We Install

by Harry Turtledove

Both new parents were as ready as new parents could be when labor started. It took a long time, but they were braced for that. It hurt, too, but Bev knew ahead of time that it would, which made a lot of difference. When she finally got the urge to push, the OB told her to go ahead.

  “Won’t be much longer,” the woman said cheerfully from behind her mask. Bev made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a squeal—she might have been trying to lift a building off her toe. The OB nodded approval. “That’s good! Do it again!”

  Jack thought his wife would explode if she did it again. But then, that was the point.

  Bev bore down once more. Her face turned a mottled purple. That couldn’t be good for her … could it? The obstetrician seemed to think so. “The baby’s crowning,” she said. “I can see the top of its head. Push hard. One more time!”

  And Beverly did, and the baby came out, and that was when the screams in the delivery room started.

  Sergeant John Paul Kling was in the shower when the telephone rang. Swearing under his breath, he turned off the water and plucked the phone out of the soap dish. “Exotic Crimes Unit, Kling here,” he said.

  “This is Dr. Romanova. I’m at Tristar Hospital.” The woman on the other end of the line sounded like someone biting down hard on hysteria. And she’s a doctor, Kling thought. Whatever this is, it isn’t good.

  “Go ahead,” he said out loud, while water dripped from the end of his nose and trickled through the mat of graying hair on his chest.

  “I think …” Dr. Romanova had to pause and gather herself. “I think we’ve had a hoxbomb here.” There. She’d said it.

  “Good Lord!” Kling didn’t know what he’d expected, but that wasn’t it. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ll send you the image,” she said, and she did.

  For a few seconds, Kling thought he was seeing what he was seeing because his phone screen had drops of water on it. He wiped it clear with his thumb, and what he saw then was even worse.

  It was a newborn baby. Well, it couldn’t be anything else, but whoever’d put it together hadn’t looked at the manual often enough. Parts sprouted from places where they had no business being. He’d heard of sticking your foot in your mouth. Now he saw it—either that or the kid’s tongue had toes. Which would be worse? He had no idea.

  “Sergeant? Are you there, Sergeant?” Dr. Romanova asked. “They put me through to you, and—”

  “I’m here.” Kling got rid of the photo, but it would haunt him forever. And he was going to have to see the model in a few minutes. “Tristar Hospital, you said? I’m on my way. Shall I notify the Snarre’t, or do you want to do it?”

  “You’re the police office in charge,” she answered, which was a polite way of saying, You’re stuck with it, buddy. “A hoxbomb could be purely human, of course.”

  “Yeah. Right,” John Paul Kling said tightly. He was a cop. Like any cop with two brain cells to rub against each other, he went with the odds, not against them. A hoxbomb didn’t have to mean the Furballs were involved, but that was sure as hell the way to bet. They were the ones who really knew how to do that stuff: a lot better than humans did, anyhow.

  He got out of the shower, put on his clothes, and called headquarters. He would have to show them visuals, and naked just didn’t cut it. Lieutenant Reiko Kelly took the call. “I thought it would be you, John Paul,” she said. “A hoxbomb, the doctor told me.”

  “Uh-huh. I’m about to head for Tristar now. Reason I’m checking in is, I want to involve the Snarre’t.” He was doing things by the book. Being only a sergeant, he needed formal permission before taking care of what everybody—even the doctor, or maybe especially the doctor—could see he had to take care of.

  Lieutenant Kelly sighed, but she nodded. “Yes, go ahead. With a hoxbomb in the picture, you don’t have much choice. If it turns out they aren’t involved, we can always peel them out of the investigation later.”

  “Okay. We’re on the same page, anyhow,” Kling said. “I’ll make the contact. Boy, that’ll be fun. Fun like the gout, is what it’ll be. So long, Reiko. Talk with you later.” He hopped on his scooter and headed for the hospital.

  The Snarre’i investigator’s name was a collection of screeches and smells that don’t translate well into human-style phonemes. We can call her Miss Murple. The name is similar but not identical to that of a legendary human investigator. What she did was similar but not identical to what a human investigator might do, too, so Miss Murple works well enough as a handle.

  She didn’t want to be investigating just then. She was right in the middle of an exciting lifey. Again, the name is approximate, but it will do. Since it was daytime out, she’d told her windows to exclude most of the ambient light. She sat in her darkened living room, her eyes closed, her brain’s little hand wrapped around her left index finger.

  A special nerve patch there connected with the brain. The genetically engineered creature spun out the story, which was set in the Era of the Three Queendoms. They hadn’t know much about biology back then, but they’d had amazing adventures. She was living this one, with all her senses involved. When the character from whose viewpoint she was experiencing the action walked across the grass, she smelled it and felt it on the bottom of her feet. When the character got hurt, she felt that, too. And when the character mated, it was as good as the real thing—better, if you’d run into some of the clumsy males Miss Murple had met lately.

  She had to deliver the spice package before sunup if she wanted her love interest to keep blinking when. … “I’m sorry,” the brain said as it abruptly returned Miss Murple to the mundane world. “You have an urgent message from Investigation Thumb.”

  “A stench!” she said. Of course the brain stayed connected to the rest of the neural net while it entertained her. But why did Thumb have to come in right at the most exciting part of the lifey? She was an investigator. She knew why. Because things worked that way—that was why. Hadn’t she already seen it too many times? “Connect,” she told the brain resignedly.

  Instead of the trees of the homeworld, she saw the unlovely offices of the gripping organ of the Snarre’i self-protection agency. Her superior’s name was as unpronounceable as hers, so we can call him Sam Spud. “A Baldy requires communication with you,” he said without preamble.

  “A Baldy!” Miss Murple said in dismay. That was too much! The aliens didn’t communicate, not at any truly important level. That was a big part of what was wrong with them. “What’s this about?”

  Sam Spud’s pupils narrowed to slits, even though the offices were also darkened against the day. “A hoxbomb,” he answered grimly. “You’d better talk to the human, sweetheart. That’s trouble with a capital T.” Not quite the idiom he used, but humans don’t have the odor receptors they’d need to appreciate his to the fullest.

  “A hoxbomb? Used on the Bald Ones? Is someone out of her mind?” Miss Murple said. Antagonizing weird, dangerous aliens had to be a maniac’s game … didn’t it? She hoped so. Humans could do things with ordinary, boring inorganic matter that the Snarre’t had never imagined possible. They could blow up a world. They could, very possibly, blow up a star.

  Sam Spud waggled his ears to show he wasn’t kidding. The brain in his office caught the scent of his agitation and relayed it to Miss Murple through the neural net. “Yes, a hoxbomb. No possible doubt. I’ve seen the image. That’s one scrambled baby Bald One.”

  It showed up in his mind, which meant it showed up in Miss Murple’s. She winced. He wasn’t wrong. A baby that distorted was good for nothing but euthanasia. “A hoxbomb,” she agreed. “All right, we need to get to the bottom of this before the humans break out in assholes.” A Snarre’ who said something like that meant it literally. Reluctantly, Miss Murple went on, “I will activate my telephone. You may—I suppose you may—give the code to the Bald One investigating.”

  “Right.” Sam Spud would have giv
en it to the human anyhow. Miss Murple knew that. And he would have overridden her if she tried to keep the telephone inactive. He was her boss, so he had the right. And he was a son of a bitch, so he would have used it without compunction. He broke the connection.

  A very little while later, the telephone made a horrible noise. Gingerly, Miss Murple picked it up. It didn’t quite fit her hand. It felt unnaturally smooth and slick. It smelled funny, to say nothing of nasty. Even with shielding, its little screen lit up too bright to suit her.

  The human who appeared on the screen was, like any human, a bad caricature of Snarre’kind: bare face, tiny eyes, pointy beak with only two round breathing orifices, small mouth with niggardly teeth. “I greet you,” it said in Snarre’l.

  “Hello,” Miss Murple replied in English. How were you supposed to get anything important across when all you could use were sound and sight? She didn’t know, but she’d have to try. Returning to her own language, she said, “A hoxbomb?”

  His translator—a mechanical thing, cousin to the mechanical thing she was holding—must have worked well enough, for he said, “That’s right.” That was what her translator said he said, anyhow. It gave his impoverished speech all the overtones it would have had in Snarre’l. Whether those overtones were really there in English … was a question for another time. The human went on, “The victim’s mother and especially father dealt with Snarre’t about the time the pregnancy began.”

  “You don’t know one of us used the hoxbomb,” Miss Murple protested.

  “I didn’t say I did,” the human replied. “But that’s more your kind of weapon than ours. And even if it was one of our people who did it, you’re liable to be better than we are at tracking it down. And I hope you want to help, because you know our news media will start screaming it was all your fault.”

  He might be ugly—he was ugly. He might—he did—speak an impoverished language. Impoverished or not, he made too much sense in it. From everything Miss Murple knew of human news reporters, they were at least as simplistic and sensational as those of her own folk. She couldn’t think of anything worse to say about them, especially when their yattering might help uncoil an interstellar war.

  She sighed. Another Snarre’ would have smelled the resignation coming off her. Not only would she not have a chance to finish the lifey any time soon, but she would have to work with this alien. For its benefit, she had to put what she was feeling into plain old ordinary words, too: “I’ll do what I can.”

  Miss Murple wanted to put on eyecovers and go out by daylight the way she wanted to come down with the mange. What choice did she have, though? Crime happened when it happened, not when it was convenient. More resignation poured from her, not that the human could notice. “I’m coming,” she said, and hung up. She didn’t deactivate the telephone, though. She knew she would have to keep using the stinking thing.

  Hospitals gave John Paul Kling the willies. Maternity wards were supposed to be better than the other units. Happy things happened there. Mostly healthy women went in, and they mostly came home with healthy babies.

  Yeah, mostly. Not this time, though. Tristar was treating the birthing room as a crime scene. Kling didn’t tell the doctors and nurses not to. But this was only where the crime was discovered, not where it had happened. Kling didn’t know where that was yet. But he could make a damn good guess about when: just about 280 days earlier.

  He talked with the victims. Mrs. Cravath was in no condition to help yet. It wasn’t only that she was devastated by what had happened. Going through labor made her look as if she’d just stepped in front of a truck. Kling couldn’t really question her.

  Her husband wasn’t in much better shape. “Why would anyone do this to us?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, sir,” Sergeant Kling answered. “That’s one of the things we have to look into. Do you have any personal enemies? Any business enemies? Did you ever do anything to offend the Snarre’t?” Did you ever do anything to really, really piss off the Furballs? was what he wanted to ask, but this was being recorded, so he didn’t.

  Jack Cravath just looked bewildered. “I sell scooters. What kind of business enemies am I going to have, for crying out loud? I’m not important enough to have enemies like that. I haven’t been in a fight with anybody since the fourth grade, and I lost then. The Snarre’t buy scooters from me every once in a while. You never can tell for sure, but I don’t think I ever got ’em mad at me.”

  “Okay,” Kling said, a little wearily. Cravath sounded as ordinary as he looked. But he wasn’t, not to somebody—not unless the perpetrator hoxbombed his wife for the hell of it. Isn’t that a lovely thought? Random criminals were a lot tougher to catch.

  “Detective Sergeant Kling, please report to the reception desk. Detective Sergeant John Paul Kling, please report to the reception desk,” came from a speaker on the wall.

  Kling jumped out of the uncomfortable hospital chair on which he’d perched. “Excuse me,” he said. Getting away from what should have been a proud new papa was nothing but a relief.

  Going out by day, going into the human part of town, Miss Murple felt as if she’d fallen into a lifey of light. Back when lifeys were fairly new, those had been all the rage for about twenty years. Ambitious directors still turned one out now and then, but the modern imitations didn’t come close to the originals.

  Part of the allure about lifeys of light was the seamy side of things they portrayed. The other part was the way they portrayed it. As their name implied, they were daytime dramas, showing what went on while honest, ordinary Snarre’t slept. They blasted you with light, and you couldn’t even squeeze your pupils into tight slits against it, because it was inside your head. And all that light didn’t just wash out the details of what you saw. It somehow mashed down smells, too, and made hearing seem less distinct. Part of that was the director’s postproduction work, of course. But part of it was the endless, inescapable, brutal glare.

  Humans live this way all the time. It’s as natural to them as night and shadow are to us, Miss Murple reminded herself. Another thought followed hard on the tail of that one. No wonder humans are so stinking weird.

  Her eyecovers and her narrowed pupils warded her from the worst of the daylight. A human with a machine would have insisted that the light level Miss Murple actually experienced was only very slightly higher than it would have been in the middle of the night. But the Bald Ones, again, were stinking weird. The human and the machine wouldn’t have understood about the heat of the sun on her fur, or about the way the air felt and smelled when she breathed it, or the simple fact that she was up and about and doing things when she should have been asleep. A lifey of light, all right.

  Street signs in the human part of town were also lettered in Snarre’l characters, just as those in the Snarre’i area had transliterations—of a sort—in the odd letters humans used. Most human buildings weren’t marked in any way that made sense to her, though. Humans assumed no Snarre’ would want anything to do with them … and the humans were likely to be right.

  Tristar Hospital was an exception. Area for the Infirm of Three Stars, read the Snarre’l translation of the English name. No olfactory cues or anything, but what could you expect from humans? At least they made some effort, anyhow. Only in the direst of emergencies would Miss Murple have wanted a bungling, ignorant human physician—but she repeated herself—coming anywhere near her, but the possibility of such an emergency was there.

  Another sign in Snarre’l got her to the reception desk. A human behind a machine—one of the devices that were a little like a brain—said, “I greet you,” and then, still in Snarre’l, “How may I help you?”

  Miss Murple needed a few heartbeats to realize this human actually did speak some of her language. That was a nice touch. “I am looking for Detective Sergeant John Paul Kling,” she said, hoping she wasn’t mangling the name past comprehension. “It told me we were to
meet here.”

  “One moment, please,” the human said, again in Snarre’l. The Bald One spoke in English into something that looked a little like a telephone: “Detective Sergeant Kling, please report …” The human looked at something Miss Murple couldn’t see, then reported, “He is on the way.”

  So this Kling was a male. Well, it could only matter to another Baldy. Miss Murple wondered how the functionary knew King was coming. Did the humans have something like Snarre’i hearers that could pick out the male’s footsteps from among all the others. Or did they …? Miss Murple’s fur rippled in a gesture of uncertainty. When it came to inorganic technology, she knew how little she knew.

  Hoxbombs were a different story. The Snarre’t had used them for thousands of years, and hadn’t needed long to discover they worked on humans, too. It made sense that they should. Even humans understood how tightly biochemistry constrained biology. If things were going to work at all, they needed to work within certain narrow limits.

  Creatures with front ends and back ends, for instance, needed hox genes to order their endedness. If you scrambled the sequence of those genes and added a couple in places where they didn’t belong … If you did something like that, you got a monstrosity like the one that had been born here.

  Easy to make hoxbombs—too stinking easy. All you needed was a little technique and a whole lot of malice. Sometimes ideology would do in place of malice. If you wanted to grab attention, not much worked better than a hoxbomb.

  “I greet you,” said a human with a voice of familiar timbre.

  “Hello,” Miss Murple replied, glad to get jolted out of her gloomy reverie. She returned to Snarre’l: “You are the human detective, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. Easier for me to recognize you here than the other way around. I wouldn’t have such an easy time in your part of town.”

  “No, I suppose not.” Miss Murple thought telling her own folk apart the easiest thing in the world. Why were humans so inept? That she’d also had trouble recognizing him never crossed her mind.