He likes this girl. He will give her the gift she wants.
“Oh, Jesus.” She reaches into a bag, searching for her two tape recorders. “May I record our conversation?”
“Of course.” He spots something in the bag. “You found the gold? At the station?”
She blushes, and pulls out a half-pound golden cylinder the size of a lipstick. “You can have it back. I took one, as a research sample.”
He strokes the ingot with one finger. “And you said you saw images at the station?”
“Projected on those big spherical monitors in the, like, office.”
“To the left and straight back as you entered?”
“Hundreds of pictures on those monitors, 3-D photographs, in color, of huts and houses and towns and farm animals and pots and carts and soldiers and children and temples, it looked like from all over the world, Europe, Asia, Africa—”
He hates to seem smug, which he’s afraid is about to become his default affect, but he can’t suppress a knowing smile, and interrupts her. “I know. I took them.”
“Shot from overhead, mostly, I guess with a very long lens?”
“Intelligence gathering is supposed to be clandestine. And I tried to minimize the Hawthorne elect—people behaving differently when they know they’re being watched.”
“A lot of the images look extremely old. Unbelievably old. Not the pictures, I mean, but the people and buildings and so on.”
“They are.”
She hesitates before asking the next question. “So, you were taking photographs all over the world before…before photography was invented?” This is precisely what she’d hypothesized, that he must be at least two hundred years old. Incredible.
“And moving pictures as well—videos, more or less. From when I arrived until the day the camera was destroyed. By the time the technology existed…indigenously, it seemed pointless for me to start up again.”
“May I ask your age?”
This time it’s he who pauses, anticipating her reaction. “The station was established in 429, CE.”
She stares, saying nothing. Her skepticism races to catch up with her astonishment.
He restates his answer, trying to help her register the fact. “I arrived fifteen hundred and eighty-one years ago.”
“You’re sixteen hundred years old?”
“Eighteen hundred and seven. Which is fairly ancient even on my planet.”
Finally, she thinks, yes: “on my planet.” It had seemed impossible, but it also seemed like the only plausible explanation. She tries not to hyperventilate. “Where—what planet are you from?”
“We call it”—for an instant his voice slips into an inhuman half hiss, half buzz—“Vrizhongil”—and then back to English with no trace of an accent: “It’s a moon, really, which orbits a large planet. Which orbits our sun, of course. About sixty-two light-years away. Very close by, in the scheme of things. But far enough, it turns out, that it made me expendable.”
Nancy says nothing, and continues to stare. Can this be happening? Can all of this possibly be real?
He had imagined this encounter hundreds of times, thousands, even rehearsed it. “You’re wondering if I’m insane, I expect. Well, there have been moments over the years when I’ve begun wondering that very thing: Am I mad? Is this story—spy from another planet stationed on Earth and abandoned by his superiors, almost two thousand years old, undersea polar base—is this all delusion, some sorry old man’s schizophrenic gibberish? And when I’ve reached those moments of existential crisis, this is one of the things I do, to prove to myself that I’m sane, that I am who I believe I am.”
He picks up a pair of nail scissors from the coffee table and jabs hard into the palm of his right hand. His blood is a kind of Day-Glo orange, and as it drips from his hand onto the table it sizzles and burns the wood like acid.
“Of course,” he says, grabbing a tissue to wipe his hand and the wood, “a skeptic would think this is a trick, some theatrical special elect. But you, Ms. Zuckerman, you have seen the Arctic station. And you found my picture there.”
“Yes.”
“So given the evidence, perhaps I don’t need to perform any further mortifications to establish my bona fides.” He’s smiling. He really does not want to remove his eyes from their sockets, or show her that he has a bifurcated phosphorescent penis and no anus at all.
“I believe you,” she tells him.
He explains that his government established a system to monitor civilizations on planets feasible for Vrizhongilians to reach, and that Earth was one of those 116 designated planets when he embarked on his 83-year-long flight here. The big ship carried four other intelligence agents headed for four other planets in the vicinity, along with their terrestrial stations in prefabricated pieces and individual expeditionary aircraft. A reconnaissance probe was sent to the surface to photograph humans, so that the necessary reconstructive surgery—remodeling ears, removing external neck cartilage, giving his skin a convincingly soft texture and pinkish tint, and so on—could be performed by doctors aboard the mother ship. His station was installed beneath the polar ice. And, voilà, he was on his own.
Sending a message between Earth and Vrizhongil took sixty-two years, so communication was impractical. He spent six weeks each year doing the field work—flying around the world, observing human settlements, taking pictures, making videos, scribbling notes—and the rest of his time organizing and distilling his material.
“Huh,” she says.
“What?”
“That’s so much time for assembling and editing.”
“Well, yes. Our productivity problem. You see, we sleep twenty or twenty-one hours a day. It’s the single thing I envy most about you. About people here, I mean.” Eating and digestion, he did not add, were what he found monstrous about humans. No doubt all intelligent species have their horrific and pathetic outliers, the psychopaths and murderers, the self-mutilators and televangelists. But on Earth, every single person chews food and swallows and shits, and it still disgusts him.
Once each century, he says, a mother ship would visit to resupply him and take back home a copy of his meticulous multimedia chronicle of another Earth century. And by the way—every one of his first six chronicles received the highest possible rating from headquarters.
“So your people, back on your planet, were only seeing your reports of life on Earth a hundred years after the fact.”