X-COM: UFO Defense

by Diane Duane

  Trenchard reached into a drawer and came up with a Toblerone bar, offering it to Jonelle. She shook her head. Trenchard nodded, then broke off a chunk himself. “There’s a theory that’s made the rounds,” he said, more or less around the chocolate, “that the Ethereals might be a more evolved form of the Sectoid.”

  Jonelle had heard the theory but had no idea how much truth there might be behind it. “Have you found any proof that that might actually be the case?”

  “Well, not proof as such. But there are similarities. Certainly the Sectoid evolution seems to be selecting some of its organic systems out, dumping them by the wayside. Already they hardly have a digestive tract to speak of. Certainly their kidnapping of humans for genetic-engineering experimentation suggests that they’re starting to take a hand in their own evolution, these days, looking for human genes that will recombine successfully with their own, and one of their main interests has seemed to be in vascular genetics. Maybe the circulatory system is the next one they’re thinking about getting rid of. Or maybe it’s something else entirely.”

  Trenchard broke off another piece of Toblerone and looked thoughtful. “Whatever else can be said about this kind of minimalist approach to physiology, though, it may have its points. Look at the Ethereals. We’re still struggling to understand what makes them go. I probably know more about the subject than all but three or four other people on the planet, and I’m seriously confused —expect to be for years. But Ethereals survive. There’s almost nothing to them, yet they are incredibly resistant to our weapons. There’s no way to tell how long their lifespans might be—except that I doubt they’re very short— and the sheer power of their minds is incredible. Maybe less is more. Maybe this is something we should be looking at for humans.”

  He went on munching. “I mean, we come back, eventually, to the question: what do you do to a species so that it turns out like this? Interrogation of Ethereals is an iffy business, you know that, but when we press them about where they come from, we keep getting this image or tangential description of somewhere dim and red, very cold, empty… Suppose their homeworld is circling a very old star? One that’s way down the stellar classes, an N or R, mostly cooling gases. It would take a long time for a change like that to set in, and if the dominant species on the planet were sufficiently advanced, it could start making changes in itself so as to be able to survive…dumping the systems it doesn’t need. As the homeworld starts to die along with the primary, suppose the intelligent species starts killing off the parts of itself it can no longer support? No more food? Easy: find some other means of energy transport to the body’s cells, and kill off the digestive system once you don’t need it any more. No more heat? Again, find another energy source and method of transport for it—maybe something like electromagnetic or gravitational fields. The same for light—engineer a new kind of sensorium, get rid of the old one. Even air, eventually—the earlier changes I’ve described would make respiration redundant, anyway.”

  “A creature so changed,” Jonelle said, “wouldn’t bear much likeness at all to its parent species.”

  “No. But it would have survived…and in this universe, anyway, survival is what counts. What hasn’t survived doesn’t count any more.” Trenchard looked at the Toblerone bar, and his hands. “Now look at that—it’s all over me. How can such tidy people produce such messy food?” He dropped the bar back in its drawer, then came up with a tissue.

  “The thing is,” said Trenchard, “our own Sun will do that eventually, if it doesn’t just go nova—which isn’t very likely. Stars in its part of the main sequence rarely go to the trouble. A long, slow cooldown is more likely, after some initial flares. If humanity is to survive such a fate—which we might not—then we’re going to have to change the physiology itself to survive. We might end up doing something very like what the Ethereals have done.” “If we did,” Jonelle said, “would we still be human?” “Depends on your definition of humanity,” Trenchard said, chucking the tissue in the wastepaper basket. “But at least we’d be alive. We would have bought ourselves time to find a way to be human somewhere else—or right where we were. Even now, being human isn’t what it was ten thousand years ago, or twenty, or fifty. We have been doing genetic engineering on ourselves, directly or indirectly, by populations pushing one another around, intermarrying, wiping one another out, over thousands of years. And we’ve been doing it to all the other species we’ve been able to get our hands on, for thousands of years already. Bacteria, for example: some domesticated to our use—like the ones that make cheese and wine— others destroyed, like smallpox, or bred to be more infectious, like biological warfare agents. Sometimes we’ve done it accidentally—look at the way the AIDS virus and the tubercle bacillus have potentiated one another, creating more dangerous kinds of TB. Think of domestic cattle, pigs, sheep, you name it, all bred by us from the original limited wild species, the desired traits kept, the undesirable ones culled. That’s genetic engineering—just the kind you don’t need microsurgery for. Six hundred species of dog, all bred by us from one common ancestor, but are any of them less dogs for all that?”

  Jonelle shook her head. “I wouldn’t know,” she said slowly. “I’m a cat person myself.”

  “But sooner or later,” Trenchard said, “if we last long enough, that’s a question we’re going to have to answer. How human are we going to insist on being? So human that we can’t survive what time has made of our world? Or will we relax ourselves to the inevitable?”

  Jonelle smiled and got up, stretching. One of the transports would be heading down to Andermatt shortly, and if she got started now, she could be on it. “Inevitability,” she said, slightly amused, “is in the mind of the beholder.”

  As she waved at Trenchard and stepped out, he grinned back, and said, “Tell that to entropy.”

  Six

  Back in the mountain above Andermatt the next morning, Jonelle allowed herself the luxury of sleeping late, just for once, and didn’t get up until about nine. There had been no UFO sightings or interceptions the night before. Thank Heaven for small blessings, she thought as she stretched and yawned and set about getting herself ready to face the day.

  She spent it, until about noontime, looking over the number-two hangar space, making phone calls and comms calls, and generally catching up on the paperwork end of business. When her desk was cleared—or rather, when everything she had started piling on her office floor had been dealt with, as far as possible—Jonelle changed into civvies and took the little “covert train” down into town.

  The day was bright and sunny, and the whole town was full of skiers, chattering at one another in three or four different languages and generally making Jonelle’s eyes hurt at the violent way their ski clothes’ colors clashed. I can’t wait for a couple of years from now, she thought, when the styles will change and soft colors, or earth tones, or anything else, will be in fashion.

  The PR office was having a quiet day, at least relatively so. “The skiers keep mistaking us for the tourist information center,” Callie complained to Jonelle when she came in. “I’ve had three different groups of people come in here and try to get me to make hotel reservations for them. I’m beginning to think we should go down there and get a bunch of brochures.”

  Jonelle smiled a little. “Maybe you should. I don’t know if they’d like us horning in on their business, though.”

  “As long as we don’t try to sell lift passes,” Callie said, “I suspect we’d be OK.”

  Jonelle laughed and sat down to go through some of the paperwork that was piling up down here: mostly written complaints and protests at the “UN’s” presence, left by local people. X-COM required that its cover offices, when such were opened, function like the real thing, so Jonelle or someone she delegated had to write letters to the people who had complained, explaining— exactly as if she were a UN representative—what could or, most often, what couldn’t be done regarding the problems they were complaining about. She spent an hour or t
wo dictating some of these letters to Callie and (when Callie’s lunch hour came around) tapping them out herself. It was not work that came particularly easily to Jonelle, especially the part where she had to tell people again and again that there was nothing she could do to help them. More than once, she wished she could simply take a laser cannon to the whole miserable pile.

  Nonetheless, Jonelle finished the work and felt insufferably virtuous at the end of it. When Callie came back from her lunch break, Jonelle happily left the office to her and went out to get a sandwich of her own from the delicatessen just past the hotel.

  She never made it quite that far. Having paused to look briefly in the window of the bookstore next to the hotel, she turned to cross the street to the deli and saw Ueli Trager coming along the street. His expression was furious, and at the same time somehow tragic.

  “Herr Präsident—” she said.

  He paused and looked at her. “Fräulein Barrett,” said Ueli, “how are you doing this morning?”

  Jonelle thought that the exercise of “bedside manner” would help Ueli no more than it would have helped Molson the other day. “I’m doing well enough,” she said, “but Ueli, you look like you just lost your best friend! What’s the matter?”

  The expression he gave her was grim enough, though there was a kind of surprise in it as well, like the look he had given her when she’d admitted to forgetting his cow’s name. “I’m very upset,” Ueli said, “and I’m going to have a drink. Perhaps you would like to drink with me?”

  The naked appeal in that face, always so reserved and controlled, except for the other night, shocked her somewhat. “Not alcohol, this early in the day,” Jonelle said, “but yes, certainly Let me just have a word with my assistant.”

  She went hurriedly back to the office, told Callie where she was going to be if she was needed, and then made her way back to Ueli. Together they walked to the Krone, and Ueli led the way into the bar. They sat down at one of the old, scarred wooden tables farthest back, underneath an ancient, rusty plow that some decor expert had thought would look picturesque hanging from the rafters. When Stefan the barman came back to them, Ueli said, “Kornschnaps, bitte—a double.”

  “Just a cola for me.” Stefan went off to fetch the drinks, and Jonelle said, “Without any beer, Ueli?” Most of the people here, she had seen, preferred to drink the local firewater as a chaser.

  “I would like to get drunk,” Ueli said with a bitter air, suggesting that he thought he might not be able to.

  “Tell me what’s wrong!”

  The schnapps and the cola came. Ueli picked up the slim, straight glass with the schnapps in it, stared at it, and knocked it straight back in one neat drink. He put the glass down and said to Jonelle, “My pugniera is gone.”

  “Gone? You mean your cow? Rosselana? Where?”

  “I don’t know. Someone has taken her.”

  Jonelle took a long drink of her cola, hoping nothing of what she was thinking showed in her face. “Who would take your cow?”

  “The same person, perhaps,” Ueli said heavily, “who left four of my other cows—” He shook his head. “Stefan? Another, please.”

  “Left them where?”

  “Not where—how. Left them in pieces, on the ground. Cut up. The hearts torn out of them.”

  Stefan arrived with another glass. Ueli took it, glancing at him. “Keep them coming. Fräulein, you may not understand how it is—”

  “Jonelle.”

  “Jonelle. I thank you. We are simple people in our way, and probably city people would not understand very well how we feel about these things. Certainly our cows are our livelihood. Its either do dairy work, in this part of the world, or cater to the skiers. There’s nothing else, really, not enough land to farm, we’re too far off the beaten track for industry. But there’s little enough grazing so that we can only keep small numbers of cattle, and when you keep them in small groups, when one man has maybe ten or fifteen cows, they become not pets, but work associates. You get familiar with them, you come to know their ways and their habits. You are friends. With a pugniera, who’s smarter than the others, stronger, a creature that stands out a little from its crowd—even if the crowd is only cows—you become friendly indeed. It’s almost like a shepherd and a sheepdog: each of you is doing the same job, though in different ways, on different levels. You appreciate each other. Now a third of my own small herd are gone. It will have an impact on my income, yes, replacing them will require a big capital outlay, yes—but speaking of ‘replacing’ them is idle: they were associates of mine. And Rosselana, not butchered like the others, just gone—” He stared at the table. “Human beings did not do these things. No human was near the lower pastures. It’s those others, isn’t it? The aliens.”

  Jonelle kept her feelings out of her face. “I’ve heard they do that kind of thing, yes….”

  “So.” Ueli looked grim. “Why they come here to us, now, I don’t know. It wasn’t like this last year. We thought all that trouble that people were having, terror attacks, we thought all that kind of thing was for the cities, that it would pass us by. History has generally done that,” he said, and glanced up with a wry look as the third schnapps appeared. “That’s why so many people here still speak Romansh, the old language. Conquerors might come and go, but these high valleys were too much trouble to send troops to. Tax collectors, yes.” The wry look went ironic. “One prince might lay claim to your valley one year, another one the next, a bishop the year after. You would pay the taxes and not care too much who you paid them to. Eventually the conquerors went off and left us to ourselves, and we gladly stayed up here, out of the way, and let the world pass us by But this,” he said, downing the third glass, “will not pass us by, I think.”

  Jonelle shook her head slowly. “As I see it,” she said, “you’re right. They mean to take the whole planet, if they can. And isolated valleys are not isolated, when you can look right down into them from space.”

  “Well,” Ueli said. “You are a UN neutral observer facility, you say. Can you do nothing about this?”

  Jonelle opened her mouth to say Sorry, I can’t help, and then she shut it again. All morning, she had been saying that about things regarding which it was, alas, true. But this was a different case.

  “We have,” she said carefully, “some people who are supposed to be expert in these matters. I can send for one or two of them, if you request it. What exactly would you be asking that they do?”

  “It’s not just for me,” Ueli said. “But I would certainly like to spare anyone else the kind of loss I’ve just suffered. We don’t like to complain, as a rule, but if there are more butcheries like this one, many people in these parts, those who don’t work in the tourist sector, will suffer badly in the next year or two. If it could be stopped, that would be a good thing. Even if we could find out where the cows have gone that have been stolen, whether they are dead or alive….”

  Probably dead, Jonelle thought, for she knew all too well what happened to cattle that the aliens kidnapped whole. Poor Ueli! But she nodded. “Certainly,” she said, “the organization can send some people to investigate. They would need to talk to anyone who saw anything strange. We might need some language help, Ueli. The investigators wouldn’t all be German-speaking.”

  “There are certainly people here who would help,” Ueli said. “Jonelle, when could they come?”

  “If I can get down to the office and make some phone calls,” she said, “possibly even today.”

  Ueli nodded. “Let us start, then.”

  Jonelle left Ueli at the bar and went back to her office. There she spent about two hours on the phone and on comms. So un-covert an operation had to be cleared through her superiors, and it didn’t go through easily, or without considerable opposition. There were some members of Senior Regional Command who felt that no civilians should have anything whatsoever to do with X-COM operation, that there were too many possible leaks from civilians to those who might be giving informat
ion to the aliens. Others, though, were more willing to listen to reason, and Jonelle knew where they were, and who. Once matters were settled with them, she went back to the bar and found Ueli there—surprisingly, not much the worse for wear, despite what she suspected were an appalling number of schnappses downed while she was gone. “We’ll start in the morning,” she said. “They’ll send over three or four people from Geneva.” “They” was she, of course, and the people would not be coming from Geneva, but from Irhil M’Goun “They’ll need to talk to everyone who lost a cow or has had a mutilation or abduction recently.”

  “All right,” Ueli said. “But what can they do?” Jonelle sat and looked at him over the glass of white wine that she had finally permitted herself. “In all honesty, I don’t know. They can try to establish a pattern, they can try to keep it from happening again elsewhere, by notifying your government….” She trailed off. She suspected Ueli knew as well as she did that the government could do precious little about a threat that dove down on it from space.

  “But it’s got to be better than nothing,” she said.

  “You’re right, of course,” said Ueli. But he didn’t sound terribly convinced…and Jonelle couldn’t blame him.

  * * *

  So it was the next morning that four X-COM people, with proper “UN” credentials in place, turned up in Andermatt and began querying the locals. Jonelle told the investigators to leave no stone unturned, or at least to appear to leave no stone unturned. They went clear down the Urseren Valley, starting at the next town down, Hospental, and farther yet to Realp—to any of the major areas nearby where there was enough pastureland for people to bother keeping cows. One investigator stayed in Göschenen and worked her way up the Göschenertal, which was where many of the Andermatt cows spent the summer, there being a lot more green there than there was locally. Another went over the Oberalp Pass to little hamlets like Tschamut and Selva. To each of the investigators, Ueli sent along a local man or woman who could handle the Urnerdeutsch dialect that nearly everyone around there spoke, and who would serve as native guide and icebreaker. A lot of the people who lived in the area, especially those farthest upcountry, were intensely private, and not used to strangers. In fact, people from Andermatt tended to use a dialect word, waelisch, to describe people from Realp and Hospental. It meant “foreigner.”