She stood on wobbly legs, but felt good, felt strong. She took a few deep breaths, let the analeptic oxygen clear her head, feed her heart.
“Esther!”
The voice came from beyond the line of trees stretching before her, a line that would become a tunnel leading home.
“Esther!”
She knew that voice, and with a gasp, she ran.
She cut through brush to the path, hopped over a fallen trunk, landed on her heels and pumped her legs around the bend. The tunnel appeared before her, and in the distance, the familiar meadow, and her house. She could see her bedroom window, closed now. At the front of the house she saw a woman looking toward the trees, hand shielding her eyes, blonde hair whispering out from the sides of her neck. A man came and stood next to the woman. He wrapped an arm lovingly around her shoulders.
He waved at her, and Esther, smiling and sprinting, waved wildly back. She ran across the vast plane of meadow, thrown wide in all dimensions, covered in brilliant green and dotted with flowers, the colors of which she’d never seen.
Bells chimed where her feet crushed grass, and the trees lining either side of her bent, creaking, as she ran past; long trunks curving to point her way home. The wind pushed at her back, lifting her.
Earth and sky melted away as she leapt through electric silence.
ATEUCHUS
“I am a worm and not a man...”
Psalm 22:6 (attributed to Jesus)
1
ALFIE DROVE THE Jeep hard over the rough, rock-strewn road that led to the find. He was up high now, altitude of at least 10,000 feet, the wind brittle cold. He kept the windows down, relishing the clean air, even if it turned his knuckles to blue bolts as they held the steering wheel.
The Jeep lifted high on the passenger side, came down with a thud, then dipped left into a gulley, rocking Alfie so hard his feet momentarily left the pedals. He jerked back into the seat, laughed, and gave it more gas.
James had said “not of this earth,” and James – an Oxford man through and through – wasn’t one for hyperbole or metaphor. Quite literal, his geologist friend. He’d also said the sample showed dramatic aging that held no relation to its geological position or depth. Put the two together and you had a nice fat meteorite, a juicy bit of space right here on planet Utah, only a few hours’ drive for Alfie from his home-based lab near the university. He praised the heavens that the thing wasn’t found a bit further north, across the border, or James might have been calling Jim Robinson at Wyoming instead. Even so, Alfie figured the find was technically on federal land, part of Ashley National Park, but he wasn’t about to bring that up with James. Hell no, this space rock was his and by God he meant to have it.
The Jeep bounced over a ridge and Alfie saw the tents in the distance, navy green pimples dotted along a butte a half-mile ahead, the thin dirt road twisting like a brown snake right for it.
“ABOUT FIVE-THOUSAND YEARS, I’d say. More or less. Just a baby, really.”
Alfie nodded, stared at the blackened chunk of rock lying in the middle of the miniature crater the geologists had dug around it. Its surface was jagged, almost crystallized, and gave off a black, chalky residue when touched. It looked, to Alfie anyway, rather unstable. More like shale than stone. James’ crew, all students, stood absently around the dig, some of them likely hoping to be included in whatever this discovery ended up being, the rest simply cold and homesick. Alfie smirked, remembering his own years as a student, having to take whatever shit the professor or project head doled out.
Hate to break it to you fellas, but your claim on this meteorite went out the window when your boss brought my sorry ass up this mountain, he thought, itching to be gone but not wanting to seem overly anxious, lest James rethink the importance of the discovery.
“Pre-Egyptian,” Alfie mused, as if bored, each word punctuated by clouds of breath in the frigid air. “Any similarities?”
James jammed his thin white hands into the front pockets of his vest to warm them, stuck out his lower lip. A posture he took often, and one that Alfie always thought would go well with a pipe and a stuffed hawk in the background, decorating the mahogany of whatever Oxford study room the professor most often postured within.
“Nothing on record, not anything like this, at least. She’s a rare bird. The composition is strange for a meteorite. As you can see it’s flaking, oxidization must have been slowly cooking this thing for the last few millennia, killing it from the inside out. But like I said, the material is completely alien. I may not know much about this little guy, but I know it wasn’t born on planet earth. I’ve already taken my samples, pictures, measured, weighed, catalogued. It’s not a chrondite, I can tell you… some rare achondrite I’ve never come across, and since you’re the only meteoritic within a thousand miles, I figured I’d hand you the baton. I have my hands full with the shit I actually came out here to do.”
Alfie nodded, only half-listening, not entirely caring about James’s considerations on the matter, since the man knew as much about meteorology as Alfie knew, or cared, about the archeologic bone-digging mission the Brits were on about. Besides, he was entranced by the object before him; it consumed every ounce of his attention. “Iron prominent, I assume?” he asked, knowing the answer but wanting to build some goodwill by asking the idiot his opinion.
James looked at him strangely, his voice lowering, as if nervous of being overheard. “That’s the thing, Alfie. You’d think it’d be packed with ferrous, yeah? But it’s not. So far, our tests have shown no iron at all.”
Alfie gave him a hard look. “You’ve got to be mistaken.”
James scoffed, pulled the front of his khaki archeologist vest down neatly. “I don’t think so. If there’s one thing I know, it’s how to test the chemical makeup of rock. Or, in this case, meteorite. Ergo, I’m curious what the university will come up with.”
Alfie nodded. “Well, I better load up and get it over there. People are waiting to see this baby,” he said, knowing damn well he had no plans to take the find anywhere but his own home lab. He didn’t want – or need – the university’s premature meddling in a case like this one. If he was ever going to raise his personal profile within the scientific community, he knew it had to be outside the purview of his employer. He stepped down into the belly of the crater the team had dug out, his eyes dancing over the rock in anticipation.
You ready to go home? he thought, kneeling down beside the meteorite, noting it was about the size and shape of two bowling balls side-by-side, joined at the corpulent hip. He rubbed the surface with his fingertips, gave a little yelp and flinched, jerked his hand away. He could have sworn he felt a pulse, as if he had touched an electrical wire thrumming with current – not enough to shock, but enough to make him want his fingers back, thanks very much.
He stared at the black smudges on his fingertips, rubbed them together, the dust staining his skin. His hands were trembling.
“Don’t tell me it shocked you, mate. I’ll have to call the Star,” James said without humor.
