Using artificial insemination, we began a successful selection and breeding program. Without Olson’s knowledge, I made slight but significant genetic adjustments to the seed we used in fertilizing our cows, and soon the “Olson Modified Hereford” was in great demand as breeding stock.
When two dozen of our cows came down with Bitterroot fever, I was able to swiftly concoct a vaccine. All of the animals were saved and the healthy stock and appaloosa horses made immune. Olson did not inform the rancher’s association of the dread infection, for fear that frightened neighbors would demand the destruction of his valuable line. In three years, Olson had improved from a competent rancher to the most knowledgeable and richest landowner in the county.
On Saturday afternoons, I read in the Clarksville library and selected books to take out on loan while the Olsons attended their weekly movie. Under cover of my studies in immunology, chemistry, earth science, botany, and zoology, I gained a clear knowledge of the current state of Earth’s physics and electrical technology. Though my craft and crew were no more, I was intent on fulfilling the mission of the Vrin and once again seeing Dana.
I became a ham radio operator, so that I could buy parts and equipment from a local supplier for an innocent-appearing transmitter capable of sending a swift signal of rescue to my fellow Telatroins in mortal danger on Mebleferion. I was their pathfinder, mine the heartbeat they could follow through the cold darkness of the universe—
Our population numbered only twenty-five thousand. We planned no violent conquest but a careful, dispersed integration that would go undetected. One great camouflaged ship like an ark would circle the Earth, while at night small delivery craft would bring diverse colonies to the countryside and forests outside your towns and cities.
The landing parties would be equipped with appropriate clothes, money, and documents. Children would be fluent in the local dialects and the adults well schooled in the professions they would assume. Small radios that worked at a miniscule wavelength, inserted under the skin at our wrists, would allow communication with other Telatroin communities, providing instantaneous news of our progress in making Earth a second but safer Mebleferion.
With an average life span of three hundred and fifty years, the original Telatroin settlers would outlive the bearers of bigotry and privilege who stain your sad history and inculcate younger generations with a different, more enlightened mode of being.
In one hundred years, the gifts of our humane insight and higher knowledge would ensure that Earth’s population would cease to know war, famine, disease, and injustice. The human proclivities toward selfishness and greed would fall away, like vestigial organs no longer necessary for survival. Liberal education and spiritual enlightenment, a deeper understanding and love of Mebleferion philosophy and art and advanced science—developed over millennia on a planet desperately lacking Earth’s generous bounty—would replace ignorance and the wasteful exploitation of natural and human resources.
We were your saviors, not the invaders your pulp literature depicts endlessly.
The night of October 31, 1938, coincidentally—or fatally—the date of Orson Welles’ broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” I received an answering transmission, a remembered cadence from among the silent stars.
After four years of endless delays and disappointments, I’d finally succeeded in sending a radio signal to Mebleferion and all week had anxiously awaited a return message from Dana.
No doubt she’d assumed that I had disappeared with the Vrin. In her grief, had she turned to another, certain that we would never meet again?
“To all Telatroin craft and their courageous explorers—”
I heard the beloved words as my heart leapt into my throat.
“Our planet is no more. You are our seed, our future, and our memory. Do well and goodbye! I love you, Ander, forever—” It was Dana’s voice, like the light of a fading star—
I was a few hours too late. My world was gone, Dana was dead. Mebleferion had wobbled dramatically and fatally on its axis. Our living zone had been both immolated and frozen.
Mallarme said of that unfortunate Virginian, Edgar Allen Poe: “A solid block fallen to Earth from the explosion of what distant world.” The chance of radio contact with Telatroin craft seemed infinitely remote. By now they had found other suitable worlds or had all perished in the search. No longer was I a wanderer far from home. Now I was a stranger without a home, except for the ranch and the kindness of the Olsons.
When Marge knocked at the door, asking me to join her in listening to the program about the Martians, I yearned to confide that my planet was dead and Dana a ghost, to lay my head upon Marge’s shoulder and unburden my sorrow. Desperately, I needed reassurance, from someone who knew and loved me.
I felt a tearing guilt, that I had killed my true love and my own people. I knew I was not a hero but a devil, a murderer. Why, why hadn’t I worked faster at the transmitter? What thoughts or motives unknown to me had reared within my subconscious and caused me to fail in my duty? Was it true, as your tragic Oscar Wilde believed, that every man kills the thing he loves? Had I changed, breathed something in Earth’s air that humans breathe, been infected by the urge toward death that Sigmund Freud theorized?
I thanked Marge politely, but said I wanted to go to bed early.
“Are you all right?” Marge asked me, touching my arm, sensing my upset.
The next morning I sat exhausted at the breakfast table. I hadn’t slept, enduring a night of tormented, excruciating anguish and loss that had crested in waves of metaphysical despair.
If Dana and other Telatroins and millennia of humane and high culture could be extinguished without a trace when the Vrin had found another world after a fifteen-year search and I had sent my call to start the evacuation that would take only hours and end four thousand years of life under the imminent threat of death—then no higher intelligence existed that was loving or kind.
I trembled when I feared that I was the last Telatroin in a meaningless universe.
“You’re lonely?” Marge said. “That’s it, isn’t it, Web?”
I nodded, fighting back tears.
“Course you are. A young man like you needs companionship.” She smiled warmly. “Let me work on it.”
And so, a week later, as the autumn’s first snow fell, I drove the icy road to the Sparkses’ residence in Clarksville.
Their daughter Melissa and I instantly were drawn to one another. Her hair was shiny black, her skin ivory, her mouth and lips generous and soft. She appeared a bright, tender girl well-schooled in the social amenities of the time. Together we celebrated Armistice Day, and on Thanksgiving we exchanged our first kiss.
As I soon learned, Melissa was healthy, warm-hearted, with a natural amorousness that I tried carefully to contain, despite my hunger for physical communion after the years of abstinence in the Vrin and the final loss of Dana, my true love.
On the Winter Solstice we embraced before the parlor fire, and soon, before I quite realized, Melissa and I had met on another plane, in an alternate space-time, a dimension far removed from earthly lovers. As we moved together, a series of glowing spheres enveloped one another in descending order toward the central golden atom and beyond. We had returned to Mebleferion, and its mysteries were intensely, if fleetingly, our own.
Then we lay on Earth again and Melissa began to tenderly caress me in the flickering half-light that suddenly blazed and the awakened castaway recalled his secret difference from all human men. I leaped up and holding my clothes hurried out to the car as Melissa called my name and started to follow through the snow.
At last I had found love, only to realize that on Earth love was lost to me, that I must always remain a stranger from a strange land . . . .
“She wasn’t right for you,” Marge said the next day, when she saw I was depressed. “It was Travis’ idea.”
Melissa sent letters that I didn’t answer, and when she phoned, Marge told her I was out in the far pasture or at a cattle camp in the mountains. Her passion threatened my one haven of security on a hostile planet preparing for another war, and I fought to put her from my mind.
Months went by and a letter from Melissa arrived from the east, where she had gone to visit her aunt. She thought it only right that as the father I should know she was pregnant with my child.
Then another tortured letter came, informing me our son had died during delivery—she had named him Web before he was buried.
The death of my poor child on a foreign planet without the presence of his father pierced me with shame and loss, though in time I would come to understand that perhaps fate had been merciful if not kind.
Finally Melissa’s last letter was delivered, announcing that she had found her destined love and had married, though she knew that no experience would ever match the one we had shared. Again, she was expecting a child.
I submerged myself in work, the ranch prospered, the meadows fully reclaimed and planted with several high-protein hybrids I had developed. The cows were heavy, sleek and of high quality. And healthy, no longer at risk of Bitterroot fever.
Beef prices rose astronomically with the Second World War. The draft board found me exempt as ranchers and farmers were at a premium, and the Olsons had already lost a son.
Olson was getting older, he relied on me not only for muscle power but for scientific and financial advice and, increasingly, the ranch’s day-to-day administration. At night I did the books, paid accounts, drew up lists of supplies as the Olsons listened to the radio news from the European and Pacific fronts.
On Christmas Day in 1947, two and a half years after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, Marge turned to Olson after offering the prayer at the holiday table. A silent signal passed between them.
“Web,” Olson said, “you’ve become like a son to us. As much our boy as Will was. Maybe more. Marge and I would like to make it official. We’d be honored if you’d become our lawful heir. Our legally adopted son.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak.
“The honor would be all mine,” I said finally.
“You can call us Mother and Father, if you want,” Marge said.
I got up and Marge and I embraced, Olson took my hand, then slapped my back and held me close.
The next Monday I accompanied the Olsons to Clarksville to the lawyer’s office and the papers were drawn up.
Then started an acceleration of my social contacts and invitations to parties and gatherings—I had already become, at the urging of the Olsons, a Freemason, a Methodist, and a member of the Grange. What the townspeople thought of me in those years I have no certain idea, though I believe my reticence with women was assigned to the caution and understandable circumspection of a young, wealthy man who would no doubt become wealthier.
I had many female admirers and as I was an attentive listener and gifted dancer, I was often asked to quote Shakespeare’s sonnets and verse from English romantic poetry. But always I maintained a barrier of reserve between myself and the attractive and love-struck women in their teens and early twenties. They would have marveled at my age, that I was fifty-two or fifty-seven, depending on what scale of gravity and time I used for calculation. Perhaps, with a more mature, more experienced woman, a sympathetic widow or someone like Marge, I might have shared an intimacy that eventually would have allowed me to safely reveal my true self. And my anomaly.
How strange, that I suffered such loneliness and frustration.
Days became weeks, weeks turned to months and then years as time accumulated slowly, like the rings of a tree. Then, on a rainy day in late March of 1953, I received a phone call that informed me of a crash that would transform my life more than the explosion of the Vrin.
On a trip to Denver to visit Marge’s sister, Olson had suffered a heart attack. They were crossing Lost Trail Pass when their car veered through a guard rail and down a steep embankment.
The Olsons’ remains were brought by train back to Clarksville and in the city cemetery I wept as my father and mother were interred. Though no stranger to death, I now found myself a true orphan.
Friends of the Olsons came forward, offering aid and support during my period of bereavement, but politely I refused, and soon I was left to myself and to the few necessary human contacts the ranch’s business required.
I no longer frequented the library, whose books I had already read, but ordered my own in great quantities from a New York bookseller. I bought a large Kelvinator freezer and stored food in bulk so I needed only rarely to journey to Clarksville for provisions. The nights were especially lonely. For a long time I could not bring myself to sit in the Olsons’ living room after dinner.
After a year of increasing sorrow I set to work with crude slide rules and logarithms and blueprints, sky charts of known galaxies, and thick almanacs that provided specifics of the orbits of the nine planets and of Earth’s rotation and fluctuating magnetic field. I drew a list of needed components, secured what materials I could from Mr. Sharp’s hardware store, then fabricated the remainder in the barn where I began construction.
Finally, at the end of six months, I placed Will Olson’s converted football helmet onto my head, I turned the dial and waited as the reintegration chamber crackled and filled with blue and rosy light.
The Olsons stood before me.
In the evenings we reminisced. I told them about my days and activities on the ranch, and with tenderness their hands reached toward me, toward the border of the light, as if to touch my cheek in warm affection.
It was later, during the winter of 1955 that I was first able to recall Dana, and she told me of Mebleferion’s last half hour, gently reassuring me that my late signal was not my fault but fated. Our sister craft, the Sprake, had sent an earlier, urgent joyous message from another star system. The great transport ship had already begun taking on passengers when Mebleferion violently rocked and died. (For fifteen years I had monitored the heavens, but never detected any Telatroin radio traffic nor learned what had become of the Sprake and its crew, which included several female officers.)
The sad news imparted over a period of weeks finally gave way to recollections of happier times, the days of our first love, and it was this platonic feminine contact which sustained me for nearly fifty years, until the beginning of my fall from grace.
In the early summer of 1958, Melissa reappeared with her beautiful teenage daughter, then abandoned us both in the middle of the night. The girl, Trudy, had learned or inherited many things from her mother (and perhaps been told of my unusual abilities in lovemaking)—I now think they were co-conspirators in a plan which, because of Melissa’s advancing age, required Trudy’s pristine physiological attributes.
Though I surmised the plot, it was only by exertion of a stern will that I avoided succumbing to Trudy’s charms—she was a young Melissa, as desirable, hot-blooded, and impulsive. The second evening after dinner I tore myself from her seductive arms and locked my bedroom door against her continued entreaties. I arranged for the girl’s education at a private school in Seattle and against her will put her on the train the next day.
So began the myth that Web Olson had a daughter, whom the townspeople for some reason—or none—named “Lucinda.”
One August morning, after a lightning storm and power outage that disabled the warning system, a great wooden bull stood at my door. Knocking at the planks, I found the trapdoor and forced the unbalanced young Ulysses to climb out and sent him walking back to town without his rescued Helen.
Perhaps the Trojan Bull, like a specter in a dream, was a veiled warning of all that was fated to occur. I felt a vague foreboding and appealed to Dana for instruction and reassurance.
Our relationship grew deeper as our nightly communions through the decades became spiritual exercises of an increasingly arcane nature. Many secrets of the universe were unveiled to me by her incorporeal spirit, now privy to all things.
One warm spring evening in 1987 Dana materialized a rare gift: The Hand, or Frorl, the Telatroins’ pledge of immortal affection.
Her charged, limpid thoughts overflowed themselves, refracting in physical form across light years of starry space to my makeshift collector dish. Energy and matter reversed like magnetic poles and love’s subtle grace assumed a shapely pattern of shining atoms.
I have held the Frorl close ever since, as I do tonight in this last year of the twentieth century. Though worlds are born, live, and die, as had Mebleferion, I learned that, as your poet Dante intuited, it is “Love that moves the sun and lesser stars.” And yet the mystical embraces and ultimate certainty that Dana bestowed on me were muted by the concrete reality of my physical existence. I still yearned for the warmth of tactile, mortal companionship.
* * * * *
In mid-September five years ago, one of my prize breeding cows died after dropping a calf. I named the calf Chloe and hand-raised her.
From the first moment she could stand she was at my boot heels. The two Australian shepherds adopted her, and she rode in the pickup bed with them as I drove around the ranch to check the cattle and fields and fences, and the sensors I’d installed to fend off would-be rustlers.
Chloe grew, and a restlessness accompanied her increasing girth. One morning I realized she had come into her maturity and I led her to the barn so that she could pass her time safely there. I’d long decided not to breed her.
A few nights later I stopped by Chloe’s stall to comfort her, and saw the promise of a transfiguring light. I had a vision, as I stared at my face reflected in Chloe’s dark eyes, of unborn galaxies packed inside a dark sphere. The sphere exploded, the ancestors of stars forming in great radiating strings, the first fiery matter racing instantly in all directions throughout the universe, creating space and time, life and death.
I would conceive a child and companion through Chloe. The Telatroin line would not die with me but continue and begin to flourish in two hundred eighty days from the point of conception. By my own efforts, as God and Adam and Eve, I would resurrect Mebleferion’s art and science and all its shining achievements, its spiritual illuminations, and the legacy of forty centuries of humane, if not human, culture. I would put an end to my isolation and at the same time begin the salvation of the Earth.
Telatroins are long-lived, patient, and physically precocious, and in thirteen years I would rediscover physical love, and enjoy a brilliant and affectionate Telatroin companion as my wife and bearer of the builders of a Second Mebleferion—
The clock struck twelve, signaling a new day.
My work in genetics had produced the Olson Hereford and as a medical cadet on the Vrin I had extensive training in using animal systems for incubation of Telatroin organs for transplant.
From a contact of Thomas Sharp’s at the Clarksville hospital, I purchased a frozen human ovum, then with an electron microscope reconfigured the gamete’s chromosomes to simulate a Telatroin egg. I fertilized it with my own germ cell of the proper gender marker and completed the careful insertion of the zygote.
And I waited with the highest hope and growing anticipation.
As I sat in a chair at Chloe’s side I often reflected how in a modest barn on an isolated ranch in western Montana, unbeknownst to the wide world, to those teeming millions in Sao Paulo and Bejing, London, Calcutta, and Los Angeles, Sydney and Kuala Lumpur, the Earth’s redemption had been conceived and gestated toward its birth.
I slept on a cot in the barn, watching over Chloe with joy and fear as the months of her momentous pregnancy passed.
Finally, on the second day of April of a warm early spring, at seven-twenty in the morning, I delivered her of all the sadness to come.
The infant was an abomination, the living fruit of my wayward and disturbed moral compass, a parody of my intent and titanic pride.
And yet she cried a Telatroin cry, and looked at me with her own dark eyes, beseeching. She recognized me as her father. I saw my eyes, too widely set, my nose uplifted with open nostrils, my brow, my mouth too extended, the temples that bore the buds of horns.
I saw what my child and I might have been, but would never become.
From that day I sealed off the ranch, admitted no would-be buyers, transported stock for sale to the city auction yard, went to Clarksville only for the direst of necessities.
I could not destroy her, and yet she had to be kept a secret from the uncomprehending eyes of the world. In truth, I loved her more because she was a living symbol of my existential predicament, my separation from all others made flesh. In mourning her presence and condition, I mourned my own—
In the end, my daughter was myself.
As soon as I weaned her, I learned to my dismay she would not eat of the Earth’s vegetation.
The dogs ran away. Deer and coyotes avoided the near pastures. I raised a temporary stock shelter at a mile distant from the barnyard. A year went by, then two. I could no longer keep her in the house, she was frightened and unhappy alone in the barn, and so I moved there to be with her and to give her the only companionship she would ever know.
We rolled about a big rubber ball, I sang to her rhymes from my youth as she tried to mimic me. When I sewed her a stuffed toy, a small mannequin of herself, she grasped it and raised it to her chest, her eyes questioning.
I pulled out the large mirror mounted on wheels and together we gazed at ourselves, father and daughter. She touched her face and head, then mine, watching in the glass, then reached out, and I took her sad ghost of a hand and held it as she leaned her muzzle softly on my head.
Her repeated bleats had several inflections that registered her changing moods and needs. She felt and returned my love in her way. She was fond of scooping up handfuls of dirt and straw and offering them to me, waiting for my look of approval and fatherly pride. She was lonely when I tended to the ranch and leaped at me when I returned from my chores.
As I was lonely for her, I hugged her close with rising heart as I entered the barn after each long day. Dana had loved me and now I held a part of what Dana had loved—
In a way, I held Dana, our child, and myself as I whispered my daughter’s name.
* * * * *
One night the alarm sounded and I went to read the directional finder in the house.
I saw the beeping dot, the moving oval that marked the intruder’s location as he stalked the standing cow.
As I hurried toward the truck, I realized I had left the barn’s door ajar.
She ran toward me, then stopped still in the barnyard. She stood to her full towering height, alert, sniffing the air.
Then she was off, racing across the fences and pastures.
I nearly collided with a saddled pinto horse galloping riderless across the road through my headlights. Another mile and I saw a form lying by the road.
Ahead, her shadow crossed in front of me. I jumped from the truck, calling out to her.
She stopped, staring into my flashlight. The man had given up, shivering, his head down. I led her away and made her climb up into the bed of the truck and attached the heavy chain to her collar.
I got a canteen and ran over and threw water on the boy’s face. He was about twenty, with light hair. He blinked, stared back at me, then scrambled to his feet, pale with shock, and ran off.
After that I locked her away in the cellar.
I cared for her with my own resources, until I had ruined myself, my ranch, my world.
Her hunger was like a confused reflection of my decades of loneliness and isolation and yearning for love. And a mirror of my prideful crime, the notion that like some self-appointed God I could rescue a fallen world!
My herd dwindled, then was gone, soon followed by my money and vast sections of my land as I bought up inferior stock. Still my daughter cried for food, cried and cried, as I tried to comfort her and finally learned how to answer her demands.
Using the black-market magneto Sharp obtained from the Air Force, I constructed the anti-matter hovercraft and at night began the thefts from my neighbors.
I could not bear to carry away the neatly arranged remnants of the murdered cattle, though wisdom counseled otherwise, because in them I saw my sin.
God, if there still is one, forgive me.
After the Olsons’ deaths, I had made my turret, transformed from a primitive machine of war, into an observatory, and like Dante I climbed the spiral staircase where I took solace during long nights in the healing turn of the stars. But now guns again take the place of lenses, bulletproof resins tint the once pure dome. An encounter will begin within minutes and I must fight to the death to protect what I have created.
I am more alone than ever. I do not have the courage to use the chamber and face Dana or the Olsons, nurturers of what was once my brighter angel.
The fashionings of wire and metal and fiberglass, the few necessary supplies I acquired from Sharp, and my own new alloys and permeable and high-tensile plastics, may be found in the barn in my primitive laboratory. The principles upon which my inventions are based will no doubt form the touchstone for a transformation in Earth’s understanding of physical laws, and produce a corresponding revolution in technology and other categories of human thought and endeavor.
In your hands you hold a Rosetta Stone, and a legacy of what might have been, but will remain a perpetual possibility only in a world of speculation.
Despite my Telatroin intelligence and learning, it is only now, as our deaths and the deaths of others grow nearer, that I grasp the poignant truth of the old human cliché: blood is thicker than water.
This morning I woke weeping, having dreamed I’d led my daughter from the cellar to the Indian Cave and put her down, but when I unlocked the steel doors and descended the fearsome stairs I saw it wasn’t so and again we embraced, before she moaned and turned to the empty trough—
As the alarm bells sound and agents approach from all points, I am tempted to sign my name “Alien”. But I know my name, and the secret name of my daughter, and I know that my failing was not an absence of heart but an excess of love.
Could you have done better?
Dana’s shapely Frorl in my left hand, the cellar keys in my right, I will go now to free her, to let her run among the far hills as I guard her escape.
Ander
Bar-Circle Ranch
Clarksville, Montana
June 6, 2000