Dark Energy (9 page)

“Possibly.”

“Why don't you have mothers?”

“What?”

“You have a father. What about a mother?”

His lips straightened into a tight line, and he pushed the mushrooms away. “Is this what you attacked Coya about?”

“We didn't attack Coya. We just talked to her about it.”

“She felt betrayed.”

I felt my stomach drop. “That wasn't our intention. Not at all.”

“Coya is a good girl,” he said. “We did not come to this school to be treated poorly. We are the children of Mai.”

“Well—” But he interrupted me.

“I do not know what is on the outside of the ship. I have never looked at the outside of the ship until we came to this planet. I didn't know we were even on a ship. I didn't know what a ship was. I thought I was in my home.”

“What?” Just then my phone buzzed, and I snatched it up. “Hi, Dad.”

“The FBI has me surrounded.”

“I'll be right out.” I slid my laptop back into my backpack, said good-bye to Suski, and headed to the school's front entrance. Dad was standing there, looking at a display case of inventions created by former Minnetonka students. He was flanked by two frowning FBI agents.

“Aly,” Dad said, and gave me a hug. He had shaved and was even wearing a clean shirt. I was impressed.

“You didn't have to go all out,” I said. “I kind of expected you to be grizzled and covered with coffee stains.”

“I'm taking my daughter to dinner,” he said. “I can at least
shave and put on deodorant. I even showered. I know you're doubting me.”

One of the FBI agents spoke up. “She's not allowed to leave the property.”

“Excuse me?” I said, just as Dad said, “What? Why not?”

“Orders from above,” the FBI agent said. “Just yesterday she snuck out of the building with one of the aliens.”

“Aly,” Dad said. I couldn't tell if it was his real disappointed voice or his fake one.

“We were outside for maybe three minutes,” I said.

“All I know,” the agent said, “is that we have new orders. If students leave they cannot come back in.”

“Want to join me in the cafeteria?” I asked.

Dad looked down at me. “It would be an honor.”

“They're serving deep-fried walleye. It's a fish,” I said. “I looked it up. It's called ‘walleye' because its eyes point out to the sides, like it's looking at the walls. The opposite of cross-eyed. And they're serving steak with a mushroom sauce that one of the Guides really likes.”

“Really? Which one?”

“The boy.”

“I bet he does. They live off the stuff. We've found huge mushroom cultivation chambers. They grow well inside the ship.”

“He also eats anything that looks like pureed vegetables. I think they must have eaten algae?”

“And here I thought you weren't learning anything.”

“Oh, I've learned tons of stuff here. Tons. Did you know that in
Call of Duty: Black Ops
, if you shoot all the mannequin heads really fast, you can get to a secret level? I'm telling you, this is a quality education.”

“Wow.”

“You have to be in multiplayer.”

“I'll remember that,” he said. “This is a nice cafeteria. But, well, seafood in Minnesota?” he said, shaking his head.

“I'm craving it,” I said.

“Lead on.”

The cook behind the counter fried us some fresh fish and some chips to go with it. Dad wouldn't take one of the desserts, so I took two cherry pies—his favorite—and set one on his side of the table. He did, however, get a few pieces of pickled herring. Probably just to gross me out.

As he dipped his hot walleye into tartar sauce, he spoke. “So where are your Guides? I can't pick them out in this sea of pasty-white Minnesotans.”

“Suski is sitting alone at his table over your left shoulder. And Coya is probably not eating dinner. She's a lot more liberal than her brother. Not liberal in the way that a scientist hippie who grew up in San Francisco is liberal. But she's liberal in the sense that we got her to wear shoes, and she hangs out and takes
Cosmo
quizzes and goes to parties.”

Dad turned his head to cough into his arm and presumably
got a look at the ever stoic Suski.

“They don't wear shoes?”

“I know! Crazy, right? They're not very guiding. Listen to this: they don't wear shoes, they don't have mothers—what does that even mean?—and they don't know how to read.”

“They don't know how to read?”

“That shocks you more than the mothers thing?”

“Different cultures do different things,” he said. “Even Plato said we didn't need mother-child attachment. But they should be able to read. You'd think a star-faring race would emphasize education.”

“I know!”

“Honestly, we've noticed the same thing with the engineers we've been working with. They know how to run the engines—which are surprisingly complicated and take a lot of manpower—but we haven't been able to get much of substance from them as to how anything works. They know their jobs, but they aren't pouring out great wisdom.”

“But you're learning a lot, right?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Tons. We're just having to do most of the figuring out on our own.”

“So what about all the big questions?” I asked, glancing at him. “Faster-than-light travel? Their mission? What that ship is made of that allowed it to skid for nearly three hundred miles and not break up?”

He rubbed a hand over his face tiredly. “I wish. But we
have their engines. And somewhere, in that giant sea of Guides, there's someone who knows how they work. We just have to figure out who. My guess is this: all the real knowledge is being saved as bargaining chips by this Mai guy. The real scientists are just blending in until we reach some deals.”

“Then we ought to start reaching some deals,” I said.

“No kidding. Days are dragging on, and things aren't going well—not for us, not for them. It's got to be getting pretty miserable in that shantytown where they're living.”

“It's not going to be getting much better anytime soon,” I said. “It's not like we have an entire empty city where we can move them.”

“And I don't know if you've been following the news, but all the federal money is going to victims of the crash first. They haven't approved anything for the Guides.”

“I can't say that I blame them,” I said.

“Congress is flailing,” he said. “Mai is the only person from the Guides who is talking—it's not like they have a secretary of state and a vice president. It all just seems to be Mai.”

“What about that woman who came out of the ship with Mai?”

“Right now it's the president and Mai.”

“And in the meantime, the people are going crazy. We had a hundred protestors out in front of the school today.”

“You were headline news yesterday. I'm not surprised.”

“I'm sharing a room with one of them,” I said.

“And are you being a good roommate?”

“I am being a
model
roommate. And she's a model roommate. They're totally normal people—and I use that word intentionally. They're people, just like any other kind of people. You wouldn't know the difference between her and me, except for my abundance of melanin.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh, really?”

“We dyed her hair, to match mine.”

“What?”

“She loved the streak in my hair, and she said she wanted one—and, like good friends and roommates, we dyed her hair and then snuck her around the back of the building to avoid the RA.”

“If I didn't know you were a good kid, I'd be terrified.”

“What makes you think I'm a good kid?”

“Because a bad kid would lie about sneaking out and getting caught.”

After we finished eating, Dad jokingly asked for a beer and the cafeteria amazingly had not only one, but a selection. I'd forgotten that they served all the adults, too. I ordered coffee and alternately steamed my hands and sipped at it.

“Okay, Alice,” he said, once he had half a bottle of microbrew in him. “I have a proposal.”

I nodded for him to continue.

“This is between you and your closest friends—the two girls in your dorm room, the ones you keep saying are so smart.”

“They're way smart—one of them at math and one at genetics.”

“Okay, here's my problem: that ship is enormous.” He took another long swallow of his beer. “You're a responsible kid.”

“Very.”

“And you get good grades. You're going to college.”

I wondered how potent that microbrew was, but I agreed and kept listening.

“And your two roommates sound like they're just counting down time until graduation.”

“Brynne already has offers to skip senior year and go to college. And Rachel's like a math savant.”

“Then that does it,” he said.

“That does what?”

“Get some cameras and come down to the crash site. We have a lot of people from NASA there, and we've recruited kids from the University of Minnesota, but we need more people on the ground to help us document it.”

“What? Really?”

“Here's the deal: we've heard rumors from Washington that the United Nations is trying to take over the crash site, but we want the first crack at it. We want to map it and
understand the technology and photograph everything, and it's so big that we can't do it all with the manpower we have. We estimate that so far we've explored about 15 percent of it. It doesn't help that the hull is round, so we need climbers to get at half of it.”

“So you're inviting me and my friends to go inside the ship?” I confirmed, giddy to tell Rachel and Brynne.

“And work, yes.”

“When can we start?”

“Tomorrow.”

“That's perfect. I've been tracking it online, and Bluebell is supposed to get here in the morning. But you're going to have to clear this with the headmistress and the FBI.”

Dad pulled out one of his NASA business cards. “These tend to get me what I want.”

I grabbed my phone to call Rachel so that she and Brynne could come down and hear the news. The two of them were jogging around the corner in their pajamas in less than a minute. Brynne looked gorgeous as always, and Rachel had her hair in curlers—although she didn't seem to care if anyone saw her that way.

They sat down at the table, and I couldn't keep the grin off my face.

“Dad wants us to go inside the ship.”

Brynne's jaw dropped, and Rachel squealed.

“Oh yeah,” I said. “This is my dad.”

Brynne stood up and shook his hand. “Brynne Fuller.”

Rachel reached across the table. “I'm Rachel,” she said, too dumbfounded to even give her last name.

“What's it like down there?” Brynne asked. “I mean, we've been watching the news, but what's it really like?”

“It's not a pretty sight,” he said. “I don't know what the count is up to, but it looks like a sea of endless tents. I think every Porta-Potty in Minnesota is there.”

“Meaning they . . . do their business just like people do?” I asked. I'd been the one who'd had to explain toilets to Coya, and it was much harder than I would have expected.

“They're just like humans from head to toe, as far as our researchers have gathered. Their translators are getting really good, but I'm not privy to all the interesting conversations.”

“Why not? You're director of special projects!” Rachel said.

“My job is entirely based on the ship. Too bad it's getting pretty rotten in there. Remember a couple years ago when a cruise ship lost power and kind of drifted around at sea for an extra week, and none of the water pumps worked so none of the toilets worked?”

I made a face. “Gross.”

“That's kind of the picture that we're getting from inside the ship. Want to know how many Guides were on it?”

“Sure.”

“Fifty-five thousand.”

Rachel spoke. “Really? We'd guessed one thirty.”

He laughed, and then finally took a bite of his cherry pie. I knew he'd eat it. I win. “I came up with that same number on the plane. But, nope, it's less. Still, fifty-five thousand. That's a lot.”

“What else is on the ship? If there're eighty thousand fewer Guides than you thought?”

“I've actually gotten to talk to a few of the Guides who worked in engineering,” he said. “They have some words that don't translate, which means they're probably terms that we don't have in English—new, alieny things like dilithium crystals or beryllium spheres. Do you realize what kind of advances we'll be able to make in our space program based off the ship alone, not to mention their engineering minds? It's amazing!”

I talked with my mouth full of pie. “You sound like a kid on Christmas.”

“This is better than Christmas,” Rachel said, looking at me like I was crazy.

“So we'll be doing what on the ship?” Brynne asked. “Just taking pictures?”

“Yep,” he said. “But I'll explain all of that tomorrow.”

“Is it safe?” Rachel asked.

“I'll only send you to safe areas,” Dad said in a gentle voice. “We're going to need an army of monkeys to fully explore this thing because so much of it is upside down, but
right now we're just focusing on the bottom couple of floors, so there won't be much climbing. You'll get dizzy. And if you are prone to throwing up, you might throw up. We've found some rooms where people got pretty injured—a lot of dried blood—and some other rooms that were used as temporary bathrooms. But nothing dangerous.”

“Sounds good to me!” Brynne exclaimed, and Rachel nodded vigorously.

Despite the girls' enthusiasm, there was something weird about the way my dad was acting. I knew him too well. He was hiding something.