Alien Nation #8 - Cross of Blood

by K. W. Jeter

  “I don’t think you understand,” said Cathy, slowly and distinctly. “It’s impossible for me to be pregnant.”

  “Well . . .” Dr. Takata shrugged. “I don’t know how long you and your partner have been trying, but—”

  “We haven’t been trying. We can’t even try. The only person I’ve had sex with—for about the last year—is a human male. So like I said . . . it’s not possible.”

  The doctor gazed at her in silence, then drummed his fingers on the manila folder before him. “Cathy . . . Ms. Frankel . . . your personal living arrangements are not really a concern of mine—except to the degree that they affect your health, of course. It’s not my place to make judgments about these things. But let’s face it—getting pregnant is quite a bit more of a, shall we say, deliberative process for Newcomers than it is for humans. Just the matter of the couple having to arrange for the services of a binnaum makes it that way—though I suppose a female who wasn’t being completely forthright with her male partner could, with some difficulty, manage it without his knowledge.” He smiled gently. “I don’t think, Cathy, that would really be your style. So if we’re done kidding around—”

  “I’m not joking.” She leaned across the desk toward him, her hands pressed flat against its surface. “I haven’t had sex with anybody except Matt Sikes. And he’s human; I’m quite sure of that. You must’ve made some mistake.”

  Takata shook his head. “I hardly think so. The only factor that can account for the elevated level of the bardok enzyme in your blood workup would be pregnancy; nothing else in a Tenctonese female does it. That alone is an infallible indicator.” He shrugged. “There were a couple of minor anomalous readings along with it, so I ran all the analyses twice, just to be sure. Believe me, there’s no mistake about this.”

  “Then there’s some other screwup.” Cathy jabbed her finger at the computer printouts. “Those are somebody else’s test results—you must’ve mislabelled the blood samples or something.”

  A shake of the head. “Every sample is bar-coded right on the container at the time it’s drawn from the patient. Plus, there’s the DNA pattern from the blood; that’s unique to every Newcomer individual, and this one—” He tapped the printout. “This one is yours. All right? No lab screwup, no mistake in the paperwork; nothing. Just pregnancy.”

  “No . . .” She shook her head, eyes closed. “It’s not . . .”

  “Cathy. As I said before, I’m not being judgmental about your personal affairs. If you choose to have a sexual relationship with a human male, that’s your business. And what you choose to tell that person about any other sexual activity in which you might be engaged—that’s your business, too. But I’m sure you’re aware that a Tenctonese pregnancy is, relatively speaking, not a simple matter. There are critical arrangements to be made; the biological father needs to be notified that fertilization has taken place, so he can begin preparing himself to receive the embryo and carry it to term . . .”

  She squeezed her eyes shut tighter. In the brightly lit office, the world outside her dizzied head, the doctor’s voice kept hammering softly at her. She could feel her nails digging into the palms as her hands balled into fists.

  “No!” Cathy heard a voice shouting and knew that it was her own. “I didn’t . . . there isn’t anyone else. There’s just been Matt . . .”

  When she opened her eyes, she saw Dr. Takata peering intently at her. After a moment, he glanced down at the numbers and notations on the papers in front of him.

  “Interesting . . .” The doctor’s voice lowered to a murmur. “Then of course, it would be impossible—wouldn’t it?” His gaze swung back up to her face. “Tell you what, Cathy, I need to talk to . . . a couple of my colleagues. I’ll get back to you on this . . .”

  She nodded, feeling miserable. And even more exhausted than she had before. It didn’t matter to her what the doctor was going to do. She would have wished herself safely back home and in bed. And asleep—if she weren’t so afraid of her dreams.

  C H A P T E R 3

  “WAY TO GO, gentlemen.” Captain Grazer leaned back in his chair, a thick cigar in his hand. “What’re you going to do if you catch a jaywalker? Draw down on him while he’s still in the middle of the street?”

  That didn’t sound good—Albert could tell when the station’s captain was indulging in his trademark heavy sarcasm. He busied himself with cleaning up the office, while Grazer went on grilling George and his partner, Sikes.

  “Come on. Give us a break.” That was Sikes’s irritated voice. “We got jumped, all right? First by those HDL jerks, then those news vultures showed up. They were all looking for trouble—that’s what they live for.”

  “So you had to give it to them?” Captain Grazer peeled one finger away from the cigar and used it to jab at the controls of the VCR beside his desk. “That’s real accommodating of you.”

  Albert emptied the captain’s ashtray into the wheeled rubbish bin, swabbed out the square of cut glass with a rag, and set it back down on the desk just in time for it to catch the next flick of gray ash. He caught a glimpse—actually, he had been sneaking looks the whole time he had been in the office—of the images on the video monitor. A streetful of angry, shouting faces, with poor George and poor Sikes stuck in the midst of them. And before that, a shot of something even sadder and grimmer, something infuriating—Albert felt his chest tightening, his own anger rising as high as it ever could.

  On the screen had been a cross made of wood and rags, soaked in a butchered animal’s blood, the red mess soaking into the grass and dirt in front of some Newcomer’s home. No binnaum was so dumb as to be ignorant of what that meant. Albert dumped out the wastebasket, then slammed it back down behind the desk, hard enough to catch the captain by surprise—right now, he didn’t care about the scowl Grazer sent his way. The grisly cross was a Purist symbol, something that bad and mean humans did to show how much they hated the Newcomers. And what the Purists intended to do to them someday. Blood on the ground, a thick red pool of it . . .

  “With all due respect, Captain—” George spoke now, smoother and more mollifying than his partner, “I think a review of the radio log and our incident report will indicate that there was no deviation from standard procedure.” He pointed to the frozen image on the monitor screen, the VCR below set in Pause mode. “Even what’s gone out on the news is fairly mild, at least by recent standards. No hospitalizations, no major property damage—it’s my opinion that it would have to be a remarkably slow news day for this footage to turn up on the evening broadcasts.”

  Albert started in on the office’s window blinds. Even though Captain Grazer had installed—at his own expense—elaborate air filtration units, so he could go on smoking his Coronas and Churchills without getting into trouble with the county workplace regulations, a yellow guck still collected on the thin aluminum slats. As Albert spritzed them with an ammonia solution, it struck him—not for the first time—that getting on TV was not always a good thing. Even though he himself had enjoyed the five times he had been on the screen in the last year, first the little segments on a local personality show, then the bits on A Current Affair and even Good Morning America, his favorite. He had to admit that had all been pretty exciting; some of the detectives and beat cops had teased him by asking for his autograph, but even that had been fun once he’d gotten over his shy embarrassment.

  “Jesus, Albert—” The smell of ammonia had drifted over to the desk; Captain Grazer waved his hand in front of his face. “What the hell are you doing? You want to run a gas chamber, we’ll send you up to San Quentin, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Sorry, I’m just about done here.” Albert wiped a fresh rag across the blinds.

  “Hey—take it easy on the celebrity,” said Sikes. “He makes you look good, remember?”

  “Yeah, well, he’s still the station’s janitor.” The ember at the tip of Grazer’s cigar glowed an angry red. “Maybe if he spent more time being a janitor, and less on all that other
stuff, he wouldn’t have to come in here while I’m trying to get some real work accomplished.”

  “All done, Captain.” Albert stowed his spray bottle and rag back into the tray on the rubbish bin. “I’m sorry I, uh, got in your way . . .”

  “Never mind.” Behind the cigar pointing toward the door, Grazer’s expression looked sourer than Albert could remember it ever having been before. “Just go.”

  “You know, it’s not the ammonia that makes for such a lovely atmosphere around here—” Sikes’s voice filtered through the door as Albert pulled it shut behind himself. “It’s not even that damn cigar. It’s you . . .”

  Everybody seemed to be having a bad day. Deep in thought, Albert pushed the rubbish bin toward the maintenance area at the back of the station. Even without all that business on the TV, the cross soaked in blood and the people all upset in different ways about it, he still would have been able to look at George and his partner, and catch some silent radiation that spoke of heavy troubles. Both the detectives looked so tired, and their heads were so jumbled up with the thoughts inside—the words and images were almost pushing out through their skulls.

  He tilted the bin’s contents into the Dumpster behind the station, then came back inside. Most mornings, he worked straight through without taking a break, at least until it was time for the lunch that May always packed him the night before. But today his own fatigue and big thoughts weighed him down too much. He pulled out the little stool he kept inside the supply closet and sat down, his shoulders rounding with a sigh.

  The closet, with its constant nose-wrinkling odor of cleansers and bulk papers goods and drying floor mops, was Albert’s private territory. On the inside of the door, his collection of press clippings and magazine articles, even a photo of him with Joan Lunden on the GMA interview set, had been carefully arrayed into a personal Hall of Fame. His buddy, Officer Zepeda, had sealed everything into flat plastic evidence bags for him, to make sure that every scrap of paper was kept safe and untorn; she had even gone out and gotten the People magazine framed. His own smiling face gazed out from under the glass, right beside the big words “Sherlock With a Push Broom.” The photographer had taken his picture with the broom in question, shoving a small mound of trash down one of the station’s hallways, with him in his janitor uniform even though he’d offered to go home and put on his good suit or one of the really nice traditional Tenctonese outfits that May had sewn for him.

  “They want the contrast,” Zepeda had explained to him. She had tapped her fingertip against his forehead. “Between that quirky brain of yours and your everyday schlub getup.”

  She must have been right about that; she was generally right about everything she told him. Unfortunately, that included her prediction that Captain Grazer was going to become increasingly grumpy about all the attention that Albert was getting. “Grazer thinks there’s room for only one genius around here—so it better be him. Comprende?” It took a while, because he didn’t want to, but he supposed he finally understood. That made him sad, sitting there and looking up at the clippings; all he’d ever wanted to do was help.

  And that was what the people who had written to him said they wanted. To help them. He had finally gotten up the nerve to tear open the letter he had been carrying around and read the letter inside. A corner of the white paper stuck out of the pocket of his jacket, hanging on a nail farther inside the closet. They’d made it sound as if they really needed him—so it couldn’t be a bad thing, could it? If he did what they wanted.

  Albert felt his brow creasing, as his thoughts became deeper and darker and harder to pick apart. He had to consider what he wanted as well. What he wanted to do for May. That’s the important thing, he told himself. He had to remember that . . .

  “Hey, whatcha doin’, Albert? Cracking another case?”

  He looked up and saw Lieutenant Dobbs’s wide mahogany face smiling around the edge of the closet door. “No—” Albert shook his head. “Just . . . resting. That’s all.”

  “Good idea. You don’t want to burn out the ol’ cerebral circuits.” Dobbs pointed a thumb over his shoulder. “There’s a phone call for you. Why don’t you take it at my desk? I’m just heading out.”

  “Oh.” A twitch, neither of fear or even surprise, pulled at Albert’s spine. Somehow he had known this also had been coming his way. “Thanks.”

  Standing beside Dobbs’s desk, with the rows of detectives and other department officers around him, Albert punched the flashing button on the telephone. “Hello?” He kept his voice low; he didn’t want to disturb the others.

  “Mr. Einstein?” The voice on the line had a pumped up enthusiastic quality to it. “Hi, this is Bob Dierdorf over at Precognosis Consulting. How are ya today?”

  “Uh . . . I’m fine.” Albert glanced over his shoulder, wondering if anyone else had been able to hear the words that had come booming at his ear. The man’s name was the same as the signature at the bottom of the letter tucked in Albert’s jacket.

  “Great, great, glad to hear it. Say, I was wondering if you received the little communication I sent you.”

  He nodded, then remembered to speak aloud. “Yes . . . I think I did.”

  “ ‘Think you did’—that’s pretty cagey, Mr. Einstein, I’ll have to say.” Dierdorf emitted a short, sincere-sounding laugh. “You know, there’s a bunch of us over here who’d really like to get together with you for a chat. There’s some things we need to talk about. Lots of things.”

  “Well . . .”

  Dierdorf jumped back in. “Now, if the dollar amount I mentioned in my letter wasn’t quite enough to whet your appetite, then that’s something we can discuss as well. I just wanted to get some figures out on the table, get things rolling, so to speak.”

  “Well, actually . . .”

  “So I can assume that the basic amount was at least in the ballpark, Mr. Einstein?”

  He had wanted to say that the number with the dollar sign in front and all the zeroes for a tail was more money than he had ever dreamed of, more money than he could even imagine; maybe this Bob Dierdorf had made a mistake or something. Albert knew how hard arithmetic could be. He wanted to say all that, but his mouth was too slow; he didn’t have a chance against the other’s onslaught of words.

  “I’ll send a car around this evening, then. We’ve already reserved a table at l’Orangerie; the other vice presidents and I are pretty much regulars there.”

  “Gee . . . I don’t know if I could afford going to a place like that . . .” Albert had never heard of it, but just from the name it sounded expensive.

  Dierdorf’s hearty laugh went off like a cannon. “That’s pretty good. But don’t worry—this one’s on us.” The laugh shifted into a chuckle. “Though considering what we’re planning on paying you, pretty soon you’ll be able to buy the restaurant. See you tonight, okay? Looking forward to it.”

  “Sure . . .” Before Albert could say anything more, the connection was broken. He set the phone back down on the desk. That was sure strange, he thought.

  As he turned around in a slow daze, he saw the door to Captain Grazer’s office opening. George and Sikes came out, the human detective rolling his eyes upward and shaking his head in annoyed disgust; George’s expression was more carefully maintained.

  From behind the two, Grazer spotted Albert. “Hey!” The captain pointed at him. “Albert—were you making a personal call?”

  It took a moment for Albert to reply. “Somebody called me,” he said.

  “No personal calls during your shift; I’ve told you before.” The captain’s scowl deepened. “How about making an effort to remember that?”

  George and Sikes had drifted over to the table with the coffee urn on it. Leaning over to fill his cup, the one with the Dodgers emblem on it, Sikes watched the scene with eyes drawn down to little simmering slits.

  “Yes, sir.” Albert nodded. “I’ll try—”

  Grazer had already stomped back into his office and slammed the door shut. T
he detectives and other officers shook their heads and went back to their work.

  “Mister Charm,” said Officer Zepeda, from over by the case files.

  “It’s okay.” Albert looked over toward her. “It doesn’t bother me.”

  Actually . . . it did. Sometimes, when the captain yelled at him for no good reason, a little spark of resentment flared inside him. This time, it was accompanied by a new thought.

  If somebody could get so rich that they could buy a whole restaurant . . . how much, he wondered, would it take to buy a police station?

  “What the hell’s this?”

  George Francisco looked up. His partner, at the desk across from his own, was holding up a small rectangular object. Sikes was regarding the thing with the mingled repulsion and fascination that a particularly large and hairy insect might evoke.

  “It appears,” said George, “to be an audiocassette in its standard, small plastic container.” He set down the inter-station memo that he had begun to read. “Surely, Matt, you’ve seen one of those before.”

  “Yeah, my glove compartment’s full of ’em. I’ve just never seen one with Ol’ Laughing Boy’s picture on it.” Sikes turned the case around to show the color photograph of Captain Grazer.

  “How . . . interesting.” George poked further through the papers in his In box. “There seems to be one here for me as well.” He held up an identical cassette, the image of the captain smiling confidently from inside the clear plastic.

  “We all got them,” said the detective across the aisle. “Check it out—you’re gonna love this.”

  George had already opened the case and extracted the folded leaflet inside. “I believe I detect signs of a commercial venture . . .”

  “Yeah, right.” Sikes slumped down in his chair. “If ‘commercial venture’ is Tenctonese for ‘scam’ that is.” He pried open his cassette’s leaflet. “God save us from Grazer’s get-rich-quick schemes.”