American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,203

but the rest of the truck appeared fine. The Ganymede looked to its right, and saw there were people in the car, two young ones. It sat there, frozen, and the children said DADDY DADDY WHAT ARE YOU DOING, and the Ganymede, lost, terrified, confused, opened its mouth, and screamed…

A wall. A crash. A splash of blood.

And no more screaming.

Then lightning again. The dome, the wonderful dome, almost out, almost back to where they came from, into their skies with the pink moon, and if it went far enough the Ganymede would glimpse their red stars…

But back down again, again.

It opened its eyes. It was holding something in its hands—the blackened remnants of a rake, it looked like—and dropped it.

The Ganymede looked around. It was standing in someone’s yard. The front door opened. A fat woman ran out to him, terrified, and she said MICHAEL MICHAEL ARE YOU ALL RIGHT WHAT HAPPENED.

The Ganymede looked at her, bewildered. Then it looked at its hands.

It did not recognize the watch, the hairy knuckles, the bitten fingernails. Not the same hands.

It was in someone else. In another vessel.

It looked at the woman, then shoved her to the ground and kicked her, over and over again until she stopped crying. Then it turned away and ran into the woods.

That was a good day. It was the beginning day.

The Ganymede experimented with this odd phenomenon over several years. It killed itself in a variety of ways: guns, knives, chemicals (ingested and poured onto itself), walking into traffic, driving into traffic, inserting parts of itself into garbage disposals, and so on. At first it did this in the presence of people—often family or friends of the vessel it’d overtaken—before deciding this was unwise: its elders were sure to take notice.

THE FIRST, especially. How it hated THE FIRST.

But what it learned was this:

They could not leave Wink. None of them could—Mother had said so. But they were also not permitted to die. So, if the vessel they were bearing expired, they were simply sent back down into another, apparently randomly.

But though it took the Ganymede a while, it learned how to control it: it could pick the vessel it inhabited. So it began to target loners, people alone in their homes or out walking. It toyed with these new hosts for a matter of hours or days before ending its life, rising up, and finding another. In this manner it could operate off radar, and no one could know who or where the Ganymede was.

It could watch its own kind. They did not even know it was there anymore.

Not as smart as they thought, not at all.

But some trappings the Ganymede kept constant. It was not sure why, but it liked certain colors—two of them, specifically: blue and white. The Ganymede, as a rule, despised every single aspect of this world, of this whole grubby plane of reality, but after a while, without ever realizing it, it did find it preferred to be sheathed in those two colors: soft, pale blue, and bright, clean white. They had not really perceived colors well on the other side: light was mere radiation, which was not worth perceiving, for them. But here, using the eyes of its vessel, the Ganymede found itself powerfully drawn to blue and white, and frequently, in the dead of night, it stole blue clothing and white hats from the local stores, just so it could dress itself up and stare at itself in a reflective surface, like a window or a still lake.

Perhaps Mother was blue and white, and he just couldn’t remember it. Maybe he hadn’t seen Her properly.

Maybe that was it. He wasn’t sure.

It wasn’t sure.

Don’t think like that. Don’t. You are not one of them. You do not belong here. You hate this place.

Yes.

Once it knew this trick, the Ganymede wondered what to do with it. Should it pick off the inhabitants of Wink, one by one? That sounded quite pleasant, but wouldn’t one of the elders notice? And besides, what would that accomplish?

Yet when it was up in the dome, wriggling through the sky as a vein of lightning, it realized that if it paid attention it noticed things it had never noticed before. It was like a brief moment of clarity: it just needed to be above it all to see these secrets, to sense them, to be free of its vessel and its trappings of sad little flesh and look.

It discovered there were two things in Wink no one