Alien Child (6 page)

He nodded. His unevenly trimmed hair was much shorter than her own. “I’m glad you got here. I didn’t know if you would.” His throat moved as he swallowed. “I thought you might be afraid to come.”

“I was.”

The boy was staring at her. When she met his eyes, he looked away hastily. “Uh, I brought your cat,” he said. “You can see for yourself.” He pointed behind himself with one arm.

She walked around the platform. Dusky was curled up on the floor, asleep, but another animal was near her, a large cat with thick orange fur. She looked up at Sven. “You have a cat, too?”

“His name’s Tanj. It’s short for Tangerine—his fur has the same kind of color. Llare got him from the cryonic facility for me.”

“My cat came from the cold place, too.” She leaned against the platform. In all her imaginings about a possible encounter with someone like herself, she had never expected to feel so uneasy. There was so much that she wanted to say, yet she could not bring herself to speak the words.

“I had to take Llipel’s authorization while she was sleeping,” she said at last, although he already knew what she had planned to do. “How did you get authorized?”

“The same way—I took this when Llare was asleep.” He gestured at his authorization. “I’ve taken it a few times. That’s how I found out about you. I wanted to talk to you as soon as I knew, and then I wondered if you’d want to talk to me.”

“But why would you think I wouldn’t want to see you?” she asked as she leaned toward him. “I always hoped I’d see someone like me, that our people might come back here, that I’d have a friend.” She held out her hand; he shrank away. She wondered if she had said something wrong. “You wanted me to come here, Sven, but now you don’t seem that happy to see me.”

He shook his head. “I am. It’s just—” He paused. “Llipel probably didn’t let you find out certain things, but I had the library. Most of what’s there is about the Institute, but I found books and tapes that showed other things. Our kind—they were cruel in a lot of ways. You probably don’t know how cruel. Sometimes I wish I’d never found out.”

“Llare let you use the library?” She felt a stab of envy.

“He didn’t for a long time, but I kept after him about it. Maybe he just got tired of hearing me complain. Finally, he said that maybe the time had come for me to learn more about my kind, but he didn’t seem happy about it.”

“He?”

Sven shrugged. “Llare said words like ‘he’ or ‘she’ don’t really apply to him or Llipel. It’s just easier to think of them as one thing or the other. It makes them seem more like us, I suppose.” He ran a hand through his thick light-brown hair. “They’re not like our kind, though. For one thing, they’re gentler.”

Sven was right about that; Nita thought of her own outbursts and displays of temper. She could understand Sven’s feelings. He had undoubtedly compared himself to his guardian and worried about why he could not maintain such calm himself. But why would he say that their people were cruel?

“Once I was happy about what I was,” he continued. “Not about everything, but I thought I’d change when I was older. I knew my people built this place not just to store embryos and animals but to find ways to prolong life and postpone death for their kind. Llare doesn’t think about death—maybe his kind lives longer than ours—but our people feared it.”

“I know that,” she said. “I learned a few things from the screens.” Her people weakened as they aged and sometimes succumbed to various illnesses. She could not recall ever being ill and almost could not imagine it.

“This Institute was built to help people,” Sven said. “I told myself that people like that wouldn’t have forgotten us, that they might come back someday. They did other things, too—they studied the planets and stars, they created intelligences like the mind—they did so much. I used to think of how happy they must have been, to have other people to live with and learn from and help. But when I found out what they were really like, I began to think it’d be better if I left this place and never came back.”

“You mustn’t say that.” She was about to stretch her hand out to him once more, but drew back. “Anyway, if you left, our guardians would probably go after you in their ship. You don’t know what’s out there, and they’d be afraid for you.” Another thought came to her. “Llipel and Llare aren’t authorized now,” she said. “They’ll be wondering about us when they wake up.”

“It’s all right. I told the mind to let them know where we are and to let them use the screens to talk to each other. We can go back before they get too worried.”

She looked down. “Llipel’s going to be concerned, anyway,” she said. “When I go back, she may not let me see you again.” She longed to ask him more about what he had read that disturbed him so much, but talking about it only seemed to make him more unhappy. He seemed to want a friend, but shied away from her at the same time. Had he changed his mind? Did he regret having asked her to come here?

He slipped down from the platform, then beckoned to her. “There’s something you should see. I found it while I was waiting for you. I guess I should show you now.”

He led her toward the glass booth, which was near the back of the lobby, not far from where she had entered. Behind the booth stood doors with rows of numbers above each; those had to be the lifts that could carry one to the upper floors of the tower. A small hallway between two of the lift doors led to an exit. She called up her memory of the diagrams she had seen; that door would lead into the garden.

Three desks and four chairs were inside the booth, which was open on one side. Sven went to one of the desks and pulled out a drawer. “Look.”

She peered into the drawer and saw several flat rectangles and circular disks that were attached to chains. “More authorizations!” she cried out.

“Now you know why they never let us in here.” He removed two authorizations, then closed the drawer. “They could have given them to us before. Now we can have our own.” He handed one of the chains to her, then thrust the other into his side pocket.

She hung the second authorization around her neck, then followed him out of the booth. She was authorized now, and she would have a friend; everything would be different. Whatever Sven’s darker thoughts were, he would surely be cheered by that fact. She wanted to reach out to him then and see her happiness reflected in his eyes.

“I wish I’d known about you before,” she said as she moved closer to him; he took a step back. “I know we’ll be friends. We will, won’t we? I wanted a friend for so long, and now you’re here. I knew my time for separateness was passing, and you must have felt it, too. Maybe our people aren’t here because it wasn’t our time for togetherness, and maybe they’ll return now that it is.”

He shook his head. “They’ll never return.”

“How do you know?”

“I know more about them than you do.”

“If you tell me what you found out, maybe it won’t seem so bad, whatever it is. I’m not like Llare or Llipel—I’m like you. I’d understand. You should tell me what you know. Aren’t friends supposed to talk to each other?”

“You might not want to find out what I know,” he replied.

“What’s the matter? You wanted to talk to me, didn’t you?”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

A sadder look had come into his face. She was suddenly annoyed with him and hurt by the way he seemed to be withdrawing from her already. “I’m authorized now,” she said. “I can find out anything you know. Why did you even talk to me over the screen if you were going to act like this? You said you were excited when you found out about me, but you don’t seem very happy now. You asked me to come here. Maybe you shouldn’t have bothered if it’s going to be like this.”

He lifted his chin. “Maybe not.”

“I wish you hadn’t now!” Her voice was rising. “But you’re the only one like me here, so I guess I’m stuck with you!”

“Nita—” He spun around then and strode toward one of the lifts. Before she could call out an apology, the door had closed behind him.

6

The numerals above the lift door lit up one by one until the last winked out. Sven had gone to the fifteenth floor. Rather than trying to cheer him, she had driven him away with harsh words. Maybe she should have asked the screens about how to behave with one of her own people.

Llipel had not told her about Sven. Now she wondered if her guardian might have been justified in keeping that secret. The boy had said that his kind, and Nita’s, were cruel; perhaps Llipel and Llare had wanted to shield them both from that cruelty. The screen images did not seem unkind, but then they weren’t really people at all, only images stored in the mind’s memory. The real people might have been different. Maybe a time for togetherness came only rarely to her people, as it apparently did for Llare and Llipel.

Nita turned away from the lift and walked toward the front doors; two images on the wall to her left suddenly caught her eye. Unlike those of the screens, these two faces did not move or speak. Metal plates under the images held lettering, but she would have recognized the faces even without seeing their names.

“Kwalung Chun,” she read aloud. “Ferdinand Ibarra.” The tilted eyes of Kwalung and the brown ones of Ibarra gazed into the distance. What had happened to them? What had happened to the others who had worked here with them?

They had founded the Institute. Others had labored here with them, had preserved embryos of their kind for some purpose. They had studied the workings of bodies, seeking ways to strengthen and heal them. They had wanted to prolong life and to bring new life into the world. Was that the work of cruel people?

She walked on. Beyond the transparent doors, the sky was lightening. A flat surface stretched toward the dark mass of the forest that surrounded the Institute. She imagined a ship landing there and her own people stepping from it. Sven might be mistaken in saying that no one would return for them; perhaps he didn’t know as much as he claimed.

If she could not reach out to Sven, she might be unable to reach out to others. Her people might not want her then. Sven was like her; she should be able to sympathize with him. If she had found out about him first, would she have approached him easily, or would she have been wary? If she had asked him to come here, would she have disappointed him somehow? He had believed himself to be alone here with their guardians; maybe he saw her as an intruder. Perhaps dreams about encounters with their people, thoughts of smiling faces, welcoming arms, and an instant empathy and joy, had not prepared either of them for an actual meeting.

She would have to go to Sven or retreat to the east wing for good. She could not let their meeting end this way.

She walked back to the lifts. One door opened as her authorization was scanned; she stepped inside uncertainly. The door slid shut; she waited.

“To which floor do you wish to go?” a voice asked.

“Fifteen.” She felt a brief moment of heaviness, then nothing, and wondered if the lift was moving. It might break down and trap her between floors; her mouth grew dry at the thought. Her life depended on the Institute’s artificial intelligence and the technology that served it, and the mind had begun to fail before. Someday the lights might not shine so readily; the cafeteria’s slots might not be filled with food by the synthesizer. She might have to leave the Institute then, and she had no idea of how to survive. Even Llipel and her ship might be of little help to her. That was another reason to reach out to the boy; she and Sven might have to depend on each other someday.

The door opened. The lobby had disappeared; she gazed into a large room that seemed to be another cafeteria. A red carpet covered the floor; the glass- topped tables had silvery metal legs, while the chairs were covered with red cushioning. Slots lined the wall to her left.

Sven was sitting at a table near the room’s wide windows. He lifted his head as she approached. “I didn’t think you’d follow me,” he said.

“The lift scared me a little,” she admitted.

“There’s a stairway, you know.” He looked away. “I was going to come down to the lobby, and then I was afraid you might have left.”

She sat down across from him. “I didn’t mean to say what I did.”

He kept his eyes lowered, refusing to look at her. “When I saw you,” he said, “all these feelings came to me. I was glad, but I was afraid, too. I thought—” He raised his head. “I wanted to say everything to you I could, all at once, and then I was afraid to say anything at all.”

“I felt the same way.” She leaned back in her chair. “What I don’t understand is why Llipel and Llare didn’t tell us about each other.”

Sven rubbed at the tabletop with one finger. “They don’t think the way we do. I notice that more now. You’d think they’d seem more familiar, but Llare seems stranger instead. They came here from somewhere else, they can’t eat our food, they don’t look like us, and they don’t see things the way we do.”

“They might have thought it wasn’t a time for us to be together,” she said, “but they still could have told us. We could have spoken to each other over the screens, even if it wasn’t a time to meet.”

He frowned. “I’ve been in the library. I know what our people were like. Llare knows—he can’t read, but he could listen and watch some of the visual records. I think he was afraid of what we might do if we met.”