Memoire: My Saucer Summer

Copyright 1986 David E. Cortesi

That particular saucer had been part of the second wave, the colonizing wave that obediently followed our phony beacons to settle on Mars. The great automated platters had sat there, full of BkLukh colonists in cold sleep, patiently awaiting the first wave's coded signal to thaw out and open up &emdash; "the frozen calamari fleet," they were cruelly dubbed the year before I was born. They were one-way transports, so after the armistice, when the BkLukh sent ships to reclaim their still-sleeping citizens, they left behind a thousand empty saucers in neat files on the dusty floor of Gangis Chasma.

The military sawed up a couple; civilian scientists sawed up a couple more; then everyone knew as much as they wanted to know about BkLukh transports. Their hulls were plain aluminum, their interiors echoed, their inertial motivators were almost dead; so they were declared surplus &emdash; available as-is, where-is for virtually nothing.

It must have been their cheapness that dazzled Uncle Peter. As a scrap dealer he would have known of the fabulous sums being offered for first-wave BkLukh fighters and scouts in working condition, but surely he ought to have known that a transport was a different matter. He must have knitted his heavy brows and opined that he knew better.

At any rate, he paid for a printout of a BkLukh operations manual and a ticket to Mars, and he drove back in a surplus saucer. Of course he was lucky to set down alive, the BkLukh having calculated the useful life of their motivators to four octals.

My older cousin Ralph (Aunt Wilma's son by an earlier marriage; he died only a few years ago) saw the landing. He loved to describe the saucer's descent from an overcast sky, waving his arms in jerky spasms to illustrate. He said it had sounded exactly like "an iron ball rolling down iron stairs." At touchdown, two of its six legs crumpled, two more bent, and its northeast rim pushed up a yard-high berm of soil. And there it sat, immobile, useless, Uncle Peter's shame.

It could have been a shame only to an adult. The scrap yard was a wonderland in my ten-year-old eyes, and the saucer was its crown. Its block-wide arc dominated the horizon from the window of the bedroom where Aunt Wilma settled me, that first summer of my parents' difficulties. I remember staring out at its silhouette, a shallow black chord snipped from the sunset, the evening I arrived. "What's that," I'd asked, and I can remember how my Aunt had looked where I'd pointed, sighed, and said "Never mind."

Of course I'd looked again on arising, to see it looming like a cloud-grey mountain over the rusty jungle in the lowlands of the yard. I brought my excitement to the breakfast table, blurting "Say, is that a real Book Luke ship out there?" as I came into the room.

Aunt Wilma froze, her finger poised over the menu. Ralph, who was thirteen then, glared at me and shook his head. Uncle Peter's jaws stopped chewing beneath his heavy moustache and he looked up from the screen of his pad. "You stay off that saucer," he said heavily, and went back to his calculations.

"What do you usually have for breakfast, young Frank?" asked Aunt Wilma, brightly, and Ralph kicked my ankle, hard, under the table.

"Don't ever, ever mention it," he cautioned me later, outside. "Dad Peter gets really mad if you do."

"But why?" I couldn't imagine anyone's not being thrilled at owning such a prize.

"I dunno," said Ralph, "I guess people give him such a hard time because he's never been able to sell it. Anyway, don't talk about it."

"Does that mean we can't play on it?"

"We ain't supposed to," said Ralph. "You want to see it?" And with the air of a tour guide, he led me through the junkyard to the saucer. It was during that walk that I first heard his lively description of the saucer's arrival.

"It smashed a third of the yard. There's a lot of good stuff underneath it that we can never get at."

"Really? Did it squoosh any people?"

"Nah, it was a Monday and we were closed."

"But there was lots of stuff here?" As we drew near the saucer, it seemed more and more clearly to be sitting on open, weedy ground, an expanse where an industrial district had been removed and the new forest not yet planted.

"Well, we're supposed to say so if anybody asks, but I don't remember there was much here. Anyway," and we scrambled up the grassy berm the saucer had gouged up, "there it is."

I remember running out onto the hull. Scoured by Martian dust and corroded by Terran oxygen, its surface was an unreflective, swirling gray that almost matched the overcast sky. I wanted to run up the gently sloping flange into the sky, to climb onto the swell of the dome as onto a friendly hill. The metal was rock-firm beneath my sneakers.

Ralph followed more slowly while I ran. I ran all the way up to the highest side of the flange, where I flopped down and peered over the edge at the ground 40 meters below (while lying there I rubbed my palm on the delicate knurling of the edge, and wondered at an edge the width of a knuckle on a structure so huge). I stampeded all the way back down the other side, my shoes flapping and pounding on the deck as I slowed at the bottom. I made half a dozen attempts at running up the central dome, which all ended with me either scrambling for traction on hands and knees or turning aside and following an arc back to the flange.

I found Ralph lying on his back against the upper edge of the dome. "I come here sometimes to watch the sky," he said. "You can't see the house or the yard or anything."

"How do we get inside?" I asked, breathless.

"Underneath," he said.

Underneath was a cool, dim cave, floored with muddy soil where the saucer's rim made permanent shade. The saucer rested on the swelling of its lower dome. One of the whole landing legs hung a meter clear of the ground. The other rested on a crushed refrigerator in a thicket of tree-of-heaven.

Ralph led me around the curve of the lower dome, the flange making a roof that dropped down to meet us. Where the light from outside was about to fail, he stopped, and said "Uh-oh."

As my eyes adjusted, I could see he was looking at a pool of water, still and ominous in the twilight. "What happened? Where's the door?"

"Right there." He pointed into the gloom.

Then I saw that the pool of water extended through an opening into the body of the saucer.

"They dug this hollow 'cause the door was partly under the dirt and Dad Peter couldn't get out. I remember him talking to your dad through a crack while he was digging."

"Where was I?"

"You were just a baby. I guess it filled with water last winter." Ralph kicked a clod into the water; it made a musical plop that echoed from the metal overhead, and glossy ripples spiralled out to the hull and crossed back.

A little constellation rippled and twinkled on the water.

"There are lights in there."

"Yeah, I know. There's a lot of them; I was gonna show you, but we can't, now." He turned back toward the sunshine.

"It's alive." The thought of lights still glowing in the ship seized my imagination and I remained behind, peering into the colored shadows beyond the door. Only after Ralph had called several times and come back to fetch me did I reluctantly come away.

Ralph had little interest in the saucer and, after that first day, even less in me. Two of his friends returned from school and the three of them automatically excluded me. With endless pleading I got them to help me find and place a pump to drain the pool in the saucer's doorway. When it was clear, they entered first. We tiptoed into the shadows among dim yellow and red lights, they whispering and giggling. One of Ralph's friends kicked at an array of amber triangles. I shouted a wordless protest, and echoes followed. All three of them shouted at the echoes, competing to see who could shout the coarsest word and choking with laughter at the echoes. When that palled, they were quickly bored with the gloom and the chill and left me alone in it. From then on, although they sometimes hid out on the upper dome to dope off, I had the interior to myself.

And I revelled in it. In the junkyard office I found a small flashlight in a pile of dusty tools, and with it I explored the saucer. The door opened on a small air-lock. On its ceiling was the panel of tiny red and green lights that I'd seen reflected on the pool that first day. Its floor was sticky with mud.

The valves of the rear door of the lock were retracted, and beyond was the first of four long rooms that curved around the lower dome. These contained blocks of red hexes and amber triangles, most of them dark, set into low posts. The room left of the lock, lowest of the four, was flooded. Its red and yellow lights shone up through clear water. At long intervals a drop of condensation would fall loudly from its ceiling and all the lights would shiver under the ripples.

Opposite the lock, a door opened into the drive room, a low, wide circular space. Here blue and white lights burned in panels that curved up from the floor. I spooked myself with the idea that I might start the drive working and be flung away into the sky, but it was only play. The gleaming drive spindles had shattered long before (shards crunched under foot) and the pools of mercury above which they'd spun had been drained, the metal sold. The inertial motivator that had brought Uncle Peter in for his perilous landing had collapsed into a ring of dry, bony parts and lay in narrow heap all around the wall.

In this room I found relics, not of the BkLukh, but of Uncle Peter: a mattress pad, empty food wrappers and water containers, and the yellowing operations manual. I took this out to the light, but the math in it was beyond me and I couldn't relate its diagrams to anything in the blue shadows. I consulted it, though, flipping the pages and then punching decisively at control panels as I directed one perilous landing after another.

The floors and ceilings of all these spaces were studded with wide metal staples, like fat croquet wickets on one-meter centers. They trapped my feet and tripped me a dozen times before I learned to walk with a sliding gait to feel them out. The same staples continued up the two turns of the curving ramp that led to the cargo space above, but that was so steep that I needed the staples to climb it.

The cargo space filled the whole central and upper part of the saucer, a vast space with an echo seconds long. (When, years later, I first entered the Cathedral of the Star, I thought of the saucer at once.) Dim yellow work lights cast intricate shadows into the cloud of delicate, hexagonal cells that filled it.

I explored the edges of this labyrinth. A metal tag incised with blocky characters dangled from the wire frame of each cell; I collected a pile of them and pretended that they were a treasure. But a few cells still held solid containers. Although they were probably storage capsules, I couldn't shake the thought that they might be overlooked BkLukh colonists who would suddenly arise from their containers and confront me. I spent most of my time in the drive room.

I was there the day the BkLukh came aboard. I was startled by a murmur of voices outside. I had stepped behind a panel to listen when I heard a dry, slipping, patting sound: thp thp thp thp. It was, of course, a BkLukh, but I'd seen them only on video, in human surroundings, where their slow, swaying progress on the tips of six tapering, boneless arms made them seem slow and vulnerable.

The ship, however, with its floor and ceiling staples, was a friendly place for a BkLukh (a slukly place as I would one day learn to say, meaning one with many firm holds) and this BkLukh was in full flow, a pinwheel of arms that rippled from hold to hold with a powerful, fluid grace.

Thp thp thp! and it was gently toeing the remains of the motivator ("'emahkhable," it said); then thp thp thp! and it was half way across the drive room and caressing a panel into a flickering display of lights; then thp thp thp! and it was hanging over me, two arms exploring the operations manual I held.

It was my first close encounter with a nonhuman. I remember the rich marbling of its skin and the metal mesh that swathed its central node. I remember the wrinkled black skin on the trifurcated tips of one arm as it turned the pages beneath the wrist eye of another. Then a third arm patted me on the head and -- thp thp thp! -- it was across the room to the foot of the spiral ramp.

"You landed this?" it asked (actually, it said "'oo lant't'iss," but the meaning was clear enough). I thought it was speaking to me, but I was still spellbound.

"Yes, I did," came Uncle Peter's deep voice from the door. He started into the room and immediately stumbled on a staple.

"Remarkable," said the BkLukh. "You were fortunate."

"So I've heard," said Uncle Peter, beginning a cautious walk toward the ramp.

"We will seek the couch of the M!Lin," said the BkLukh, and whirled away up the ramp.

Uncle Peter followed, and I followed him. "Uncle Peter, what does it want?"

"What? Frank, did you follow us?"

I thought it best to ignore that. "The BkLukh, it touched me! What does it want?"

"It wants to buy this -- never mind, boy. Is that my flashlight? You stay down here. In fact, what --" he looked at me, looked up the ramp after the BkLukh, back at me. "You wait right here and don't touch anything." He went up the ramp. I, of course, followed.

The BkLukh had entered the skeletal honeycomb; I could make it out only as a swift shadow passing in front of distant lights, now at one level and again at another. "Uncle Peter, what's it looking for?"

"Frank? I told you &emdash; never mind. I don't know. Some important squid &emdash; person, whatever, rode this ship. It thinks." He rubbed his forehead. "'I seek the ship,' it said; 'show me your ship.' God..."

With a whirl of arms the BkLukh was with us again. "The M!Lin did not travel this way." With a patter, it was off for the ramp. Both I and Uncle Peter said "Wait!" My "Who's the M!Lin?" was submerged in Uncle Peter's "How do you know?"

"The M!Lin is our head, stolen and packed frozen into one of these ships. Restoration of the M!Lin was one of the few good results of the recent war. It desired a souvenir of its adventure, so I sought its ship, but this is not the one."

"Well, they're pretty much the same," Uncle Peter began, as I squeaked "How can you tell?" Once again it chose to answer me. Perhaps my higher voice was easier for it to follow.

"There would be a sign of the name. It was not in any other ship, nor is it in this one. No doubt it was destroyed by guilty plotters, so I shall never know the ship."

It whirled away down the ramp. I looked up at Uncle Peter, who sagged in the yellow twilight. Then I got it. "Wait, BkLukh, wait!" I shouted, running toward the ramp. I tripped on a staple and sprawled full length.

It returned at once. I incoherently signed it to wait and nursed my scraped shin and elbow as it and Uncle Peter hung above me. Sniffing, limping, I led the way down the ramp to the drive room, to the cubby beneath a panel where I had stowed the trove of tags I'd taken from cells above.

The BkLukh reacted instantly to the sight of the heap of metal plates, curling down and flicking through them rapidly. It stopped with one cradled in two arm-tips. "Yes. This says 'Frozen Glory,' the alias the conspirators concocted for the M!Lin. This is the sign. Why were you keeping it here?"

I was at a loss for words. How explain a game of pretend to any adult, let alone an alien? I gaped and whispered "It was a treasure &emdash;" and writhed.

"A treasure? Perhaps. Here." It was pressing something small, a coin or button, into my hand. "This is a token of the M!Lin. With it, when you are an adult, you may demand a patronage favor of diplomatic grade three at any consulate. Or you may trade it to another; many do."

"Thank it, Frank," growled Uncle Peter, and nudged me.

"Thank you, sir."

"Acknowledged. I will go."

"But, about the ship?" said Uncle Peter.

"The ship? The ship is of no value. Who would want one of these?" Clutching the slip of metal, the BkLukh wheeled out through the lock, leaving silence behind.

It was then that Uncle Peter showed his mettle. He stared at the doorway for a long, silent time. Then he said "Hmph. Maybe. Frank?"

Wordlessly, I held out the token, a wrinkled sphere of brass like a nut-meat. "No, that's yours. The squid would have walked out if you hadn't figured out what it wanted. But, Frank &emdash;" he squatted down and looked at me, the blue lights casting a deep shadow over his eyes. "I believe I see a way, with that token, I could turn a profit on this old ship. Would you risk it, in exchange for a promise of ten percent of whatever I can make on it?"

Wordlessly, I held the token out.

"I warn you, some people don't think I'm much of a dealer," he said.

"It's a good ship," I said, and he took the token.

And he applied it well, bartering it among the BkLukh for translations, advice, and advertising privileges. In a few weeks the first tourists arrived to see the ship of the M!Lin. By the time Uncle Peter died, the saucer had long been profitable, the foundation of his fortune and, indirectly, of mine.