“I have a decent job. You can’t buy my loyalty for a thousand bucks.”
“Per day.”
Brom took stock. “For what? My week with her?”
“Indefinitely. Retroactive to your first direct contact with Aliena.”
Brom stared at him. “The Project pays that?”
“Yes, to start. You are important to Aliena. That’s what counts.”
“You guys don’t pussyfoot!”
“Correct.”
“But do you have the authority to admit me to the Project?” Brom asked. “I mean, you being a foot soldier?”
“I don’t,” Sam said. “But she does. Anything she wants, she gets, if it’s physically possible. There really aren’t limits, ultimately.”
Brom spread his hands. “If that’s the price of her, I’ll take it. But I would do it for nothing. I just want to be with her. I do believe she needs me, and I need her.”
“That’s what makes you right for her. You don’t care about money or notoriety, just her.”
“That’s true.”
They exited the house. There were Martha and Aliena waiting before their house, facing Brom’s house. Aliena was standing stiffly, her face expressionless. She was in mortal fear of rejection.
Brom strode toward her, smiling. He sang. “Ali ali ena!”
She sounded her note, so clear and resonant that it filled the neighborhood. They came together, singing. Then they kissed passionately. Then she laughed, and burst into tears, clinging to him. Her relief was busting out all over.
Sam and Martha were staring. “They never heard me sing,” Aliena explained. “Or laugh. Or cry.”
Just so.
Part 2
Trillion Dollar Project
The next few days were busy. Brom moved into Aliena’s surprisingly capacious house, because it was secure and her safety was paramount; they couldn’t risk her in his comparative shack. It was a marvel of electronics with unobtrusive closed circuit television covering every portion including the toilet; Aliena had not had sufficient awareness of human privacy to protest. Every door was like a bank vault, closeable with an airtight seal, operable only by coded combination. But by similar token it would have been a death trap had she been caught inside during the power failure. In hours a generator was installed in the capacious basement so that there would never be another failure. They knew how close a call it had been.
There was also, it turned out, an underground access that had somehow been constructed without the neighbors knowing. Most of the supplies were delivered via this, because it would have been suspicious to have constant trucks coming to the front door. Only enough for Aliena and Martha were handled the conventional way.
“But why put her here anyway?” Brom asked. “Instead of locked in the Pentagon or somewhere?”
“Because she needs to become an ordinary citizen,” Sam answered. “To be embedded in a community like any other person, showing that she is really one of us. She insisted on it. This is practice for that.”
“I think that’s the hard way.”
“Welcome to put a note in the suggestion box and be ignored, as I was.” They laughed together. Sam was okay, now that they were on the same team.
Brom was assigned his own bedroom, but it was meaningless, as he shared Aliena’s room, by her demand. A doctor came in the first hours and thoroughly checked Brom, pronouncing him fit and clean; he was not about to contaminate her. They made singing love the first night, though Brom knew that the cameras were recording everything. Well, that was just another part of the price of her; he did not make an issue. In the morning they showered together; she was delighted to make him react in the masculine manner, and encouraged him to mate her again in the flowing water.
“I felt odd, before, in the shower,” she confided. “Now I know why: I wanted company, but had none. It was just water. Not even salt.”
That reminded him. “That note you sing when we make love. What is it? I want to understand it better, having had so much joy of it.”
“It is joy. Of mating, of companionship, of discovery, or the sheer delight of a situation. I felt all of these when we were at the beach.”
“So its not just sexual.”
“It is not,” she agreed. “But mating may accompany it, and is hard to do without it, for me.”
Every second morning they dressed out and ran to the park for exercise. She had run with Martha before; now she ran with Brom. Brom knew that Sam was always nearby, tracking them electronically; should there be any hint of anything dangerous, Sam would be there, guns blazing if necessary. It was all part of the natural person presentation; obviously Aliena was a pretty girl who had found a boyfriend to exercise with.
Sam did some spot training of Brom, teaching him the easier throws and blows of judo and other martial arts, as well as equipping him with a deadly double-edged knife in a masked shoulder hostler and a small but similarly deadly gun under the other shoulder. Aliena herself was unarmed, left innocent of such things. Until she braced Brom about the matter, and had him show her their operation. Before long she could handle the knife with disturbing finesse, and became an accurate shot. Sam and Martha were both nervous about this, but could not directly oppose her.
Nor in this: “Please, Brom, marry me now.”
“Aliena, we haven’t known each other long. It would seem sudden.”
“Not as sudden as the baby that will grow within me.”
It was a valid concern. She now knew about contraception, but eschewed it; they were having frequent unprotected sex. Her period had passed and she was coming into her fertile time. Now he realized that she fully intended to conceive and bear his baby as early as possible; it was not just passion that caused her to mate with him daily.
“Normally there’s a ceremony,” he said. “People bring gifts.”
“Gifts? As of personal talent?”
“Not in this case. Friends may share gifts, which are things they give to each other because they like each other. They can be large or small. For example, I might give you a box of candy, if I thought you would like it.”
“That would not be kind to this body, which I must keep fit.”
“Or a kerchief to wear on your head, to make you even prettier than you are. The point is in the attitude of the giver. It’s a social convention. We would miss all that in a private wedding.”
“I will try to understand it,” she promised. “I do not need gifts from others.”
They got married in a small private ceremony, with Martha and Sam as witnesses. He gave her a modest but nice gold ring, and she gave him a similar ring. “We have exchanged gifts,” she said, delighted. It sufficed, and they were both pleased to wear their rings thereafter.
Their honeymoon was a global tour, somehow afforded by pooling their resources (theoretically), visiting the Grand Canyon, Machu Picchu in South America, and the Great Wall of China in rapid order. They spent a lot of time in the air, and Aliena adored it, constantly holding his hand and humming her note faintly as she rapidly read ebooks. In hotels she clasped him closely, demanding mating before sleeping. She was obviously a woman in love. Brom wasn’t certain how Sam and Martha kept up, as they were not in evidence, but he knew they were close at hand, on and off the planes. Aliena went nowhere unguarded.
In China there was a snafu that got them stuck in a fancy hotel for several days, doubtless hardly noticing the delay in their haze of love. But it was not so. “Take her down to the main lobby and lose yourselves in the crowd of tourists,” Sam’s voice came in Brom’s ear. Brom, startled, obeyed; he had not realized that the spy wiring was two way. In the lobby Sam’s invisible hand took firm hold of Brom’s elbow and guided him silently to an empty elevator. They entered, and there was Martha. Then the elevator went down, not up. Where were they headed?
“What’s going on?” Brom asked somewhat querulously. “This is supposed to be our honeymoon.”
Aliena smiled. “Beloved, this is better.”
>
“You know about it? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Surprise,” she said.
“She was not allowed to tell,” Martha said. “Lest you inadvertently mention it outside.” By outside she meant the regular world.
“So what is it?”
“Not yet,” Sam murmured. “Wait till we board the train; that is secure.”
With that he had to be satisfied.
They exited the elevator in a basement and walked to a subterranean garage where a limousine with darkened windows waited. They got in, and it glided to the surface and moved quietly through the city.
It stopped, and they got out and entered what appeared to be a train station. Martha walked ahead to an intersection of passages, looked both ways, and nodded: the way was clear. Sam then touched a panel on the wall, in a pattern. In a moment the panel slid aside to reveal an opening to a stairway down. Martha rejoined them and that panel slid shut behind her.
Two flights below was a waiting train. They entered the nearest car, which they seemed to have to themselves. It was plush, more like a recreation room than a transportation vehicle, with couches, TV sets, and even a pool table.
The train moved out, slowly but smoothly. It accelerated until its speed as indicated by the passing pillars of the wall was alarming. Brom remembered that they had faster trains in China than in America; this one seemed almost supersonic.
“We can watch what we want,” Sam said, turning on a TV. “Anything from kiddie cartoons to porn.”
“Nature,” Martha said.
Immediately a competent nature program came on, this one about koala bears, which it quickly explained were not bears at all, but marsupials. Aliena watched, fascinated, holding Brom’s hand.
“Now we can talk,” Sam said on Brom’s other side. “We are participating in what we nickname the Trillion Dollar Project, vital to every major nation on Earth but unknown to the general populace. There are no headlines about it, no articles. We do not risk discussing it anywhere but in secure facilities, and even then we are careful, as you can see. Keep that in mind.”
“This relates to Aliena?” Brom asked.
“Very much so. It came into being for her, and serves her; without her it would dissipate.”
“A trillion dollars. That is hyperbole?”
“No. It is impossible to put a dollar value on every aspect of it, considering that global currencies differ and some are extremely closed mouthed about their contributions. The Chinese, for example, had built this underground rail system for other purposes, but adapted it for this goal. That trillion may be conservative, but it gives a notion of the Project’s importance.”
“This is a secret Chinese railroad, that they just gave away for our use?”
“And theirs. The Project is of preemptive importance to us all.”
“The project centered around Aliena?”
“Exactly. She is the most important person on Earth, for all that she is and must remain unknown.”
Brom was feeling a bit dizzy. “And this train is going where?”
“To the space station in the Gobi Desert.”
“Space Station!”
“Surely you didn’t think she just walked up to a corner cop and said ‘Hello, sir, I am an alien brain transplanted into a human woman. Please take me to your leader.’”
Aliena squeezed his hand without looking at him. “I did not.”
“I guess I hadn’t thought about how she came here,” Brom admitted. “She’s been keeping me pretty distracted.”
“It’s called sex,” she said. “Can you wait until this show is done? I am learning much.”
“Yes, of course,” Brom said, faintly nettled as he saw both Martha and Sam suppress knowing smirks.
She turned and kissed him on the ear. “I am teasing. Did I do it well?”
“Very well, thank you.”
She squeezed his hand again and refocused on the show.
“How did she get in touch?” Brom asked Sam.
“The alien space vessel radioed our prime computers with a message intended to be readily translatable. After a week they managed to work it out.”
“Supercomputers took a week for an easy message?”
“The starfish are significantly ahead of us technologically. Good thing they choked it down to our level, or we might never have translated it. At any rate, it was a greeting and a coding table so that we could zero in on further messages and establish direct communication.”
“This happened when?”
“About a decade ago, as I understand it. The ensuing dialogue took time, and organizing our resources took more time. But now we are moving on it well enough.”
“You said her planet is a hundred light years away. How could there be a back and forth dialogue?”
“It is that far. It took the space vessel three centuries to get here, which is incidentally much faster travel than we are capable of. As I said, they are more advanced. It was the vessel that sent the message.”
“And there are live starfish aboard it?”
“Not exactly. They were stored in suspended animation for the duration, and are only now being reanimated individually as necessary. Aliena is the first.”
Brom suffered a siege of horror. “You were frozen for three centuries?” he asked Aliena. “That must have been horrible.”
“It was an eye-blink,” she said. “One moment I settled in my tank. The next moment I was awake in the ship.”
“And you had to sacrifice your natural body to be transplanted to this alien-to-you host?”
“It was necessary. I knew it would not be fun when I volunteered.”
“But to lose your—to do that—I don’t think I could stand it.”
She turned her head to face him. “Brom, I found you. I love you. It is worthwhile, apart from my mission.”
“You have more courage than I do.”
“It was necessary,” she repeated, and returned to the show.
“What was it like, to be in a human body?”
“Weird. My rays, my radial limbs had become feet and arms, and my mind was on the end of the fifth limb. There was the constant oppression of gravity. I had to breathe air without stopping. I had to wear clothing, do my hair. Things were different, like breeding, and love.” She smiled. “But I came to like them.”
“What happened to your own body?”
“It remains, in stasis. That is a field that suspends the passage of time, so the body can exist without the brain. If some other starfish loses the use of her body, her brain might be moved to my body, to restore her. We do not waste things.”
He was morbidly fascinated. “You were selected because of your intelligence?”
She laughed. “Not at all! I am of only average intellect for a starfish.”
“All your people are as smart as you?” He had assumed she was a genius among her own kind.
“Not all. Many are smarter.”
He was taken aback. “So we humans are comparatively dull.”
“It is not your fault, Brom,” she said comfortingly. “You have other values.”
“Such as?”
“Feeling. Your creatures feel. Your brains process feelings for memories when you sleep. Feeling is everything. You care.”
“So why were you selected?”
“I had the best potential for feeling. It was not easy, but I learned it, thanks to you. Others of my kind might have found that more difficult.”
“Starfish are very straightforward,” Sam said. “They study what works best, and implement it without compunction. That makes them very smart, but they don’t generally make good friends.”
“Aliena is a good friend!”
“I am learning that from you,” she said. “Come, the nature show is over. Let’s mate.”
“You’re managing me!” Brom said. “Diverting me from awkward questions.”
“That is true. I prefer that you think of me as a loving wife, rather as the calculating creatu
re I am.”
“Are you pulling my leg?”
She was perplexed. “Do you wish me to yank on an extremity?”
He had to laugh. “It’s more idiom. I mean, are you teasing me?”
She considered. “I did not think so. I want to be feeling with you, and mating tends to evoke that.”
“But actually you are constantly calculating?”
“I am. But please, how may I best impress you?”
“Just be a little more subtle.”
“Subtle?”
“Make me think it’s my idea to have sex. That I am diverting you, rather than you me. I may know better, but it’s a willing self deception.”
“I must learn this. But in matters of feeling, I am not smart. How may I make you think it is your idea?”
“Oh, you might let me see some of your body by seeming accident, as you did during the power outage before I clued you in about that. You might evince a need for comfort, maybe even forcing a tear as you look me in the face. I’m bound to pick up on the hints.”
She faced him, leaning forward with a tear in her eye. Her breasts showed seemingly coincidentally, her deep cleavage heaving. “Please, Brom.”
She could be a frighteningly swift study! “I have an idea,” he said.
“This way, beloved.” She led him to a chamber he had not noticed before. It was a sleeping compartment. In moments they were making almost savage love.
“Did I do it correctly?” she asked as they lay in the aftermath.
“Aliena, you’re always a perfect sex partner.”
“I mean the diversion technique.”
“That too.”
“I will remember.”
“Now what were you diverting me from?”
“My calculating nature. I am learning how to mask it.”
“Keep practicing. You can also use it on people when sex is not an issue. Sometimes they need to be persuaded, and subtlety can accomplish what direct argument won’t. That’s similar to the way I make cartoons seem real.”
“Thank you.”
“But for the record, I’m not turned off by the signs of your intelligence and decision making ability. I know you will need them for your role as envoy, and I want you to be as good at it as you can be.”
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