The Far Side

by Wylie, Gina Marie

  Kris laughed for the first time in weeks. “A publicity hound who has never made a video appearance, given no interviews and is held incommunicado?”

  “Like I said... you have to consider the source.”

  “I will come, as soon as it can be arranged.”

  “I don’t suppose you could arrange a visit from Miss Schulz?”

  “A visit? Sure. You can’t begin to match the offer the Arvalans made her, though.”

  “I could try.”

  “She’s the dean of science for the entire continent. She has scholars and the learned fawning over her, even now, here, where they can only talk to her over the radio. She gives daily lessons on math, science, weapons... it’s impressive.”

  “You’re right, I can’t match that. I will see you in a few days, Miss Boyle.”

  Kris moved the microphone to one side and turned to leave the room. Kurt was there.

  “Well?” he asked.

  “You get your wish,” she told him.

  * * *

  A week, Kris thought. What a difference a week makes. She’d spent a day with her father as he went over the politics. Her father had been arrested, as had almost everyone else who’d stayed on Earth, but unlike Kris and a lot of the others who had gone off-world, they hadn’t insisted he be quarantined.

  There was a reason for that, she learned. The President was terrified that if he incarcerated Oliver Boyle again, the next person incarcerated would be himself.

  Her father had been cheerful. “They figure it’s fourteen months to the off-year elections. Let the voters kick them out if they want, or so the theory goes. That simply means we’ve started expediting the criminal cases. Last week we filed felony complaints against thirty-two Democrats and twenty-four Republicans members of the House, and two each in the Senate -- none of the last four are up for reelection and thought they could surely sneak it past us.

  “Now they are trying to fight having to resign in the professional misconduct subcommittee, but when they introduced that motion, we started asking for ‘no bail’ requests. None of those have worked, but they are being booked, which is bad enough for them. All it will take is one who decides to move to Brazil and there will be a lot of bail bonds revoked.”

  “I have no idea what you are doing,” she told her father.

  “A soft coup. A coup within the rules, without a great deal of violence -- certainly nothing like what you had to face, Kris.”

  “Are you comfortable with me going off to Vermont?”

  “I tell myself it will be for a few days. I looked -- they had a frost there yesterday and the leaves will be changing color. I’ve seen the fall colors in New England, Kris -- it is one of the most spectacularly beautiful things you’ll ever see. Then it starts to snow -- if you move to Vermont you will freeze your ass off.”

  “You think that cave was warm?”

  “No, but it wasn’t freezing.”

  There was that, of course.

  “Security?” she asked.

  “We released to the media that you had a seizure right after you returned, and that your condition was still under scrutiny.”

  “I didn’t have a seizure and I’m not under scrutiny.”

  “You fainted -- that’s close enough to a seizure for government work. You are subject to weekly medical tests for the next eleven months, then monthly for the indefinite future. That sounds like scrutiny to me.”

  “Gosh, thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. I might add that only a half dozen people away from the quarantine site know about Diyala. None of them are going to talk.”

  “Thanks,” she told him, meaning it this time.

  A little later her mother appeared for her morning rounds. “We need a blood sample, Kris,” she was told.

  Kris bared the arm that hadn’t been the victim the day before. She had long since realized that her mother had no day-to-day memory of what arm she offered up.

  Her mother drew the blood sample and started putting things away.

  “Mom...”

  Her mother looked at Kris.

  “Can you tell me one thing that you’ve learned from these tests? One thing that justifies them?”

  “You wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand myself -- lack of understanding could be a problem. It’s better if you remain ignorant.”

  “Mother, you once told me that you were profoundly opposed to ignorance in people.”

  Her mother blinked. “I remember that. This is a different kind of ignorance, Kris. Knowing what I know wouldn’t help you a bit and could cause problems.”

  “Mother, I’m eighteen. If you were my doctor in a hospital, would you have to fess up?”

  “Don’t be silly dear; we lie to our patients all of the time.”

  “Mom, once upon a time, Dad found out what Andie and I were doing. He realized that if he forbade it, we’d do it anyway, and I’d be pissed at him from now until the end of time. Mom -- you’re not immune to the same thing.”

  “What? You want me to tell you about things none of us understand, not even dimly? The Arvalans are nearly human. My God! I even have a semen sample! It’s nearly, but not completely, human. They use two amino acids that we don’t. We use three they don’t. Amino acids, I might add, that exist on both planets.

  “Bacteria...” she sighed. “We have no idea. None. For a few days after you came back, we found foreign DNA -- DNA with the wrong amino acids -- in the titers of your blood. Each day you were back, we found less and less. Most of you were clear after five days, and we found no foreign DNA after the seventh day.

  “I know you don’t approve, but we’ve been running the same tests on the girl, Diyala. Not only has the foreign DNA been purged from her blood, but we go through her stools with a fine tooth comb. The foreign DNA is gone there, too.

  “The best explanation is that while you were there, the foreign DNA had access to your system, but eventually you adjusted to it. Diyala’s immune system spent about two weeks trying to kill everything it met, but it has given up, and is now accepting the bacteria that she meets here every day.

  “We have no idea how this works, Kris. None. Obviously, foreign DNA hasn’t had to build up immunity to the attacks of our immune system before -- and vice versa. We can’t even begin to understand this. The simplest explanation is that our immune systems recognize that they have to adapt -- and then do so. There is no logical reason such an ability should have developed.”

  “You’re saying I’m not contagious?”

  “You don’t appear to be, Kris. Nor does Diyala appear to be. I understand that Andie considered the fact that SG-1 found English everywhere to be obnoxious.”

  “I did too,” Kris said, defending her friend.

  “Well, guess what? Your immune system speaks English, and when the Arvalan bacteria are here, they learn to speak English too. Arvalan immune systems can learn to speak English as well. There is a little cross-talk in the beginning, but it fades rapidly.”

  Kris contemplated things. “You’re saying I’m not supposed to shout this to the rooftops?”

  “Kris, it’s an unproven theory, okay? One alien planet does not make a successful test of a theory.”

  “And this Thomas Briggs’ wife?”

  “Marjorie?” Her mother smiled slightly. “Dear, I trusted Marjorie long before I met your father. She and I are looking for the same things, and I might add, quite happy to find them.”

  “You and she aren’t...”

  “Like Andie and Linda? No dear, sorry. We were though, more like you and Andie. We were both driven students who had singular goals that we worked very hard towards. I was heterosexual and Marjorie was a nun. Really -- she was a nun. She gave that up after she graduated from pre-med, but that’s how she started.”

  “And me?” Kris asked. “What about me? Was I an after thought?”

  Her mother shook her head. “You were most carefully planned.” She stopped, seemed to take stock, before going on. “I was doi
ng some important research and couldn’t afford to have the experiment interrupted except on a particular schedule. You came from that schedule.

  “Please, Kris, you have to trust me. I love you -- I always have and I always will. I know I show that love in ways you don’t recognize, but who knows, maybe one day you will. In the meantime, don’t ever forget who loves you!”

  Her mother waved towards the small infirmary. “Speaking of that, Diyala would like to talk to you.”

  “I wish you’d have mentioned that first,” Kris said, sounding peevish.

  “I had things to do and answers for your questions, plus an explanation or two. Sue me.” She laughed and walked towards the lab, Kris’ blood sample in its little basket.

  Kris went inside the infirmary and saw that Diyala was out of bed, sitting in a chair, looking at a children’s picture book with the words spelled out in large letters.

  Diyala looked at her. “Your mother says that soon we may leave.”

  “Yes.” It had been amazing how fast Diyala had learned English. Then, Diyala had mentioned that she spoke some of the Builder tongue, the ancient language of the Arvalans, plus two other languages that belonged to other nations the Tengri had met. Her father, as a senior officer in the Tengri Imperium, had no sons, and so his daughter accompanied him on many of his journeys. According to Diyala, her father didn’t want anyone to know how many languages she spoke.

  “That is true, Diyala, we will be going on a trip here shortly.

  “One thing you will learn on that trip is that I will prove to you that you are not on the Big Moon while we are on this trip.”

  Diyala looked at her with wide eyes. “How could we be anyplace else?”

  “We have a number of ways of traveling that the Tengri do not. As you have ships in the water, we have ships that move through the air -- they fly. Our ships in the water move much faster than your ships, and our ships in the air travel dozens of times faster than that. Some of our ships in the air move faster than a musket ball.”

  Diyala scoffed. “You say! Always, you say that you are so much better than us.”

  “You’ve told me that books are rare among your people. That the Builders made some, but your people prefer hand-written scrolls. Not even the Builders made books like the one you’re reading.”

  “It was made by a machine,” Diyala sniffed. “That is of no account. Slaves are cheaper.”

  “Actually, they’re not. Not even if you discount how much slaves cost. A machine can make hundreds, thousands of books in day and not need to rest or eat.”

  “You say,” she told Kris. “Always you say. Machines break.”

  “And slaves don’t?”

  “There are always more slaves.”

  “Diyala, I saved your life.”

  “You say.”

  “I did.”

  “You say.”

  “Well, believe it or not, I did. And tomorrow we’re going to leave here. One of the things we will do is board one of those ships of the air, and it will fly us across my country. I will let you sit at the window and look out.”

  Diyala might have been as hard as nails about politics, but she was a normal almost-teenager. “We will really fly?”

  “Aye, Diyala. I swear it. And we will visit some of our cities. Mine, which is the second largest in my country and I promise you, you will be surprised. Then our greatest city and then some smaller towns.”

  “You say.”

  Kris laughed. “Aye, I do. And I want you to think about something. At some point you are going to realize that these things you laugh at are true. A mean person -- a Tengri, for instance -- would rub your nose in it. If I understand some of what you said, if you disagreed with your father as sharply as you disagree with me, he’d beat you.”

  “You are not my father. One day he will come for me, and you and yours will all be slaves.”

  “You say,” Kris said with a laugh. “From what you tell me, there are about twenty million Tengri.”

  “There are lot of those zero-things,” Diyala agreed. “I am not sure how many.”

  “Yes, well, you will find out soon enough -- for every six Tengri, there are a hundred of us. Your muskets shoot once a minute -- ours a thousand times. You have cannons that throw heavy iron balls a few miles. We have weapons that you could fire from your homeland and hit the Arvalans -- and vice versa. You have no bombs. We have bombs that can consume a city utterly.”

  “You say.”

  “Indeed. Fifteen of our years ago, twelve of yours, a country with an army larger than ours invaded a neighbor, one of our allies. We told them to leave. They didn’t. Diyala, we sent a tithe of our army and we won in four days. They lost tens of thousands of soldiers, and we literally lost a handful.”

  “And now they are your slaves.”

  “No, they had a utility as they were. My country doesn’t take slaves, Diyala, and it was a very poor country. Six years ago they angered us again, and that time we conquered them utterly. We still haven’t enslaved them -- and won’t.”

  “I suppose you have your machines to do your labor,” she told Kris.

  “That’s right. Keep it up, Diyala, one of these days you’ll learn to think with your head and not your prejudices.”

  “What is to become of me?”

  “We haven’t decided. For the time being you are like a fosterling, which is something you know of.”

  “Many high-ranking families practice it,” she agreed.

  “I will see that you receive an education, that you are fed and clothed, and when you are eighteen of our years, sixteen of yours, you can decide. Even if you wish to return home, I would try to find a way to do it -- it is, for instance, unlikely that your father has returned home. We can hear him use his radio from the islands off the Fingers.”

  “Radio is a secret of the Tengri Imperium. No others have it. We would know.”

  “Well, we’ve had it for a very long time. It is why I can talk to you about it, if you think about it.”

  Kris didn’t want to tell her that the National Security Agency had, on their own, sent three linguists and a half dozen signal analysts through the Far Side Door to Arvala and were even now reading the messages between the Imperial Viceroy and his Emperor. Between Chaba and Diyala, they’d learned enough of the Tengri language, and Diyala knew how to write it, and had given them the alphabet. Kris felt bad about that, but what could she do? The girl hadn’t even been asked. She’d volunteered it when Kris had been teaching her the English alphabet, and she’d told Kris the numbers when Kris had been teaching her numbers as well.

  * * *

  The next day, Kris imposed on her mother not to do any blood work, and she took Diyala to the airport, with Kurt and Ezra accompanying them. Diyala was genuinely shocked to discover what an automobile did, and then even more shocked when she saw the traffic on the roads of LA.

  When they reached the airport Diyala looked at Kris. “And this is just one city?”

  “Yes. Come, I will show you something else.”

  She led Diyala to an observation deck and waved around at the airport. There were aircraft taxiing, taking off and landing. It was hard for Kris to take it all in, and Diyala ended up trembling. Plus, of course, jet engines aren’t the quietest things in the universe.

  Kris had Diyala focus on one aircraft at a time, and after she had watched two take off, she watched another one land. By then she’d mastered her emotions and looked around. “These are war machines?”

  “No, these are just for people to travel around in. We keep the war machines at special places. Our fliers practice far more than those from any other country. We rarely lose a war, and the one time it happened was because we decided not to fight any more... it would be like the Imperium deciding not to fight in Arvala any more. It was halfway around the world and our people decided it wasn’t worth it.”

  “And these machines? How many people do they hold?”

  “The smaller ones, a hundred, a hundred
and twenty maybe. The medium size ones, two hundred or thereabouts. Some of the largest hold four or five hundred people.”

  “How fast to do they fly?”

  “Five hundred miles an hour,” Kris told her. “Our military flying machines fly much faster.”

  Diyala looked around them, at the crowds of people visible towards the terminal. “I will have to think on this. I thought you were lying to me.”

  “Diyala, when you have this,” Kris waved around them, “you don’t need to lie.”

  Diyala nodded soberly.

  She was silent as they went through the security check point, but Kris had told her what she had to do, and there were no problems. “I don’t understand what they are looking for,” the young girl told Kris.

  “A few years ago fanatics captured four airplanes and crashed them into three great buildings. Two of those buildings were destroyed, and one was damaged. The passengers of the fourth learned of what their fate would be and rose up and in the fight aboard the airliner, the fanatics crashed it into the ground.

  “Since then, we don’t take chances.”

  Kurt and Ezra stayed a few steps behind them, not saying anything. Diyala was aware that Kurt had been there when her mother had been killed, but she wasn’t aware that it had been Kurt who had killed everyone aboard the ship except herself.

  Kris helped Diyala buckle in, and then explained in a low voice the rituals of the preflight briefing. Diyala had her nose pressed against the window as they taxied, and, having no experience with takeoffs, was surprised to be pushed back against the seat as they accelerated down the runway.

  “That is the ocean, yes?” Diyala asked as they flew out over the water.

  “Yes,” Kris answered.

  “And those things I see, they are ships?”

  “Some of them are very large, but yes, they’re ships.”

  “The ground is getting very far away.”

  “Yes, we’ll probably be flying seven or eight miles above the ground.”

  “Out of musket range,” Diyala said pensively.

  “Yes,” Kris said, enjoying the repetition.