Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales (16 page)

The mom watched them: Lola watched the mom. As the babies played with the bow and the arrows, those eyes slid around the top of her head so that she could watch them all. Lola had to smile: one eye per baby was a useful ratio—she suspected some human mothers would kill for that kind of ability.

One of the babies made a bigger finger than the others, something that looked more like a suction cup than anything else, and wrapped it around one of the arrowheads. For a moment it munched and mumbled at it, then spat it out again, seemingly unhurt: but it made a little noise as it did so, an unhappy chirp.

The mom-thing moaned at it. The sound struck Lola as an unhappy one.
Maybe,
she thought,
it’s the alien version of ‘Don’t put that in your mouth, you don’t know where it’s been
—
’
 The other babies were doing the same suction-cup trick, now, with stones and pieces of twig they found lying around, with pine cones and dry grass. Each time, a “suction cup” would fold around the object, worry at it a little, then spit it out again. Each time, Lola noticed, the faint blue glow inside the babies would flare a little brighter, then pale down again. As if disappointed—

Lola’s mouth dropped open.
They’re hungry,
she thought
. They’re looking for something they can eat!

“Do you need food?” she said softly to the mom-thing. It looked at her, and Lola couldn’t shake the thought that the creature wasn’t completely uncomprehending. “Do you read minds or anything like that?” She tried to make pictures in her head of food—trail mix, granola, beef jerky, the other stuff she had brought with her. Wryly she wondered if any of it would seem appetizing at all to something from the far side of wherever.

The mom-thing just looked at her. “Well,” Lola said, “come on. You come back over the hill with me. We’ll see if you can do anything with what I’ve got.”

Very slowly she stood up. The babies crowded back as she did, flattening somewhat and staring up at her with all their tiny eyes: but the mom-thing didn’t move, just watched Lola. “Come on,” Lola said, picked up the bow and the arrows, and started to make her way back up the hill again.

They followed her, though slowly at first. The mom-thing came after her, and the babies shuffled along the ground, still trying unsuccessfully to eat things as they went. Several times the mom slid eyes around to look at them and made that little moan again, the “Don’t eat that, it’s icky” sound. The babies obeyed her, left the rocks and pinecones and came after, but reluctantly, it seemed to Lola. They weren’t now moving even as briskly as they had when she had first seen them, only a few minutes ago.
Are they tired,
she wondered,
or are they getting weak from hunger? I hope I’ve got something they
can
eat…

Lola made it up the slope with less trouble than she’d had before, even though it was darker. On the hillcrest she paused, checked to see that the mom-thing could see where she was going, and started down the other side. As far as she could see, everything in and around her circle was as she had left it, and there were no demons or other weirdnesses roiling around in it and furious at having been first summoned, then put on hold.
What a relief. All I’ve got to worry about are a bunch of hungry aliens who’ve dropped in for dinner.

And this is an improvement?
shrieked part of her mind. Lola made a wry face as she came to the bottom of the slope, looked up behind her.

The mom-thing and her babies came down the slope and shuffled straight across the clearing, messing up the circle: the babies immediately paused to try to eat the powdered chalk. Lola shrugged and went over to where she had her backpack hanging from a tree, undid the rope and let it down. “Here,” she said to the mom, “tell them to come over and give these a try.” And she started emptying out her next five days’ rations near the little camp stove.

The next hour or so was profoundly disappointing. Lola gave the babies trail mix: they spat it out. She gave them granola: they spat it out. She gave them dried apricots. She gave them apple leather. They spat both of them out. She gave them pemmican, and beef jerky. They refused even to try the pemmican. They made a valiant attempt at the beef jerky, and complained in many small chirps after having to spit it out again and again: there was something about it that they couldn’t handle.

Lola sat down crosslegged by her camp stove, lit it, and made them instant soup, cooled down to lukewarm. The babies gathered around the little aluminum camp pot, confused, and tried to eat that first. At this, Lola found herself exchanging a look of pure amused frustration with the mom-thing, and realized that those four black eyes were not as expressionless as she had thought. “Is this a physiology thing,” Lola said to the mom, “or are they just incredibly picky?”

The mom moaned at her, a helpless sound. There was more than frustration in the noise: there was unease as well. Lola could see that the babies were glowing much less brightly than even a little while ago.

“Right,” Lola said, and sighed. She put her finger in the soup and wiggled it around there. The babies got the idea, put their own “eating” fingers in the soup and tried it. A moment later there was something like a group sneeze, and Lola was more or less spray-painted with cream of chicken soup.

“Okay,” Lola said. “Make a note. No soup.” She tried making them instant noodles. They tried eating the noodles, and spat them out, but one of the babies then produced several extra fingers, and started to knot the noodles together and wave them around.

The mom moaned. “
Don’t
play with your food,” Lola said, but she was beginning to feel desperate too, now. One package after another, she went through everything in her pack. The babies could not eat freeze-dried ice cream (and Lola had to agree with them that it was fairly inedible even for humans). They couldn’t eat fruit. They couldn’t eat candy. She had started hand-feeding them—they didn’t have any teeth that she could see: it seemed safe enough—and then one of them had more or less climbed up in her lap. It was an odd feeling: the little creature was extremely light, and felt like a Zip-Loc bag full of warm air. It had draped itself over her knee, and she was now feeding it M&M’s in a hopeless kind of way. One after another it ate them, and one after another it shot them out against the camp stove,
p-ting! P-ting!

The mom moaned.

“Kids,” Lola said. But that moan had more fear than ever in it, now. The babies’ lights were fading down very low.

“They’ve tried everything,” Lola said. “Everything. They can’t eat any of it. I don’t know what to do.” She leaned one elbow on her knee and rubbed her eyes briefly, cradling the baby on her knee with the other.

Something brushed the arm she was holding it with. Lola sighed, opened her eyes, had a look.

The spot where she had knocked the scab off her forearm had gotten scraped again, either going up the hill or coming down it, and was bleeding. Lola had paid no attention to it: she was bleeding from so many other places that any given scratch was no longer a big issue. However, someone else had noticed it. The baby in her lap had attached its suction-cup to the bleeding place, and was sopping up the blood.

And the blue glow inside it was getting stronger.

Lola simply stared for a moment, too tired and too astonished to do anything sudden. Then she looked at the mom-thing.

Two of the mom’s eyes were fixed on the baby, which was getting brighter by the minute. Two of them were looking at Lola. Both sets of eyes seemed to have gotten bigger. She did not moan, or make any sound at all for a moment.

Then she moaned, very loudly indeed: so loudly that all the babies, the listless ones as well as their more vigorous sibling, started “upright” like very shocked sunny-side-up eggs. The three not sitting in Lola’s lap went humping over to their mother as fast as they could. The fourth one withdrew its suction cup and made a chirp that was the unhappiest sound Lola thought she had ever heard: but slowly it humped down from her lap and went to its mother, the ground shining under it as it went.

The mom and Lola looked at each other. It was a long look. After a few moments of it, Lola was fairly certain that, while the creature might not be telepathic, it understood the score very well indeed.

The mom started to lead its babies away from Lola, back over the hill.

“No!” Lola said.

The mom stopped, looked at her. Those eyes, which had seemed so expressionless before, were now plainly full of both grief and resolve.

“No!” Lola said. She was starting to make connections: the right ones, she hoped. “That light inside, it’s what makes your ship go, isn’t it? And all of you, too. If you don’t have enough energy, you can’t leave, and you’ll all die after a while—“

The mom looked at her. Then started to move away again.

“No!” Lola said, and stood up, jangling with desperation. “There has to be something.
There has to be
—you can’t just—“

In the bushes, something rattled. Lola nearly lost her temper. “Goddamn rabbits,” she said, picking up a rock—

Then she froze.

“Yes,” she said softly. “Rabbits.”

She picked up the bow, and the arrows. The mom, with her babies gathered around, hunkered down and watched as Lola put on the bow-guard with grim determination, then slipped into the bushes herself.

What followed would have been funny had Lola not been so desperate. She had never actually tried to shoot anything live before. All her work had been with stationary targets, bales of hay with plastic bulls-eyes wrapped around them. None of that had prepared her for
this
, in the dark, in the cold, buried up to her neck in manzanita, itching, being bitten by bugs while trying to aim. Her own incompetence frustrated her to the point of tears. She wasted several arrows into the brush and knew she only had so many: was afraid to shoot, and knew she had to try.

What saved Lola, though, was the rabbits’ inherent stupidity: or perhaps campers had spoiled them by hand-feeding them. At any rate, scattered all around the little campstove by the babies’ depredations was a great pile of all kinds of food, which visiting aliens might not be able to eat, but which visiting rabbits were apparently finding too tempting to resist. The first one, a big one, she shot from hiding, at a range of about six feet, while it was eating her granola. Another rabbit, creeping out from bushes nearby, was briefly frightened away by this, but then came back only a few breaths later and started nibbling at the freeze-dried ice cream. That one Lola shot not only from need, but to put it out of its misery.

Those’ll do for a start
, Lola thought, and came out of the brush, rejoining the mom and the babies, and rummaging around in her backpack for the spare camp-stove pot and the Swiss Army knife. She was trembling, both with surprise at herself, for what she had done, and with fear that it might still somehow be useless. With certainty that surprised her, a person who had never touched a dead animal except the kind you get in pieces and wrapped in plastic wrap at the supermarket, Lola slit the first rabbit’s throat and held it over the pot to bleed into it. She was surprised at the amount of blood.

She was also surprised at how fast it went. The babies crowded around the pot, put their suction cups down into it, and sucked and sucked and sucked. The blood from the first rabbit was gone in just a few seconds. Lola and the mom both looked at them anxiously: and after about half a minute, the glow began to get stronger. Stronger still—

Lola slit the second rabbit’s throat and bled it. The babies kept on drinking. The glow got surprisingly bright: they were like little flying-saucer shaped Christmas lights, and somehow they simply looked more contented now. Their mom watched them: and she watched Lola. There was an odd similarity in the expressions in the two pairs of eyes…

The babies got tired of feeding, after a while, and slipped away from the pot to lie flattened here and there on the ground. The light got brighter as they did.
Digesting?
Lola wondered, and speculated on whether they would need burping, and whether burping them would be safe without wrapping yourself in a fire blanket first.

The mom humped along to the pot, then, having waited for the last of them to leave, and finished the contents herself. Her glow, too, started to strengthen: it never got as bright as the babies’, but it became deep, and its pulses, as she drank, were strong. With great care the mom polished the pot perfectly clean: then backed away from it, and looked at Lola.

Lola reached out to pick up the pot, examined it. “I could use you around the house,” she said.

The mom moaned. The babies humped themselves up again, came over to her.

Lola and the mom looked at one another silently for a moment. “It’s a shame you don’t read minds,” Lola said.

The look in the mom’s eyes suggested that mind-reading wasn’t everything.

“You’ll want to get your ship going again and get yourselves home fast,” Lola said. “I understand.”

The mom moaned again, and began leading the babies back up the slope. Lola went with them. At the top of the slope, the mom focused all five eyes around on her and moaned very loudly, which Lola took to mean “Stay back so you don’t get hurt.”

“Okay,” Lola said. “Listen—go home safe. And drive more carefully this time, okay?”

The eyes mixed themselves about briefly on top of the mom, then slid around the other side of her, and she headed down the slope.

At the bottom of it, she and the babies gathered around the globe where it lay slightly burrowed into the ground. It was cold, stone-grey when they started whatever they were doing. It brightened, though, as one after another they pressed themselves up against its indefinite, misty surface, seeming to press themselves right through it. Lola couldn’t see exactly how it happened, but at the end of the process they had all vanished inside it, and the globe glowed and pulsed with a blue fire that was a combination, Lola thought, of all their inner lights.

Utterly silently, the globe rose up out of the gully, arced up into the night sky, and receded, at greater and greater speed, a shooting star in reverse, getting smaller and further away until it finally vanished. No thunderclap, no flash of light: just one more star among many.