Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (6 page)

Buck shrugged, then swallowed.

“Yeah, I can feel it working already.” Vornho pounded on his chest. “Andarko! It makes the air smell different. I can’t even smell the holy gas, not that it’s been too strong this shift.”

Buck inhaled deeply. The holy gas had never had much of a smell to him. He had never been able to tell when the concentration of it was being adjusted the way some of his friends could. And he noticed no difference now.

“I feel
great!”
Vornho exclaimed. He clapped Buck on his shoulder. “C’mon, let’s get over to a
plaski
hall and find some girls. I heard that you can get a mat room all to yourself if you know whose spots to cross.”

Vornho bounded forward without waiting for Buck’s reply. Which was just as well, because Buck had no reply to give. He had no idea how coupling could take place without bonding. He didn’t even know why anyone would want to. If you couldn’t do it like Celine and Andarko, what was the point?

He decided Vornho’s enthusiasm must have something to do with the
eemikken\.
Maybe in addition to blocking the effects of the holy gas the drug made it possible to couple in a purely physical way, like
malsina
could. It was a big ship. Who knew? Perhaps the
eemikken\
could even clear his mind enough so he would understand everything Moodri told him in their secret meetings. Buck decided he would like that and waited with more eagerness for the drug to take effect.

Twenty minutes later at a
plaski
hall, as Vornho engaged in heated negotiations with a maintenance worker for the private use of a mat room, Buck was very aware of the explosive change that had come over his friend. Vornho browbeat the old
binnaum
in charge of the hall forcefully, without patience or politeness. Buck decided he would not enjoy wrestling with his crèche mate when he acted in this manner. A single finger in the armpit was one thing in play, but Vornho looked as if he would no longer know when to stop.

Vornho got the mat room in exchange for the clear wrap the
eemikken\
lozenges had come in—an exchange in which Buck saw no advantage, other than freeing the
binnaum
from having to continue talking with the obnoxious boy. Then Vornho came over to Buck, keeping his eyes on a group of young females about his own age who were cooperating in bouncing a set of
sawtel
balls off a wall in intricate patterns.

Now Vornho behaved as if he had been under the feeding lights for a hundred shifts, speaking expansively and bouncing from foot to foot as if ready to start a race. “This stuff is
great,
Finiksa. Do you feel it the way I do? I mean, it’s almost as if the light is brighter in here, or as if I can see farther down the corridors, hear things more clearly. No wonder the Overseers know everything that’s going on.”

As far as Buck could tell, the dim lighting was no different now than it had been in the past eleven years. The cramped and narrow corridors still stretched out into mist-obscured points, and the background rush and rumble of fans and pumps and three hundred thousand Tenctonese going about their lives in a volume of the ship suitable for a third that number sounded just the same as it always had.

“Well?” Vornho asked.

“Actually,” Buck said, deciding on his strategy, “I think it’s upset my stomach. I’m feeling a little sick.”

Vornho’s mouth dropped open in disappointment. “Finiiiiksa. Look at the females over there. See the one with the ear valleys? The really curved pair?” Vornho crossed his hands over his chest and thumped his hearts in a crude rendition of a lover’s greeting. “How
low
do you think her spots go?”

Buck knew he would have to leave. He wouldn’t be able to talk Vornho out of what he wanted to do, and Buck wanted no part of it. “I’m going to have to go back to the crèche,” Buck said, trying to sound ill.

“You’re missing a real opportunity,” his crèche mate said. “Who knows when D’wayn will give us another dose and we’ll be able to feel this way again?”

Buck didn’t know what his friend was speaking about. The
eemikken\
had had no flavor and no effect. Either Vornho was imagining things, or D’wayn was trying out a trick on them and had only handed out one real dose of the drug. Whatever was going on, Buck didn’t want to be involved.

“I really have to go,” he said, and with that final protest he could see that Vornho was glad to be rid of him so he wouldn’t be able to spoil the fun he had planned.

“I’ll tell you
everything
that happens,” Vornho said. “I’m not going to waste a chance to feel like an Overseer.” Then he began to swagger over to the females without even raising a single knuckle in good-bye.

Buck turned away and headed through the corridors for his crèche. If this was what it felt like to be an Overseer, he thought, then what was the advantage? He felt no different now than he had on any other day of his life.

He’d have to ask Moodri what that meant.

Moodri knew everything.

S
OMETIME IN THE LAST TWENTY MINUTES
, Matthew Sikes realized, the rain had stopped, as if the whole world were holding its breath as it waited to find out what would happen next. It was the way he felt as well. And feeling that way, he could think of nothing else to do but keep driving. Through the city, through the night, toward the medical center where the ambulance had taken Susan and Emily, where George waited. No thinking. Just driving.

Driving with an alien beside him . . .

Sikes glanced to his right and saw Cathy Frankel fixed and rigid, staring straight ahead through the windshield. The passing headlights of cars and the dull orange flash of the streetlamps drew flickering arcs of light along the graceful sweep of her hairless, smooth, and spotted head.

Graceful? Sikes thought. He glanced again at his across-the-hall neighbor, the Tenctonese female who troubled his dreams and, more and more in recent days, his waking thoughts. The inhuman lines of her gently rounded skull
were
graceful. Odd how that had never struck him before, or that he had never admitted it to himself. And the sensuous curve of her ear valleys, almost trailing into a gentle S . . . George had once told Sikes how seductive that was to a Tenctonese male, and Sikes could almost see why. The easy curve of it, the delicate fold, the shimmering sparkles of light caught along its soft ridges by a few shining beads of rain like dew on a flower. Dew on a flower? Sikes thought. Since when—

AARRROOOOOOOGGGG!

A deafening airhorn blast captured Sikes’s attention as if a thousand volts had shot through him, and he jerked the wheel of his sleek red Carralo to bring the car back across the double yellow lines and out of the path of an onrushing semi. The Carralo’s alignment just hadn’t been the same since his daughter’s crazy boyfriend had driven it over the median on Sunset Plaza.

Yeah, that’s what went wrong, Sikes told himself with a gulp. I wasn’t distracted by Cathy. It was the damned car. He rubbed at his face, heart hammering, seeing Cathy stare at him from the corner of his eye.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Her sweet voice, usually both light and husky, was strained by tension.

“Yeah, sure, fine,” Sikes mumbled. “The guy musta been falling asleep at the wheel.”

“I can drive, if you’d like.”

“I’m okay,” Sikes said. His hands were tight on the wheel, his eyes fixed on the brake lights of the car a block ahead. Until now he and Cathy had said little to each other, ever since the odd radiance of the aurora borealis had flickered across the clearing night sky. An extremely rare event this far south.

As rare as an alien spacecraft crash-landing in the desert.

Every time Sikes looked up to the skies these days, everything up there seemed to have something to do with the Newcomers. Spacelab arcing by overhead, testing its communication laser; he had watched it from the roof of his building with Cathy. The night had been so cold, yet he had been gripped by a warmth he had been terrified to acknowledge. Spacelab was home to the first Tenctonese astronaut to return to space. Sikes had held Cathy close. The world had changed so much in six years. His hand had lightly glided over the perfect smoothness of her skin. Lasers flashing through the night. Brilliance against darkness. Their lips had met. The taste so different, the heat of her breath, the stars circling. Even the damn aurora tonight probably had something to do with the Newcomers. Everything in the world was caught up with the Newcomers. Everything in Sikes’s world was contained in Cathy’s eyes, in Cathy’s lips, in Cathy’s arms.

Sikes wanted to pull the car over to the side of the road and kiss her again. To gather her tightly in his arms and mold himself to the secret ridges and curves hidden by her clothes and flesh. He wanted to tell her that no two people were
ever
alike. But that two lovers were always the same.

Two worlds, two lovers, two hearts—no,
three
hearts beating as one. He laughed at himself, breaking the tension that filled the car.

Sikes couldn’t pull over. Sikes couldn’t kiss Cathy. Because the truth was he was afraid of her, just as he had always been afraid of the Tenctonese, ever since he had met them, long before George, from that first time, in the desert. The desert . . .

“What is it?” Cathy asked. Her voice was brittle now. Tension surfacing. She didn’t understand his laughter.

“Nothing,” Sikes said. He looked at her. His heart ached for her. She frightened him.

Cathy looked into his eyes, and Sikes had no idea what she saw. But he could guess what she felt. The rain on her face made her look as if she were crying. Her expression said the same.

“They’ll be okay,” Sikes said, looking away, pretending that the tension between them was the result of their shared concern for Emily and Susan, victims of a Purist plot to kill prominent Newcomers.

“It’s not them,” Cathy said. Her hands picked at the shoulder strap of her seatbelt. She looked ahead. “It’s everything . . . everything about this world.”

Sikes couldn’t stand to hear anyone, even Cathy, descend into self-pity. He had done it too often himself and knew now, from the clear and perfect vantage point of hindsight, that it had simply been a way to drive his wife and daughter away from him. Besides, Cathy wasn’t the type to feel sorry for herself. She was building walls. Deliberately. Just like a human.

“Look, Cathy, things are bad. I’ll give you that. But what happened to Susan and Emily, and Judge Kaiser and Dr. Bogg, for that matter, are just isolated incidents. Sooner or later the same thing happens to every minority, everywhere on Earth.” He tried to smile but failed. “It goes with the territory.”

Cathy watched the road. “Where we come from, we weren’t the minority.”

But you were slaves, Sikes wanted to say. But he didn’t. He didn’t want to hurt her.

Cathy sighed then. If she had been human, Sikes might have thought he had heard the prelude to tears needing to be released. But he couldn’t be sure what that ragged, trembling sound might mean coming from a Tenctonese. Then, without knowing why, he wondered what Cathy’s face looked like when she made love, how or even if her eyes closed, how he could possibly know what she might mean by any expressions she might make, how he could possibly know how to please her.

It’s impossible, he told himself, shaking his head to drive the questions and the images from his mind, to think instead of all the traffic shortcuts that lay between home and the medical center. He had watched the “educational” tapes Cathy had lent him of Tenctonese lovemaking, videos made for her comparative sexuality courses at UCLA. Beyond the superficial sameness of gross body structure—what some experts thought might be the result of random though convergent evolution—Tenctonese did not look human, did not act human, were not human. And after watching the tapes forward and backward and in slow motion and freeze frame, Sikes couldn’t see how a human male and Tenctonese female could ever even
attempt
to perform some hybrid blending of their species’ respective acts of love without the human breaking his neck, besides other parts of his body.

Cathy sighed again.

He had to face facts. He actually feared involvement with Cathy. To make some form of love with her could be life-threatening. Yet her unhappiness was cutting through him, robbing him of his better sense. He reached out to hold her hand. “Are you going to be okay?” he asked, and he realized that he would do anything—
anything
—to make certain that she would be okay, for as long as he was able.

Cathy looked out the side window at the dark stream of locked and grilled storefronts they passed. “Oh, Matt. I don’t know anymore. Nothing’s right. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is how we hoped it would be.” The sigh again. “Sometimes I . . . I don’t think we made the right decision to come here.”

Above all else—confusion, fear, and heartache—Sikes was a cop, and he heard the one word in her statement that didn’t belong.

“Decision?” he repeated. “I thought you guys crash-landed here when your ship went kablooie.”

Sikes felt her hand tense beneath his.

“Cathy,” he said, “your ship
did
crash-land, right?”

She squeezed his hand once, then slipped hers away. “Yes, Matt,” she said. “The ship crash-landed here.” She took a breath. If she had been human
and
a criminal, Sikes would have bet a week’s worth of doughnuts that a confession was going to follow. “Because it was
made
to crash-land here.” She looked at him, waiting for his reaction.

Sikes’s only reaction was to wrinkle his brow in confusion as he expertly shifted gears to swing around a slow-moving van on the wet road before them. “What are you saying? That there was a mutiny or something on board?” The official reports were still no different from what had been on the news at the time. The Newcomers’ slave ship had had trouble with its main engines as it was performing some sort of close approach to the sun to store up . . . whatever. Sikes couldn’t remember. But the engine problem had led to the Newcomers’ ship coming apart just past the moon, with the cargo-disk section being jettisoned and coming in to a rocky landing in the Mojave Desert. Yet Cathy had just implied that that story was wrong.