Cold Fire

The Friend seemed to fit right into that list.
    Jim quickly wrote another question and showed it to Holly: Where do you come from?
    ANOTHER WORLD.
    Which could mean anything from heaven to Mars.
    Do you mean another planet?
    YES.
    “My God,” Holly said, awed in spite of herself.
    So much for the great hereafter.
    She looked up from the tablet and met Jim's eyes. They seemed to shine brighter than ever, although the chrome-yellow light had imparted to them an exceptional green tint.
    Restless with excitement, she rose onto her knees, then eased back again, sitting on her calves. The top tablet page was filled with the entity's responses. Holly equivocated only briefly, then tore it off and set it aside, so they could see the second page. She glanced back and forth between Jim's questions and the rapidly appearing answers.
    From another solar system?
    YES.
    From another galaxy?
    YES.
    Is it your vessel we've seen in the pond?
    YES.
    How long have you been here?
    10,000 YEARS.
    As she stared at that figure, it seemed to Holly that this moment was more like a dream than some of the actual dreams she'd been having lately. After so much mystery, there were answers—but they seemed to be coming too easily. She did not know what she had expected, but she had not imagined that the murkiness in which they had been operating would clear as quickly as if a drop of a magical universal detergent had been dropped into it.
    “Ask her why she's here,” Holly said, tearing off the second sheet and putting it with the first.
    Jim was surprised. “She?”
    “Why not?”
    He brightened. “Why not?” he agreed.
    He turned to a new page in his own tablet and wrote her question: Why are you here?
    Floating up through the paper to the surface: TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND.
    “You know what this is like?” Holly said.
    “What's it like?”
    “An episode of Outer Limits.”
    “The old TV show?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Wasn't that before your time?”
    “It's on cable.”
    “But what do you mean it's like an episode of Outer Limits!”
    She frowned at TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND and said, “Don't you think it's a little … trite?”
    “Trite?” He was irritated. “No, I don't. Because I haven't any idea what alien contact should be like. I haven't had a whole lot of experience with it, certainly not enough to have expectations or be jaded.”
    “I'm sorry. I don't know … it's just… okay, let's see where this leads.”
    She had to admit that she was no less awed than she had been when the light had first appeared in the walls. Her heart continued to thud hard and fast, and she was still unable to draw a really deep breath. She still felt that they were in the presence of something superhuman, maybe even a higher power by one definition or another, and she was humbled by it. Considering what she had seen in the pond, the pulsing luminescence even now swimming through the wall, and the words that kept shimmering into view on the tablet, she would have been hopelessly stupid if she had not been awed.
    Undeniably, however, her sense of wonder was dulled by the feeling that this entity was structuring the encounter like an old movie or TV script. With a sarcastic note in his voice, Jim had said that he had too little experience with alien contact to have developed any expectations that could be disappointed. But that was not true. Having grown up in the sixties and seventies, he had been as media-saturated as she had been. They'd been exposed to the same TV shows and movies, magazines and books; science fiction had been a major influence in popular culture all their lives. He had acquired plenty of detailed expectations about what alien contact would be like—and the entity in the wall was playing to all of them. Holly's only conscious expectation had been that a real close encounter of the third kind would be like nothing the novelists and screenwriters imagined in all their wildest flights of fantasy, because when referring to life from another world, alien meant alien, different, beyond easy comparison or comprehension.
    “Okay,” she said, “maybe familiarity is the point. I mean, maybe it's using our modern myths as a convenient way to present itself to us, a way to make itself comprehensible to us. Because it's probably so radically different from us that we could never understand its true nature or appearance.”
    “Exactly,” Jim said. He wrote another question: What is the light we see in the