Lost and Found (4 page)

Maybe they just wanted to chat, he told himself as he sat in front of his tent and watched the remarkably realistic counterfeit sun set behind the illusion of distant mountains. Although no one had come to try to talk to him yet. And sociable conversationalists did not go around kidnapping those with whom they wished to converse. He was trying to put the best possible spin on his situation, and it wasn’t easy.

Astonishing himself, he managed not only to sleep, but to sleep well. Waking was momentarily disorienting until he remembered where he was and what had happened to him. Emerging from his tent, he saw the same bogus Steller’s jay arguing with the same dyspeptic chipmunk over the same illusory nut. That, he decided groggily, was going to get old real fast. He giggled. He would have to have a serious chat with the administrator in charge of prisoner programming.

The giggle made him nervous and uncomfortable, and he broke it off fast. No doubt surrendering his sanity would provide his captors with additional entertainment. It might also make them question the health of their captive. Since the prospect of undergoing a physical checkup by giant, purple, pebble-skinned aliens wielding unfamiliar instruments was less than appealing, he made an effort to appear as normal as possible.

Walking down to the splinter of transplanted lake, he washed his face in the cold, clear water. That helped, a little. As he returned to his tent, he saw two of the aliens watching him from the corridor that formed the fourth side of his more or less square enclosure. He could not tell from looking at them, or at their variable attire, if they were two he had seen before.

Entering the tent, he dressed quickly, perfunctorily. When he reemerged, they were still there—watching, unmoving. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed deliberately toward them, halting just short of the restraining electrical field whose location he remembered from his encounter with it the previous day.

The wraparound horizontal eyes that peered back at him were unblinking. He could not plausibly call them cold. He did not know enough about his captors to ascribe emotions to appearances. But neither did those penetrating, unvarying alien stares fill him with warmth.

“Hi.” No reaction. Not even a quiet warning to “behave.” The solitary hearing organs atop the conical skulls pulsed hypnotically, like small anemones bobbing in a light current. “Who are you? Why have you taken me? Where are we? Are we still on Earth—on my world? Are we moving?”

Since he had been able to understand them yesterday it stood to reason that they should be able to understand him. He had no way of knowing because they did not respond. After another minute of staring, both turned and trundled off silently down the corridor, moving in the same direction that others of their kind had taken yesterday. In place of the black plastic he had noticed previously, the flaps on their feet, he observed, were now encased in what looked like oversized dark socks. These made heavy
shush-shussh
ing sounds as their owners lumbered along, their massive bodies swinging slightly from side to side with each step. In the midst of his rising frustration and anger, he noted that he could hear clearly every sound beyond the restraining field. That suggested that air moved freely between his enclosure and the inaccessible corridor. Despite their radically different body types, it also strongly hinted that commodities traders from Chicago and purple aliens from Who Knew Where survived on the same ether juice.

He advanced as far forward as he could without getting shocked. Peering down the gradual curve of the corridor, he jumped up and down while waving both arms wildly over his head. “Hey! Hey, talk to me! At least tell me what’s going on!
Say something,
dammit!”

Neither his importuning anger nor the gestures with which he accompanied it sufficed to induce the departing aliens to respond or to return. He was alone again.

Days passed. From time to time, aliens would arrive to observe him. He learned to recognize several. After a while, and their continued refusal to communicate with him, he took to sulking within his tent. That produced a measurable reaction, and not a good one. For twenty-four hours, no food bricks or water emerged from beneath the surface of his fake lakeshore. He was reduced to surviving on his limited stock of energy bars and canned food. Water was no problem, thanks to the ever-replenishing section of lake. But he did not doubt for a second that it could also be taken away as effortlessly as the food bricks had been denied. The lesson was unmistakable. Better to play the game, even though it infuriated him to have to perform like an animal in a zoo.

Animal in a zoo. That was not a pretty thought. Unfortunately, it was not one he could reasonably rule out. Not until and unless one of the aliens chose to speak to him and inform him of their purpose in taking him from his home. No, not his home, he corrected himself. They had removed him from his environment of the moment, which happened to be a tent on the shore of a Sierra Nevada lake. That was the habitat they had reproduced for his living quarters. Ruefully, he regretted that they had not abducted him from, and duplicated the surroundings of, say, a suite at the Four Seasons.

This went on for two weeks and continued into a third, by which time his anger had given way to melancholy and despair. He was alone, his fate unknown, his prospects unpromising. One night, ignoring the fact that he was doubtless subject to round-the-clock observation, he slipped out of the tent and made a mad dash for the corridor. The electrical field that circumscribed his habitat, he discovered, grew more intense the farther one penetrated into it. In addition to momentarily paralyzing him, it slammed him back to the ground inside his enclosure. That was the one and only time he tried to run through the barrier. Careful exploration had already shown it to completely surround him, from the bottom of the piece of lake to the highest point he could reach by jumping or climbing. He could not dig under it, leap over it, or run through it.

And in addition to everything else, the short-lived attempt at flight cost him another day’s rations.

Imitation sun shining, bogus birds singing, fake fish jumping, one fine false afternoon found him sitting and sobbing uncontrollably behind the tent. He knew he probably shouldn’t be doing it. Observing, taking notes, doing whatever it was that they did in regard to his circumstances, the aliens might decide he was ill and move to try to “cure” him. But all they did was stand in the corridor and watch, as they did several times each day. In fact, there were noticeably fewer daily visits. Were they growing bored with him? Was he proving to be insufficiently entertaining?

“You lousy, rotten, purple bastards!” Eyes red from sobbing, he turned from where he was sitting to rail at the pair who were currently studying him. “Enough already! I’m sick of this! I want to go
home
!”

He found himself thinking of his friends. Of Charlene, who always had a welcoming smile for him when he arrived at the office. Of Early Hawthorne, who while as somber and staid in appearance as an undertaker, was never without a new risqué joke to tell. Of Tyrone “Ty one on” Davis, with whom he would argue the merits of the current Bears and Bulls rosters during frenetic, hastily gobbled midday meals in one of the three restaurants located on the same block as their offices.

Initially concerned when he failed to return to work, they would then have become fearful, then frantic, and finally resigned. By now they were all probably certain that he was dead. Stumbled off a mountain trail into some impenetrable ravine, his twisted and broken remains devoured by scavengers. That was what they would think, and who could blame them? Thank God he wasn’t married. Thank God he had no children. His mother had died of cancer several years ago, but his father was still alive, healthy and remarried. Thoughts of how the old man would react to the news of his only son’s disappearance and probable demise set him to sobbing all over again.

When he finally emerged from his extended lament, exhausted and unable to cry any more, he saw that the aliens had departed. Good. Damn good. Futile as he knew the gesture would be, and likely as well to result in the withholding of another day’s food bricks, or worse, he had determined to try throwing in their patronizing direction a few of the biggest rocks he could find. Though defense had been his position of choice on the teams he had played on, he had a good throwing arm. Maybe bouncing some fist-sized rocks off a few of those pointy heads would provoke some sort of reaction. Far sooner than expected, he was approaching the point where he no longer much cared what that might consist of.

Straightening from picking up another good throwing stone to add to his growing collection, he happened to look up and off to his right. What he saw made him drop the couple of rocks he had already accumulated.

The wonderfully convincing lakeshore and distant mountains that had filled that portion of his enclosure had vanished. In their place was, incongruously, a slice of what appeared to be an urban alley. Not a very clean or prosperous one, either. Garbage cans, some vertical and some not, shared space with high dilapidated fences of concrete block and wood slat. Graffiti covered both. Telephone and power poles with lines leading nowhere lined one side of the alley. Like a dead rhino, the rusted and scavenged-out hulk of a thirty-year-old Cadillac dominated the classically urban scene.

Captivated, he rose and moved toward it. Noting the spot on the ground where the restraining field normally flowed, he halted. Extending a cautious hand, he reached out toward the nearest piece of wooden fence that now magically adjoined his own enclosure. Nothing shocked him; nothing stopped him. Here, and for now, the field had been deactivated. The fence felt real beneath his fingers: old, weathered wood, full of splinters and bent nails. There was more graffiti, crude and challenging, far from the spray-paint chic favored by the bored and self-indulgent New York arts intelligentsia. He recognized but could not interpret the gang code.

In the depths of the dead Cadillac, something moved. Walker hesitated, wanting to rush forward, to embrace whomever it was who might also have been abducted along with him. Natural caution held him back. A glance to his right showed that the corridor was still empty. But they had to be watching, or at least recording what was happening. Of one thing he was certain: this section of restraining field had not been deactivated accidentally. Therefore this imminent encounter had been planned. An experiment of some sort, he decided bitterly. Or perhaps, just perhaps, a reaction to his extended crying jag and visible depression.

A shape began to emerge from the rusting skeletal hulk of the decrepit luxury car. Let it be a homeless woman, he entreated silently. Someone with whom to share his isolation and misery. Someone to talk to besides unresponsive aliens. Even a hobo, even a drug addict sleeping it off. Anyone, someone!

Then he saw that the shape was not human.

3

He did not burst out crying at the apparent disappointment. Neither did he take flight, wide-eyed and afraid. Instead, he just stood and stared as the solitary inhabitant of the car wreck nonchalantly ambled toward him. It had two eyes, like him. It had two ears, like him. It had hair, more than him. It had a tail, not like him, and it advanced at a comfortable trot on all fours.

The dog was a mutt, a forty-pound lump of canine insouciance that looked as if it had been sired by a drunken sea lion who had copulated with an industrial-sized bale of steel wool. Fearless and unafraid, the dog came right up to him, tongue lolling to one side, tail wagging, and sat down.

It wasn’t a beautiful eighteen-year-old runaway, he reflected ruefully. It wasn’t even a strung-out junkie. But it was alive, and homey-familiar, and of Earth. It was company, though not of the sort he had hoped for. Privately, he found himself envying the mutt. Unencumbered by higher powers of cogitation, it might even be enjoying its new surroundings. Or rather, its transplanted familiar surroundings. Just as he, Walker, had been taken whole and intact along with a copy of his immediate environment, so apparently had the pooch. It might wonder why it could not stray beyond a certain line without being shocked, but doubtless its confusion and bewilderment were mitigated by a steady supply of food and water. Walker wondered what its food bricks looked like, and if they were in fact all that very different from those that were provided to him.

“Well, here we are,” he muttered aloud as he bent over to pat the dog on the top of its woolly head. “Two terrestrial mammals cast adrift on a sea of alien indifference.”

“Don’t mix metaphors with me, bud. This isn’t the time or the place for it.”

He froze. The words were not an auditory illusion. He had seen the dog’s mouth move, had heard the sounds spoken. Which meant the canine shape he was staring down at could not be a real dog. It was an alien invention, perhaps designed and fabricated in some unimaginable alien workshop to ease his loneliness and mitigate his melancholy.

The dog spoke again. “Why did you stop petting me? I haven’t had anybody pet me in days.” Retracting its tongue and turning, the fuzzy head nodded in the direction of the corridor. “The Vilenjji won’t pet me. I’ve asked them to, but they just give back with that flat, fish-eyed stare of theirs.” The tongue reemerged again as its owner panted softly. “Wish they’d take me for a walk once in a while, though. I get tired of hanging around the alley.” Peering past Walker, who had suddenly turned into an unmoving poster boy for a life modeling class, the dog chirped excitedly, “Hey, you’ve got a pond!” Uttering a single, sharp bark, he bounded past the gaping commodities trader.

“Wait—wait a minute!” Awakening from his trance, Walker rushed after the dog.

Not wanting to get wet, or do anything else until he understood better what was happening, he was reduced to standing and calling from the shore while the dog swam and played in the portion of lake. Only when he’d had enough did the mutt dog-paddle out, trot onto shore, and shake himself dry. Absently, Walker wondered if the watching aliens were recording this, too, and whether they were discussing animatedly among themselves the dog’s built-in means of shedding water from its fur.

Sitting down, the mutt began cleaning himself. In between methodical, energetic licks, he squinted up at the bewildered human whose enclosure he was presently sharing.

“I’m from Chicago. Illinois.” When a dazed Walker still hesitated to reply, the dog prompted, “You?”

“The same. Chi—Chicago.”

“Hey, we’re neighbors! Whaddya know? Well, a big woof to that. What’s your name?”

Walker swallowed hard and sat down on a convenient rock. “Marcus Walker. Everybody calls me Marc. And you—yours?”

Refreshed from its brief swim the dog pushed its forelegs out, stretched, and crossed its paws. “‘Dumb mutt’ is one. I often answer to ‘Get out of there!’ ‘Shithead’ is probably the most common.”

Still tense inside, Walker found himself warming to the animal. Despite its unnatural ability to converse, it did not act like something that was the cold, calculated product of an alien manufactory. Both its sense of humor and its kinked hair reminded him of an old friend he hadn’t seen in years, a crazy defensive tackle on his university team. “I can’t call you that. How about George?”

“‘George.’” The dog considered the suggestion carefully, the heavy brow crinkling in thought. Then it nodded, ears like kitchen scouring pads flopping against the sides of its head. “Beats ‘shithead.’ George it is. You’re no sweet-smelling bitch, Marc, but it’ll be nice to have a companion for a change, someone from home to talk to.”

Walker started to grin. “I was thinking the same thing.” Then his eyes, and his thoughts, turned again to the still-empty corridor. “You said that the ‘Vilenjji’ wouldn’t pet you. Those are my—our—captors?”

Newly anointed “George” nodded. “Snooty bastards, aren’t they? As soon spit on you as talk to you—though I don’t know if they have any spit. Leastwise, I’ve never seen one salivate. Hard enough to get an idea of what all their externals do without trying to visualize the functions of their insides.”

Walker nodded knowingly, then asked the question he had to ask. “You’re not some kind of alien plant, are you? Something these Vilenjji have cooked up to get me to act differently?”

“Funny,” George replied, “I was wondering the same thing about you. No, I’m not some silly stupid alien fabrication.” His hindquarters came up. “Want to sniff my butt?”

“Uh, no thanks, George. I’m going to take your word for it that you are what you say you are.” He scrunched down a little tighter on his chosen chunk of granite. “And you keep your nose to yourself.”

“Will do, Marc. As best as I can. You being human and olfactorily challenged and all, I bet you haven’t even noticed what these lumps who snatched us smell like.”

“No, not really, I haven’t.”

Edging closer on its belly, the dog looked around and whispered conspiratorially, “Mothballs. They smell like old, thrown-away mothballs.”

Walker shared a smile with the mutt. “Not meaning to insult you or anything, George, but it’s been my experience generally that dogs, even those from Chicago, don’t talk. Not English, anyway.”

“We don’t generally speak Vilenj, either,” the unoffended George replied. One forefoot rose to dig meaningfully several times at one ear before the dog looked up again. “Implants. One for each internal auricular setup containing, as I understand it, some kind of universal translation node. Soft-wired right into the brain. So you can understand pretty much anything you hear. Every sentient here has them. Even the Vilenjji. Plus, I got a brain boost. Something to do with stimulating and multiplying cerebral folds. All I know is that things that always seemed muddled to me now seem obvious.”

“You’re very lucky,” Walker commented.

Gazing back at him, the dog cocked its head sideways. “Am I? It wasn’t a damn Christmas present, you know. They do it so they can talk to you, and so you can talk back. It was done to facilitate communication between captive and captor, between dog and Vilenjji. After it was all done and healed up, given the meager amount of talking they do, I wondered why they bothered. So I asked. They told me they were curious. Not as to why a race of subsentient but semi-intelligent creatures choose to exist in such a subservient relationship with a slightly higher order of being, but as to why we seem to enjoy it so much.”

One of the great unanswered questions, Walker mused. “What did you tell them?”

Raising a hind leg, George began to scratch furiously behind his left ear. “I told them that while I couldn’t speak for all dogs, in my case it was just because I happen to like humans. Actually, I think that’s pretty universal, dogwise. Besides, I told ’em, who says it’s a subservient relationship? Not all, but many of us get a free place to live, free food, free medical care, and stuff to play with. Humans have to work their butts off all the time for any of that. All we have to do is lick the occasional face and whine piteously. You tell me who has the better deal.”

“What’d they say to that?”

George shrugged, dogwise. “They said a slave isn’t a slave unless it possesses the intellectual wherewithal to comprehend the condition of slavery. I told them to stuff it down their masticatory orifices.”

Walker shifted on his stone. The corridor remained empty. “If you don’t mind my saying so, you have an awfully well-developed vocabulary.”

George put one paw to the side of his nose. “Like I said: knowledge boost. I’d give it all back if I could. Talking is hard work. Thinking is harder. I’d rather be chasing cats. Wouldn’t you rather be chasing a football?”

The commodities trader looked startled. “How did you know I played football?”

“Didn’t. Lucky guess. You’re in better shape than most humans your age.”

“Thanks.” Walker was quietly relieved. It was difficult enough to get used to the idea of a talking dog. He was not sure he could handle one that could also read minds. “You look pretty good yourself.”

“Clean living,” George replied. “Plenty of cat chasing. Actually, I quite like kitties. But tradition is tradition, you know.”

Walker nodded sagely. “Isn’t it going to be tough on you when we get out of here? Being so much smarter than the average dog, I mean?” He repressed the urge to pat the woolly head reassuringly.

George snapped idly at an invisible fly. “What makes you think we’re going to get out of here?”

That kept Walker quiet for a while. His silence did not seem to trouble George, who was content to rest his head on his forepaws and lie quietly in the artificial sun. Eventually the trader stood, studied their surroundings. The barrier between his mountain lake environment and that of the dog’s relocated urban surroundings was still unbarred. The realization that it might be closed off again at any time, at a whim of their captors, and that he might be separated from his garrulous new four-legged friend, left him unexpectedly queasy. He chose not to address the phlegmatic pooch’s terse observation directly.

“Didn’t I hear you say something about them, these Vilenjji, taking you for walks?”

Lifting his head from his paws, George nodded. “I keep asking them, and I keep getting turned down. Not that they have to worry about it. There’s nowhere to run to. Sometimes one or two of them will pay a visit to my cage.”

“Enclosure, you mean.” Walker had no grounds for correcting the dog, other than psychological. It was easier to think of himself as being kept in an enclosure than a cage. “They come in?”

“Sure. They know I’m not going to hurt them. I mean, I
could
bite. There’s nothing wrong with my teeth. But have you noticed the
size
of these mutes? What good would it do, ultimately, to take a chunk out of a leg flap?”

“You’d get some honest satisfaction out of it,” Walker countered heartily, feeling a lot like taking a bite out of a Vilenjji himself.

George snorted softly. “Then
you
nip one of them. Me, I’d rather keep getting my food bricks.”

Walker thought back to the days when he had not been fed, remembering the hollow feeling that by afternoon had developed in the pit of his stomach. The dog was right. If he was somehow going to get through this, he would have to alter his behavior to match his circumstances. This was not a play-off game. No running down an opponent here. He would have to use his brains. Like George.

But he knew he would draw the line at licking a Vilenjji’s face, or asking to be petted.

“What else have you seen while you’ve been here?” He gestured at their immediate surroundings. “This is all I’ve been allowed to access.”

“Well, for one thing, there are a lot more enclosures like yours and mine. Also some that are smaller, some that are substantially larger.”

“You mean, like for elephants and things?”

“‘Things’ is more like it. I haven’t been on the ship for that long, but as near as I can tell, you and I are the only captives from Earth. All the others are from . . . somewhere else.” He eyed Walker evenly. “As soon as they think you’re ready to handle it, at regular intervals they’ll drop the innermost part of your enclosure. The electrical field as well as the hologram, or whatever it is.” He nodded in the direction of the corridor. “The rest of the ship is naturally off limits. I suspect that letting you and I get together is a prelude to introducing you to the rest of the gang.”

Every time Walker thought he was getting a mental handle on his situation, new circumstances kept cropping up to dump him on his mental butt all over again. “‘Rest of the gang’?”

“All the other oxygen breathers. They’re not a bad bunch, I suppose. You meet worse in city alleys. Our laugh-a-minute captors get a kick out of seeing how we all interact, I suppose. Maybe the interactions of different species from different worlds edifies them. Maybe it makes them laugh. I don’t know why they do it. If you’re that curious, you ask them, when you get the chance. I’m not sure why, but I get the feeling prying into the motivations of the Vilenjji might not be a good idea.”

Walker looked around nervously. The enclosure, the cell that he had come to resent so thoroughly, had abruptly taken on all the aspects of a comfortable, familiar home he did not want to lose—even if it was nothing but a carefully crafted illusion.

“How do you know we’re on a ship?” he mumbled.

“I asked some of our fellow captives. Must be pretty good size, too, just extrapolating from the enclosures.” He lowered his voice. “Listen, Marc. No matter what happens, always stay calm. Keep your head and you’ll keep your head, if you know what I mean. Usually, the Vilenjji don’t interfere in altercations between captives, no matter what happens. But a couple of days before you got here, a Tripodan from Jerenus IV—”

“What’s a Tripodan? Where’s Jerenus IV?”

“Shut up and listen to me. The Tripodan, I was told it had caused trouble before. This time, it got into an argument with a Sesu. There are four of them captive here, and they’re about as dangerous as pups. But they’ve got sharp tongues. I mean, sharp verbally. The Tripodan took exception to something one of the Sesu said. Then it took the Sesu apart. The way a human would dismember a fried chicken. I watched, from as far away as I could get, and I know I was whining good and loud the whole time. I was plenty scared, let me tell you, because I had no idea what might happen next.