Something Comes Across

{An early work of science fiction, this story functions primarily as an allegory about the problems and possibilities for communication between all forms of separate entities. A theme that would later become the focus of Charles's opus Anoint...}

It had appeared at some point in the night, was there waiting gently nestled in the grass when they'd woken up in the morning.

Johnny, upon seeing the bit of rock, was recalled to a cataclysm of his youth, seemingly unrelated. It was an emotion he didn't know then and would only later decide to call loss. Not that he'd never lost anything before that, but in those earliest instances nothing to was firm even to define loss against. He would to have had to have lost. But when the dog died it crystalized both the having and the losing, as well as backforming a whole host of having hads--certainly a new creation as well and distinct from either having or losing, a compound really that computed through time and memory past hads, past losses and their absence in the proper moment of either. Complicated stuff really.

All this was at first glance at the stone laying gently in the grass rushing back to him. It wasn't an orb or anything that appeared constructed for a purpose. It was rough just like any other stone. It lacked, or rather the ground around it, lacked anything like evidence of its transmission. So its placement said something about purpose. The surprising thing was that he would have expected the opposite: a clearly meaningful object propelled haphazardly into the lawn around their house. That might have meant that purposeful things are prone to chaos, that best laid plans and all that can't account for all the tiny variations of grass blades and the hole he'd dug as a kid at the far side of the yard that at least would have caused the thing to skip if it had careened out of the sky.

So that memory that wasn't really a memory but more of a feeling that hit him was giving way to other thoughts. But the first one hadn't gone away really. It just sat there at the ground level of his mind without moving at all. Not becoming more articulate except as it spiraled outwards into a memory about trying to tell this to his sister and her not really following him but holding him anyways.

When practical matters came to, he decided to call some people he knew at the university who studied local artifacts including the rocks on the hillside. He didn't think it was anything valuable like gold or silver. It was a dirty mud clump looking thing.

"Well it certainly isn't from this planet." Johnny was sitting in the little dust motes floating perfectly still in the air of the cramped little university office. "We've never seen a thing like it, right down to the molecular level. It's like a different kind of carbon. Not like it is heavier or lighter or differently arranged, but a different kind altogether. If I knew a way of saying something further out than 'not of this planet' I'd be saying that to you."

"And I suppose you all will want to keep it now. Play around with it and figure out where it might have come from."

"I'm telling you, we don't know a thing about that. I mean, this didn't come down from Mars. Hell it didn't fly in from further out in the universe. We've seen asteroids and they are something. We've seen new molecules. We know what it is to see something new and add it to the chart." He's tapping the edge of the periodic table with a lit cigarette. The canvas chart is away from the wall and swings as he taps it, but doesn't catch.

"Well that is certainly something. All I meant to say was that you all can hold onto it. I wouldn't know a thing to do with it myself. Put it on the mantle or in the garden. Make up a good story about Martians and moon rocks and charge people to come and see it. But I'm not much for showmanship."

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