The Empty People

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

First there was Della, the woman who wanted . . . love? She did not - could not - know, for where love should have been was emptiness. Then came the Poet, who wanted only to please, but did not know how. His every effort was rejected - but he could not stop trying. Rogers was the completion, the part above all other parts that made the whole. And then there was Archer - and the thing in his brain . . .

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 159

Sample

THE INSIDE:

Her name was Della and she had lived a life. A reasonable, protected, purposeful life it had been and it had gone on for forty years or so, and then one day the aliens came—and that was the end of life as she had known it. The only question, then, was one of retaining purpose: Della would not live in a vacuum. Otherwise, she supposed that it was all over.

The aliens came like this: one moment she was backing out of the driveway, coaxing the car onto the pavement so that she could get into the city and do the Thursday things, and the next, the air was full of fire. Near her, far from her, throughout the city, there was a web of flame and she was caught in the center. She could feel her lungs searing with that wretched heat and the first question, the only question at all, was why did she not die? Why did she not simply shrivel and blacken inside and vanish? Everything else could wait if she could find out about that. But she didn’t learn the answer to that one for a long, long time.

She came staggering out of the car, looking for the source of the flames and then, suddenly, as if the world were a candle which had been extinguished, they were gone: and there was in that air only grayness and a few wisps of smoke darting aimlessly in the sky. Then the ships came.

They came without any sense of transition: one moment there was nothing; the next they were in the air. And then they began to land, one by one, on the street, encircling her. They were very small—the size of a small passenger car—so that they could land by the hundreds and hardly take up any space at all. Della looked around her, but there was no one else on the street. Just the ships. And her.

In the near one—they were shaped, vaguely, like canteens, this array of ships, and after they had landed there was only a thick silence for some time as if they were becoming acclimated, for God’s sake, or trying to determine who she was—a door opened and something wearing a helmet looked out, shining a beam on her. She tried to stare past the beam because, whatever else she did, she had to meet this on her own terms, but she couldn’t take it: it was sharp and concentrated and piercing, as if all light had been compressed into the one sliver which winked across. And so she looked at the ground instead, the familiar stones and grass of her drive, and wondered stupidly what her husband would think of this when he came home. Would he like outsiders coming into their neighborhood and deflating property values in this way? Surely these Martians—that was the only rational explanation; they came from outer space or something like that—and the point was that now they were going to take over the earth. Or try to. So that made it all right, Della thought; if it was happening to everybody, it didn’t matter particularly that it was happening to her. That braced her a little. Nevertheless, where were the other people? Wouldn’t something like this bring all of them into the street as well? What the hell else happened in Mahopac at ten on a Thursday morning?

“You,” a voice said from the helmet. “You over there, come here.”

She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to. I want to stay.”

“You don’t come … we take.”

“I still won’t.”

There was a feeling of tenderness around the edges of her limbs and then she blanked momentarily; when she came to, she was standing by the vessel and the thing with the helmet was looking directly at her. There were no eyes behind the faceplate; as far as she could see, staring through the blank glass, there was nothing at all. No features. A dryness. And yet …

“Worked very well,” the creature said. “Considering the problems. You transport economically.”

“I what?”

“You transport well. Don’t worry about it. This is our concern, not yours.”

“Now what?”

“Now,” the creature said, almost cheerfully, “we take you with us and do what needs to be done. Of course. You don’t think we can just leave things like this now, do you?”

She tried to hold off what was being done to her, then, feeling surges of force creeping up and down her; she even curled her fists and made whimpering noises against the pressure, but it was pointless. She was picked up—quite conscious, this time—and dumped into the vessel, in a space just big enough to sit her snugly against the thing in the helmet, which then closed the door briskly and, working on some kind of a switchboard, caused the ship to elevate. It went up with dismaying speed, so high that looking out the window she could see that all of the city to the horizon was covered by the fire and the dots of ships. They began, then, to work on a slow, downward incline toward a spot which she imagined would be around Times Square. Times Square in New York City.

“Very easy,” the thing said. “Considering the technical problems, it went over quite well. Not that we didn’t expect it to, of course.”

“Where are you from? What is going on here?” The thing to remember and to hold onto was that she was a housewife—all right, a wealthy one; but still, basically, a simple housewife—and that it would have to be a dream. All of it was so banal that only housewives or businessmen could have dreamed it. If it was really happening, it would have been much richer and more sensible than this: not like a poor recollection of a comic strip she had passed over a long time ago. If she treated it as a dream, remembering to be polite and courteous at all times, it would simply go away.

“We are from another star,” the creature said. “This is an invasion of planet earth by the warlords of X’Ching. We intended originally to kill all of your men and abduct most of the women for our own fiendish purposes, having them breed and stock our large farms. But those plans were only tentative, and depended to a large degree upon what kind of resistance we encountered. Since it appears,” and the thing inclined its helmet toward the panel showing the fire, “that we have accomplished our objective with a minimum of difficulty, I would say that this is probably the course, then, that we will be following. Of course, we don’t intend to be brutal unless given reason. We are not basically a brutal people: only expansionist and somewhat imperialistic in nature.”

“I’m being abducted then?” Della asked.

“You are.”

“Am I the only one?”

“No. I told you we’re taking all the women. You are my particular assignment.”

“Then where are the others?” she asked. “Why was there no one out on the street? Why is there no one else here? Where did all the other ships go? Why does it seem that I’m the only person in the world, now?”

“Can’t answer those,” the creature said, and it did something to the board which made the vessel descend; it moved rapidly and terrifyingly through several levels of air and there was a faint jolt. Looking out the window, Della saw that they were in an enclosed space somewhere, in a strip of land set off by thick walls. They were in a courtyard, small pieces of fire moving through the air, passing against an unknown resistance. She felt the dust around her, moving into the ship.

I’m crazy, she thought. I’ve lost my mind. I’m either crazy or I’m dead.

“Oh, you’re neither,” said the creature. “We, the warlords of X’Ching, are purely telepathic of course, and I can read your thoughts anytime at all. You’re not crazy and you’re not dead; you’re right on the planet Earth, in New York City, and we’re going to put you in a cell for the night. We’re going to do it to millions and millions of others. How do your people have sexual relations anyway, if I might ask?”

“We enter one another,” she replied.

“Banal,” said the thing in the helmet, escorting her from the hatch and into what was obviously a hastily constructed courtyard which had been placed somewhere in the center of Manhattan. Wall Street? Times Square? It must have been a part of the city she had been in a hundred times before, but it was as if she was seeing it for the first time.

“You will be on the first level,” the creature said, pushing her gently in the back, forcing her to stumble ahead of him in a half-run. They came to a row of cubicles lined with barred doors and he opened the nearest to incline her in, then closed the door and did something with the lock. She guessed that she was trapped. When finished, the thing leaned in, putting two appendages on the bars and inclining his head between them, all of this giving a certain ingenuousness—not to say sprightliness—to his aspect.

“There are so many others to find,” he said. “You will pardon me for leaving you now. We will be back later to talk in some detail; in the meantime I suggest that you keep very quiet, avoid speculation as much as possible, and restrain your physical needs. There are, behind you, a group of books to divert and we will be coming by occasionally. Good luck in your confinement,” the creature finished rather stiffly and then it tramped away.

Della wanted to scream but there was no use; in the first place, the creature had said it was telepathic and that meant it had no sense of hearing (wasn’t that right? She seemed to remember something to that effect.) If it was telepathic, it would know how she felt anyway. It obviously didn’t give a damn. And in the second place, screaming wasn’t going to change a thing; not a single thing. It was all a question of accommodation.

No, that was giving into this on its own terms. She was a suburban housewife with too much time and excess energy and little enough to do now, and she was obviously paying the price for her corruption; she had obviously taken to some kind of drug and was having an extended hallucinatory reaction. When the effects wore off, she would be lying in her bed in a cold sweat, staring up at the spots in the ceiling, looking at the empty space next to her and wondering when James would be home. That was all there was to it: you spent twenty years letting the best parts of yourself go to waste and dim (for she had said to herself often, too often, that that was exactly what was happening to her) and after a point it was too late, too late already; the trouble again was the banality of this nightmare—was this really the best she could do? Was it?

With all that had happened to her—although most had happened a long time ago and probably didn’t count—and with all the agony that she felt, quickening below her surfaces occasionally, trapping her into a soundless wail that she thought would be the leitmotif of suburban existence, with all of that—couldn’t she do better?

Many years ago—this was relevant—a boy had crouched between her breasts, doing unnameable things to them, gasped out along with his passion the feeling that she was the smartest woman he had ever met. The sheer irrelevance of this confession, the incongruency of it, stayed with her when a lot of the other things had gone. Surely she would have to be very bright indeed to have wrung such a confession from this boy. All of the Others, the occasional dabblings while James was away (and a couple of times, incredibly, when he had been at home, doing the same things to someone else) had been with men who had considered her to have the keenest mind in the neighborhood. How could this be happening to her?

Or perhaps it was mushrooms. She understood that mushrooms released the most childish of obsessions. Yes, she remembered vaguely having talked about mushrooms not long ago and feeling mildly curious; perhaps she had started with them because they were supposed to be the easiest.

(But I don’t like them raw, she thought foolishly; they have to be made in a pan over a fire with lots of butter.)

They should have had children. If they had been able I to have had children if she had not been so damned sterile, she would not have all this energy—expended in whatever mindless fashion—and she wouldn’t have taken to the hallucinogens and thus into this real fix.

“We enter one another,” she said, pointlessly, speaking to the walls. Yes, that was the bes. . .