V_The 2nd Generation

by Kenneth Johnson

  He eyed the selection carefully. "Anything human here?"

  "Not yet," Diana said, smiling. "We're saving them for dessert. After we've selected out those suitable for other uses." She watched as Jeremy also inspected each of the small animals pawing around inside translucent containers. "Anything look interesting to you?"

  "I'd heard these were quite nice." Jeremy opened one of the built-in cubicles and took out a yellow parakeet.

  "Yes, indeed they are, sir," said Paul. The unctuous press secretary had been looking for a neutral opportunity to insert himself into their conversation. "Careful of its little claws, though, sir."

  Jeremy turned the parakeet around in his hand, admiring the feathers. Then he opened his mouth and his jaw popped loose as it distended inhumanly wide. He pushed the fluttering bird in and swallowed it whole.

  Diana watched his throat bulge unevenly as the still-living bird slid down his gullet. She wondered if Jeremy thought he could dispense with her as easily.

  For his part, Jeremy seemed focused entirely on his dining experience. He was, Diana knew, a connoisseur who much preferred live food such as the parakeet. He liked experiencing the deep satisfaction that resulted from the sensation of the creature's passage downward, alive and squirming, within his throat. He greatly enjoyed that feeling as he would also enjoy the animal's panicked, drowning flutters deep within his stomach for the next few minutes.

  Diana moved to her chair at the end of the table and sat. "So. You're here to improve our efficiency?"

  "Yes. There are pressing reasons." He was picking a small piece of yellow fluff from the corner of his mouth.

  "Oh, I know there are, of course." Diana nodded, smiling as she traced a finger over the smooth tabletop and said casually, "The approaching war."

  Martin stopped breathing. Had he heard correctly? From his position near the door, Martin saw that Paul was also stunned at the mention of a coming war, but the ever-cagey Shawn was unruffled, apparently in on the secret. Jeremy's eyes had quickly flicked over to Diana. She had not looked up, but she knew that he was surprised and it pleased her. "So you see I'm not completely uninformed." She raised her smoldering eyes slowly to meet Jeremy's. "Martin, will you please see to tonight's gathering?"

  As Martin emerged from the conference chamber and walked down the shadowy passageway, Willy, who had been pretending to do some maintenance work nearby, fell into step beside him. Willy could feel Martin's unease bubbling near the surface. He whispered to his friend, "What is it?"

  "Oh, just the casual mention of a coming war."

  Willy was shocked. "War! Against the Resistance?"

  "No, it was something else, something new." Martin exhaled with frustration. "I wish I could be among her innermost group."

  When they were well past a Patroller, Willy said in a whisper, "Listen, I had an idea about that. Someone who might help. I sent off a message to Margarita . . . about Emma."

  AS IN ALL OF THE OTHER 250 MOTHERSHIPS, THE FLAGSHIP'S LOWER, inner passageways were narrower and much less inviting than those frequented by Diana and her command staff. The walls were an oily black. They were covered from top to bottom with electrical conduit or pipes of various sizes. Many of the pipes were transparent so the various colored liquids within them could be seen flowing; some were thick and moved sluggishly while others flowed at great speed. The inner corridors were also much darker and since they were steamy most were perpetually damp. The temperature was as high as the humidity, which made the air feel even more close and claustrophobic as it pressed against Sidney Stein's sweaty skin.

  His clothes were soaked from his own perspiration that traced down his face and neck. Danny Stein's father was among thirteen very worried human prisoners being led by three Patrollers along a dark passageway deeper and deeper into the bowels of the great behemoth of a ship, where even the most trusted Teammates were never allowed. The prisoners continually glanced at one another, seeking some comfort or at least connection with a fellow human. Sidney had seen the panic in the tearful eyes of the woman just in front of him. He didn't know her name and had never seen her before they were thrown together as prisoners. "I shouldn't be here," she was murmuring to the uncaring Patroller walking in front of her. "The woman who denounced me was lying. I'm not in the Resistance."

  As they passed a hatch, a female Visitor technician suddenly popped her head out at nervous Sidney, and shouted, "Boo!"

  Sidney was startled and unnerved by the Visitor's appearance. The technician had a human face with a Hispanic cast to it, but one of her eyes was violet. Sidney also noticed there was an odd sheen on one of her cheeks. A Patroller prodded Sidney to move along as the technician laughed, then went back inside the hatch and into one of the Flagship's many chemical laboratories.

  There were perhaps twenty-five Visitor technicians and doctors working at various tables and consoles. The lab was similar to those of Earth. It contained numerous racks of flasks, tubes, and other containers, but also some devices and instrumentation that a human chemist would have thought unsettlingly alien. The technician, Teresa, who had scared Sidney, looked in a mirror assessing the sheen on her face. "So, what do you think?"

  The human blue eyes of the gentle half-breed custodian, Jon, glanced up eagerly from where he was electronically scrubbing the floor. He was delighted to be called upon. "Very interesting, ma'am. What exactly are you—?"

  "I'm not talking to you, you stupid dreg." The tech gruffly shoved Jon aside and approached a Visitor research doctor. "Well, Eric?" The doctor turned to look at her. He had a good, square, honest face and thick, slightly graying hair that gave him the look of a respectable fifty-year-old Caucasian. He was in the midst of using a syringe to extract puslike fluid from a bulbous insect.

  Teresa displayed her violet eye and the sheen on her cheek. "Is Jeremy going to be happy?"

  "Only if we finish quickly." Eric scrutinized the details of Teresa's face while she picked up one of his fat insects and popped it into her mouth, chewing it with enjoyment. Then Eric concluded in his characteristically soft-spoken manner, "Yes, it looks better. And please stop eating my research."

  "But those brown ones are killer." Teresa was reaching for another when Eric's serious expression stopped her. She smirked and turned back to her own work as Eric gathered some scrap material and smiled down toward the young janitor.

  "Jon, do you think you could dispose of this?"

  "Certainly, sir." Jon nodded graciously at the kindly doctor. Eric was one of the very few who ever showed tolerance to half-breeds such as Jon. "Oh, and, sir," Jon spoke quietly to avoid the notice of the other doctors and technicians, "you had also discarded this molecular analyzer." The teenager opened a door on the side of his floating custodial module to show Eric the small device.

  "Yes, I did, the power cell was faulty"—then Eric smiled knowingly—"something new for your collection?"

  "If you wouldn't mind, sir," Jon said hopefully.

  "By all means." Eric gave the misshapen boy a fatherly pat on the shoulder and returned to his work.

  Jon put the waste materials into the top of his floating module and eased it out the hatch ahead of him. Once in the corridor he used his access key to enter a transport tube designated as Restricted Entry.

  As the tube carried the teenager downward and at the diagonal angle necessary, his facile mind was turning over the possibilities of recalibrating a micro-fuel cell already in his possession to reactivate the molecular analyzer. He was confident he could construct the proper algorithms and create the necessary quantum interface. Numerous possible equations spun through his busy brain and began forming into exciting coherence.

  The elevator eased to a stop and the control panel demanded a High Security code key, which Jon supplied. Then the door hissed open to reveal a corridor much larger than those he had just left. It was dark. The walls were the same slick black and circumscribed with conduits and piping through which the bodily fluids of the great ship surged, pulsed, or slowly f
lowed. The air here was even heavier with heat and humidity, though Jon seemed not to notice. He walked along the floor, a metal grid that allowed him to see down through to other such walkways below his feet, the sublevels disappearing downward into the hazy distance.

  Jon guided his custodial unit toward a larger open hatch. The gurgling sound of thick liquid intensified around him. There were also thousands of intermittent hissing and percolating noises that blended together into a low, pervasive white noise like a wide swath of a shallow river flowing over small stones. But this was no sylvan landscape. Crossing the threshold into the Storage Chamber was like suddenly stepping from an ordinary room into a dark, towering cathedral, but much larger, like a domed sports stadium. Yet this Storage Chamber was far larger even than that. It seemed immeasurably vast, stretching a mile above and below Jon's vantage point and more than a mile across. And it was not empty.

  It was filled with opaque, membranous capsules, each about the size of a coffin. They stood upright, side by side. There were row upon row of them, stretching upward, downward, and away from Jon with access catwalks and open lifts interwoven among them. Jon looked at the capsules nearest him, which were representative of all the tens of thousands of others. Bloated, flexible, intestinelike tubes coiled and pulsed around each of the capsules creating the undulating sounds that filled the chamber. Inside each capsule was a human being, sightlessly staring out, comatose.

  Several of those near Jon wore U.S. military uniforms, while others wore clothing that suggested their profession. There were mechanics, people in lab coats, business suits, firemen. A little girl wore the white blouse and pleated, plaid jumper of a Catholic-school girl. But the majority of them were dressed in everyday clothes such as might be seen on any city street. Each of the people entombed was fitted with a neurological unit that covered head and ears like a helmet. The cables snaking upward from the head unit always reminded Jon of the mythological Medusa.

  Jon was fascinated by human mythology. Unlike many half-breeds, Jon had embraced the human side of his heritage and was an avid reader of whatever books from Earth he could get his hands on. Many books that were no longer available to people on Earth were stored in the restricted vaults on the Flagship, to which Jon had custodial access. He had secretly read such forbidden works as Brave New World, 1984, Huckleberry Finn, All the President's Men as well as hundreds of other books both fictional and fact. His thirst for knowledge was intense and he took great advantage of his privileged access. He particularly enjoyed scientific works. He counted himself very lucky, because the education of most half-breeds was ignored among the Visitors much as it was among the humans.

  Jon had moved farther along the catwalk amid the storage capsules. Though he had seen these complex, cocoonlike mechanisms all his life, they fascinated him. He was intrigued by how they had been designed to keep the people within in a state of suspension, just barely alive, for years. He slowed his pace as he approached a particular capsule. He stopped and with his hand gently wiped the collected moisture from its surface so he could better see the woman within. She was about thirty years of age and her hair and eyes were similar in color to Jon's.

  He gazed at her glazed, unseeing blue eyes for a long moment, then he sighed and walked on. Rounding a corner he came in sight of a Capsule Operations Control. There were many such operational platforms scattered throughout the gargantuan storage chamber, but this was the principal one and the largest. It was semicircular, its flat side about forty feet long. Monitoring consoles were built into that back wall with hundreds of thick conduits channeling into the top of them. There were two long desk-style consoles along the front of the curve with a wide space in the center to allow access from the platform to the catwalks that fanned out among the myriad capsules.

  Jon saw that Diana's chief lieutenant Shawn was showing the operation to the newly arrived Commandant. Not wanting to incur Jeremy's further displeasure, Jon held back discreetly but watched the proceedings. He saw the thirteen most recent human prisoners being led to an equal number of open capsules. The frightened people were being directed to step into them, as a storage technician moved closer. Like many of the Visitors who worked in the innermost regions of the ship, storage technicians rarely wore human faces. This one leaned his scaly reptilian head with its several tiny horns along the temples close to the woman who had been walking in front of Sidney Stein and who was now standing in the capsule next to his. Though Sidney did not know it, she was Connie Leonetti, the woman whom Sidney's wife Stella had falsely denounced at the chemical plant.

  Connie drew back instinctively from the reptile's sour breath and sharp teeth. His forked tongue flicked out and toyed with her ear a moment. Jon knew that the technician enjoyed his position of superiority and often harassed the new prisoners. Then the technician's yellow eyes with their vertical irises flashed as his green lipless mouth grinned at them. "Welcome to our little hotel. We've got some nice bedtime stories for you."

  Other storage technicians, also with reptilian faces, were using their scaly, clawed hands to affix the neuro clamps onto the heads of the prisoners, including Sidney who was near panic now. "This is a mistake! I'm a loyal Teammate! Please, Commandant!"

  Sidney's plea opened the floodgates and suddenly the other prisoners also began crying out, begging for their lives, as the plasticine shells began to slowly close them in. Connie was screaming through her tears, "Please! I'm not with the Resistance! Don't do this! My little girl has only me! Please don't—!"

  The capsules sealed around Connie and the others whose voices could no longer be heard though Jon could still see them pleading within. Jon glanced at Commandant Jeremy, who was watching with bored impatience as the interiors of the capsules swirled with a greenish gas. Jon saw the people within reacting with terror as they tried to breathe, but couldn't. Jon held his own breath while mentally urging the desperate people not to fight it. He knew that struggling against the gas was useless. Yet several of them did, particularly Connie whose mouth was gaping wide again and again seeking the oxygen that was no longer available. Jon hated to see the bizarre, unnerving process. But he forced himself to watch, thinking that perhaps his presence, his bearing witness, might somehow ease their suffering.

  After an interminable moment, the clenched muscles in Connie's face and neck began to relax and she ceased to move. Like Sidney and the others, she had become impassive, staring sightlessly, without motion.

  Jon glanced at Jeremy. The Commandant was picking another tiny piece of lint from his pristine sleeve, apparently anxious to get on to more important matters.

  9

  THE AFTERNOON SHADOWS WERE LENGTHENING ON HEMLOCK STREET just west of Van Ness where there were a number of small shops. One was a modest, mom-and-pop vid store, selling mostly used merchandise. An old table set out in front displayed the cheapest inventory. The vid dealer, a turbaned Arab named Ahmed, was arranging his wares as a middle-aged businesswoman paused by the table and flipped through the vids. Then she casually checked to be sure no one was listening and whispered to him, "I'm looking for The Truth."

  Ahmed reacted cautiously, then chuckled. "Hard to come by. No CNN, no Voice of America. Just like in my old country."

  They both became aware that a Patrol shuttle was gliding by overhead. They waited for it to pass. Then the woman poked at the cheap merchandise again and spoke without looking at the dealer, "I think I'm supposed to say 'Street-C sent me.' "

  Ahmed had already been sizing her up. These were very dangerous times, but he also knew they were critical times. He and his wife Viella had been working with the Resistance for sixteen years, ever since they had barely escaped a Visitor dragnet in Riyadh. He glanced again at the businesswoman. The look in her eyes was earnest. Ahmed reached under the table and gave her a vid disk like the one Danny Stein had been viewing at his school. The customer smiled and opened her purse, but Ahmed stayed her hand. "No charge. Just please pass it on."

  The woman met his eyes with a conspirator
ial twinkle. "You can be sure I will." Then she moved on up the sidewalk.

  Across the street the black Visitor Patrol captain who had condemned Sidney Stein was holding Danny's arm as the boy reluctantly looked across at Ahmed in front of his shop. Danny's voice was low; he was very reluctant. "Yeah. That's where I got the vid." Danny looked up at the Visitor's dark face. "Now will you let my father go?"

  THAT EVENING THE GRAND BALLROOM AT SAN FRANCISCO'S FAMED Mark Hopkins Hotel was rocking with the latest popular hit being sung by America's sexy sweetheart, Emma. The music carried out into the large elegant foyer that was deserted except for Commandant Jeremy, who had just emerged from the ballroom onto the thick burgundy carpet. He'd had quite enough music. He looked impatiently around the lovely high-ceilinged room with its gold rococo chandelier, its beautifully carved mahogany woodwork, its tasteful and expensive artwork, and he saw none of it. The thick, king-sized door he'd just come through opened again as Diana paused there to study him. Behind her could be seen a narrow sliver of the chic gathering within, people in black tie or in Visitor and Teammate dress uniforms seated at tables flowing within linen cloths and set with crystal. Emma could be glimpsed singing on the small stage, but Jeremy was uninterested. Diana walked slowly toward her fellow Commandant with a look of feigned concern on her face. "Something wrong?"

  His tone was curt. "We should just get to business."

  Diana smiled wisely. "This is business, Jeremy."

  "This is fluff. All of that in there"—he gestured deprecatingly toward the ballroom—"it's mere nonsense."

  "Exactly. And humans thrive on it," Diana spoke easily, a twenty-year student of human sociology. "Gatherings like this, and entertainment in general—with embedded propaganda," she added pointedly, "is the best way to achieve our goals."

  He didn't believe her. He'd made his own assessment. "You've gone soft."