Alien Nation #8 - Cross of Blood

by K. W. Jeter

  That had been a long time ago. But even now, it would be so easy for him to be carried away by his father’s words, to believe in that bright promise once again . . .

  To be fooled.

  Buck looked up at his father. Inside his chest, he could feel his hearts clenching like doubled fists. “Sure,” said Buck. “They gave us our lives. Just so they could take them away from us again.” He flicked a hand toward the television. The gesture said enough: every day, the TV’s blank screen had seemed to become even more of a window onto another world, a darker one, filled with hate-contorted faces, uniformed Purists, fists waving in the air . . . and crosses soaked in bloody rags, propped up in front of Newcomer homes just like this one. “You just . . . don’t . . . get it. The terts don’t want us here. They never did; they were lying to us. And now they’re getting set to do something about us slags. The humans have probably got their final solution to the Newcomer problem just about ready.”

  His father wearily shook his head. “Buck, that is just paranoid nonsense. I’ll grant you there are problems between the humans and our people; there are bound to be. Do you think I don’t know that? I have to deal with groups like the Human Defense League every day. But what about our friends? What about humans like my partner Matt? Your sister Emily calls him ‘Uncle Matt’—do you really think that someone like him wants to rid this world of our people? You can’t be serious.”

  “Sikes is your friend.” Buck spat out his next words. “I don’t have humans for friends. You don’t understand—if they can’t kill us one way, they’ll do it another. The humans will act like they’re our friends, they’ll do all sorts of nice and cozy and wonderful things for us . . . and then one day we’ll be gone. Because there won’t be any more Tenctonese left. We’ll all be just like them, the humans. Or we’ll have died trying.”

  For a moment, Buck’s father closed his eyes, trying to compose himself. “I have devoted my life—this life that’s been given to me by this world—to building peace between the humans and our people.” As he looked at his son, his expression was both stern and grieving. “I don’t know if there’s room in this house—in this family—for someone with so much hatred in his hearts.”

  The shouting and the fury had come to an end. The only words that could be spoken now were hollow things, like the rustling of dry leaves after a storm had passed.

  “Fine by me.” Buck grabbed his jacket from the end of the couch and stood up. “Nobody has to make room for me.”

  He pulled the front door shut with an echoing slam behind himself.

  Outside, the family station wagon had just pulled up in the driveway. Emily had already scrambled out, arms full of bags from The Gap and Mervyn’s; behind her, Buck’s mother was busy unstrapping the baby’s car seat. She looked up as he stalked past.

  “Buck—where are you going?” She sounded alarmed, as though she had caught the expression on his face.

  He made no reply, but went on striding down the sidewalk, past all the well-groomed lawns and sprawling houses.

  “Hey!” his sister cried after him. “Buck . . .”

  Past the lawns and houses, and into the soft blue islands of the streetlights. Toward the distant, hard-edged outline of the city. He kept walking, the night air already cold on his face.

  “Mr. Einstein—glad you could make it.”

  His hand was caught like a startled bird and pumped vigorously up and down. The napkin slid from Albert’s lap and floated to the restaurant’s intricate gold-threaded carpet.

  The man who had come striding up to the table now pulled back the last empty chair and sat down. One of the pretty waitresses from the bar section immediately placed a scotch and soda, clinking with ice cubes, in front of him, then retreated.

  “Albert, this is Mr. Vogel.” Sitting on the table’s other side, the human named Dierdorf smiled even more broadly than before. “He’s the president of Precognosis.”

  “Um . . .” Albert could feel his feet beneath the table beginning to swell, in the usual Tenctonese sign of nervousness. He resisted the impulse to reach down and loosen his shoelaces. “I’m . . . pleased to meet you, Mr. Boggle.”

  “Vogel. And call me Harve.” He waved off the menu that another waiter had extended toward him. “Just the usual, André.”

  The waiter nodded in a way that seemed more intimidating than servile to Albert, then turned haughtily away. Albert wondered if they were going to get anything to eat here.

  “Okay if I call you Albert?” Broad-shouldered and with styled silver hair that looked like a movie star’s, Vogel leaned toward him. “Or do you prefer Al?”

  The notion of choosing between one name or another triggered a small panic attack. His mind went blank, or even more so; a few seconds passed before he realized he was still staring wide-eyed at Vogel. “Al . . .” He struggled to take a deep breath. “Albert’s fine.” He pointed toward the other immaculately dressed human. “That’s what . . . Mr. Dierdorf’s been calling me.”

  “No, no; you mean Bob.” Vogel winked at him. “I really want us all to be on a first-name basis, Albert, because Precognosis isn’t like an ordinary company; it’s more like a family. We work very closely together. And that’s how we want to work with you.”

  Both the humans were looking at him with the same sparkling, smiling, oppressive force; Albert felt as though he were in a TV wildlife documentary, the one he and May had watched, where a deer had been caught frozen and unable to move in the glare of a poacher’s spotlight. He wished May were with him right now; she was smarter than him, even if she might not be quite as smart as this Vogel and Dierdorf. She might have been able to figure out what he was supposed to do next.

  “I . . .” Making his mouth work took an effort of sheer will. “I don’t even know what it is you want me to do.”

  An unsmiling glance passed between the two humans, communicating something that Albert wasn’t able to discern. Then Vogel turned back to him, laying the manicured fingertips of one hand on his.

  “Mr. Einstein—Albert—there’s nothing you have to worry about.” Vogel’s words were resonant with sincerity. “There’s nothing on which we’re going to ask you to trust us, that we’re not immediately willing to prove to you. Look.” Vogel reached inside his suit jacket and pulled out a checkbook; he flipped it open and scrawled quickly with the fountain pen that Dierdorf handed to him. “This is for you.” He pushed the check across the white tablecloth. “That’s just for the privilege of meeting you; of meeting somebody with your tremendous God-given talents. Go on, take it. You keep that whether we wind up doing business together or not.”

  Albert bent over the check, afraid to touch it. He could see that there were several zeroes written on it, along with a big fat number one at the front. He felt a little dizzy; he couldn’t make out quite how much money the check represented, but he was sure it was more than he’d ever made pushing a broom at the police station.

  “But . . . but why?” He looked up at Vogel. “Why would you give me something like . . . like that?” He poked a finger toward the check lying between himself and the human.

  “We have some real good reasons, Albert.” Dierdorf leaned into the conversation, as Vogel sat back in his chair. “Right now, I imagine you’re a little confused, because you don’t really know what it is our company does. Let me fill in the picture.” The polished smile flashed again. “Basically, Precognosis is the leading provider—in the world, Albert—of what we like to call enhanced market research. Do you know what market research is, Albert?”

  “Um. You . . . you tell people where to go. To the market, to buy stuff.”

  Dierdorf’s smile gentled. “Not quite. We tell the other people—the people who make ‘stuff’—what to put in the markets. And in the stores, and on television and in the movie theaters. So that people like you—and us—can go into the stores, or turn on the TV, or go to the movies, and we’ll be sure to find exactly what we really want to buy.”

  “Albert, do you
know how much it costs to put a new product on the shelves of your local supermarket?” Vogel’s expression had turned into a serious, deliberative frown. “Say, something like a new line of fruit-flavored sour milks? Or a dehydrated raw liver snack chip?”

  He thought hard for an answer. “A lot?”

  “A lot, Albert.” Vogel nodded. “Millions of dollars. It can be billions of dollars, for a total design shift and reorienting of market position. You’ve got your design costs, your acquisition or retooling of production facilities, the setting up of your distribution networks . . . it’s very expensive, Albert. Same thing with making a movie or producing a new TV show; there’s always a lot of money at stake, and it’s all riding on being right about what people want, and more importantly, what they want to buy.”

  “That’s where people like us—market research firms—come in,” said Dierdorf. “It’s our job to go and find out what people want. We find out whether some new snack chip that a company is thinking of making is even something that people would want to put in their mouths. Now, there’s a lot of traditional ways of doing that kind of research: you talk to people, you give them questionnaires, you do focus groups, you wire them up for galvanic skin responses, muscle twitches, eye pupil dilation indices, you do prototype taste tests, limited regional marketing . . . there’s a whole raft of things that researchers have usually done, to try to figure out what people want. But you know what the problem is with those methods, Albert?”

  He shook his head. Dierdorf’s list had frightened him; he’d had a vision from an old black-and-white movie that he and May had watched late at night, of a mad scientist’s laboratory, with crackling electric bolts arcing over a hapless figure strapped to a table.

  “Two things, Albert. One, they’re expensive; a company can wind up spending millions just on its market research. And two, even if you spend all that money, you could still be wrong. The results just aren’t accurate enough. And all that money, millions and billions of dollars, goes down the drain.”

  “Gosh.” He hoped that Dierdorf and Vogel didn’t think it was all his fault.

  “Now, Albert—” Vogel’s tone became even more kind and fatherly. “Do you remember that afternoon you came to our offices? The ones downtown? You remember what we had you do then?”

  “Sure.” It had been a whole day, not just an afternoon. Everybody had been really nice to him. They’d fed him lunch, not at a restaurant, but right there in one of the conference rooms; it’d been a buffet, a big spread of all kinds of food, that twenty people couldn’t have put away. He’d been told to fill his plate with whatever looked good to him. The only weird thing had been the human woman in a white lab coat, who had followed him around the table, watching him and marking things down on the clipboard she’d carried with her. It had only been later, at home with May, that he’d realized the big lunch might have also been part of their tests, along with the quick little videos they’d shown him and the rows of empty boxes, stuff he’d never seen at the supermarket, that they’d asked him to pick and choose from. Sitting here with Dierdorf and Vogel, he remembered and slowly nodded. “Yeah, that was kind of fun.”

  “Do you know what those tests were all about? What we were looking for?”

  Albert considered for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I sure don’t.”

  “We were looking—” Dierdorf leaned across the table, his voice serious and confidential. “For a picker.”

  “Oh.” He felt a sense of disappointment bob up inside him. He knew what a picker was; and that it was just about the only job on this planet worse than being a janitor. What that had to do with the tests he’d taken, he hadn’t the slightest idea. He’d already figured out that these two humans were going to offer him a job of some kind—and that he wouldn’t take it. There’d be no way he could leave all his friends at the station. Still, it would’ve been nice if it’d been something a little better than that. So he could tell May about it. “I don’t know . . .” Albert shook his head. “Thanks, but . . . I don’t think I’d be very good at climbing those ladders all day long, and picking apples and stuff off the trees. And strawberries would be even worse—don’t they grow kinda low to the ground? I’d probably throw my back out or something.”

  Dierdorf and Vogel exchanged puzzled glances, then both men smiled and rolled their heads back as if they’d just figured out the punch line of a joke. “No, no, Albert; that’s not the kind of picker I meant.” Dierdorf, still smiling, had turned back to him. “Not a fruit picker. You’re too important a person for that sort of work. I mean a . . . well, a future picker. It takes a very rare talent to do the kind of work we’re talking about. We’re looking for someone who just knows what’s going to happen with a product or a service that one of our client companies is thinking of putting out in the marketplace. The kind of person that, if you put products X, Y, and Z in front of him, can just tell by pure instinct which is the one that’s going to be the big hit, that everybody is going to rush to buy. That takes a magical kind of talent, Albert. Your kind of talent.”

  “I’m not sure . . . I understand . . .”

  Before Albert had recovered from Dierdorf’s rush of words—he felt like he was trying to come up for air from a swiftly tumbling river—he was hit with more from Vogel. “That’s what the tests were all about,” said the other human. “They were a long series of choices, Albert, one after another. Just so we could see what things you liked, what things you didn’t like. And you know what?”

  Terrified, he shook his head.

  “A ninety-nine point nine correspondence with our previously established database of consumer preferences.” Dierdorf’s earnest face pressed toward Albert. “Nobody—and I mean nobody—has ever hit that level before.”

  Leaning back in his chair, Vogel rubbed his chin. “There was what’s-his-name . . . Peter Hoaglund; he got up around ninety-six, maybe ninety-seven.”

  “Yeah, when he was sober.” A scowl clouded Dierdorf’s face. “Don’t talk to me about that Hoaglund maniac. Jesus.” With a visible effort, Dierdorf pumped up the smile he displayed to Albert. “Trust me; it’s a rare talent. And yours is the finest example anyone’s ever come across. We had a pretty good idea that you’d be a top candidate when we read those newspaper and magazine articles about your little detective work down at the police station—”

  “Those weren’t any big deal,” said Albert. “I just made some lucky guesses is all.”

  “ ‘Lucky guesses’—that’s good. But they weren’t just luck, Albert. That’s the kind of thing that a natural-born picker is always doing. Guessing . . . and being right. And being right about the future—about what people, Newcomers and humans alike, are going to want to eat and drink and wear and see, and buy . . . that’s our business, Albert. And the more often we’re right about those things, the more money we make. But it’s not just about money.” Dierdorf’s expression took on the heavy, brow-knitted quality that Albert had only seen before with the preachers on late-night television. “The more often we’re right, the happier we make people. Because we help them get what they want . . . before they even know what it is they want. You’d like to help make people happy, wouldn’t you, Albert?”

  He shrugged nervously. “Yeah . . . I suppose . . .”

  “Everybody does, Albert. It’s a natural instinct on the part of all sentient creatures—to create and share happiness.”

  The sincerity that Dierdorf radiated was so intense, Albert almost burst into tears. “But . . . but what would you want me to do?”

  “Just like those tests,” said Vogel, as the other human nodded in agreement. “Like that day you spent with us. We put some products in front of you, and you pick out the one you like best. Or we show you a little video, the rough cut of a commercial or a new TV show, and you tell us what you think about it. That’s all. We’re just interested in knowing what you like. Because that’s what everybody will like. Or at least ninety-nine point nine percent.”

  “What if . .
. what if I don’t like any of the things?”

  “No problem. We just tell our clients to take ’em all away, and come back with something better.”

  Albert’s feet pressed uncomfortably against the inside of his shoes. He was very nervous. Everything was so confusing—the flood of words, the way the two humans looked straight into his eyes without blinking, as if their combined gaze could pin his trembling brain to the back of his skull—he felt adrift on a great ocean, swept by dark and dangerous currents. He didn’t know what to do right now; that was why he was afraid.

  Dierdorf must have been some kind of mind reader; he nodded in perfect understanding, as though Albert had blurted out his inner fears. “You don’t have to decide right now. We know that it’s a big decision . . . no, a big responsibility. You could become one of the most important people in the world, Albert. That’s why we want you to take your time to think about all this.”

  He nodded in mute gratefulness. For a moment, he’d had the uncanny feeling that everybody in the restaurant, the people at the other tables and all the waiters, had been watching him, wanting to know what his answer would be.

  “I . . . I will. I mean . . . I’ll think about it.”

  Dierdorf raised a hand, “That’s all we’re asking. No, actually, there is something else. Here, give me that back.” He reached over and snatched away the check that had still been lying in front of Albert.

  He watched the human tear the check in half. He knew it had been too good to be true.