“Not at all. He wants to make it on his own. I respect that.”
“Matt’s a hard one to do favors for. He’s super independent.”
“So are you.”
She blushes. “What makes you say that?”
“No one’s helping you pay for college.”
“I was lucky to get my track scholarship.”
“It wasn’t luck that allowed you to win so many races in high school. You worked your butt off.”
“I did, but . . .” She doesn’t finish.
“What?”
“Running comes easier to me than most people. It must be my genes. Sometimes I wonder if I could run in the Olympics.”
“The metric mile? The fifteen hundred meters?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell me about it.”
Teri stops walking as she struggles to find the words. “I train mostly on the track because the coach expects it. And I’m good at running intervals. I know it’s a quick way to build strength. But I feel at home when I go out for longer runs, alone, either late at night or early in the morning. Sometimes I slip into a rhythm—it’s hard to describe—where I don’t get tired no matter how fast I run. At times like that I feel I could break the world record in the mile.”
I understand perfectly. But then, I’m not human.
“So you want a gold medal and you want to graduate medical school before you’re twenty-five. Anything else?”
Teri laughs. “You’re making me sound like Ms. Super Achiever.”
“There’s nothing wrong with fulfilling your desires.”
“What if there are ones you feel you’ll never fulfill?”
“You’re talking about Matt again.”
“No. Yes! How did you know?”
“You can control what you do. But you know you can’t control him.” I pause. “By the way, that was brave of you to encourage him to audition.”
“He has so much talent. You’re right, I can’t hold him back.”
“But it scares you just the same.”
“Sure. You saw the way the girls all cheered when he came on last Friday. If he gets his foot in the door, he’ll hit it big, and then he’s going to get hit on by every chick between New York and LA.”
“Do you want my advice?”
“If you have some to give me, sure.”
“Actually, I usually hate giving advice. People never listen to it. In the end, they just do what they want to do.”
“I’m listening . . . Alisa.”
“Trust.”
“Trust in what?”
“Just trust.”
“You mean, trust in his love for me?”
“That’s part of it. Trust in the big picture as well.”
“What’s the big picture?”
“No one knows. That’s why you have to trust in it.”
Teri considers for a moment, then smiles. “How did you get so wise?”
“Oh, I’ve been around.”
We walk for another hour without talking. I enjoy the exercise, but I’m also looking for places to set up monitoring devices to increase my security.
Back at my house, we find Matt reading a short story that I wrote for a sci-fi anthology. It’s a personal favorite; I left it out on purpose. It follows the observations of K-8-P—or Kap—the name my hero goes by while he’s on earth. Matt reads it aloud to catch Teri up.
Although from another planet, Kap is a low-level grunt who, along with his partner, has been assigned the job of destroying the earth. Kap’s own world is only a few centuries further along than earth, but it belongs to an advanced galactic civilization that has been monitoring earth’s TV and radio programs for decades, and that has determined we are far too hostile a race to be allowed to expand out into the galaxy.
My story begins with Kap and his partner spraying a ten-mile-long asteroid with a special type of black paint that reduces its albedo ratio—its ability to reflect light—to near zero. Then the two outfit the asteroid with rockets that fire for a month and slowly alter its orbit so that it will intercept the earth in three years. Because it’s so dark, earth astronomers won’t notice the asteroid until it’s days away from destroying our home.
The job done, the two enter a deep freeze that will keep them asleep for a decade while they cruise home. Only Kap sets his hibernaculum so that he awakens as soon as his partner is asleep. He turns their ship around and heads for the earth. He is curious to meet humanity. This is the tenth planet he’s destroyed, and he wonders what criteria the top dogs in the galaxy are using to decide who lives and who dies.
The story takes off when Kap takes a shuttle down to earth and is fired upon by America’s missile shield. His shuttle is damaged, and he crash-lands a couple of miles offshore, near San Francisco. The shuttle is equipped with a device that instantly gives Kap amnesia, lest he accidentally or intentionally warn any backward planet that it is about to be destroyed.
Kap survives the crash and is rescued by a fishing ship.
The rest of the story deals with Kap’s innocent observation of human life. In one sense he sees everything with a child’s eyes. But in another sense his observations are profound because they’re completely unbiased.
I called the tale “Eyes of the Stars,” and it won both a Nebula and a Hugo award for best sci-fi short story of the year. Like most of my work, I published it under the name Lara Adams.
“Why do you use a pen name when you write?” Matt asks as he finishes the story.
“Don’t be so nosy. Her reasons might be private,” Teri scolds.
“I do it to maintain my privacy,” I say.
“I don’t believe that,” Matt teases. “Most people, when they’re nobodies, talk about how they wouldn’t mind the money fame brings, but they’d hate to have people chasing after them taking their picture. But I think everybody wants fame.”
“Not me,” I say flatly.
“Come on,” Matt insists. “Wouldn’t you love to have your picture taken by paparazzi and splashed all over the magazine covers?”
“Paparazzi are vultures. They’re the last people I’d want near me.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Teri says. “Our society suffers from celebrity addiction. So much reality TV gives people the impression that the only way to be happy is to be famous.”