The Complete Aliens Omnibus

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “We’re not sure they’re pre-mammals,” Tad corrected. “We haven’t done much analysis. We’ve spent most of our time perfecting hiding techniques. We want to do the zoological research over the next year.”

  “Since you have this stuffed one,” I began, “does this mean you were able to dissect one?”

  Chantal tried again to speak. “We did what we ca—”

  “We can’t dissect them,” Tad cut her off again and took over the explanation. “This one died in an unusual circumstance. It was impaled on a glass spike when it fell off a cliff. Its body drained of the acid blood and its internal cavities were excavated by the blackies long afterward. We managed to clean and retrieve the exoskeleton. Chantal pieced it together with some other parts we had lying around.” His eyes flipped to Chantal and he added, “We just got lucky.”

  Chantal stared back at him for longer than was necessary. “I pieced it together.”

  Pretty soon she’d just be repeating whatever he said.

  I wished I could talk to her alone. “Then you didn’t have much chance to really have a look at its internal organs?”

  “We’d have trouble with that,” Tad said. “Their blood, once it’s exposed to the outside elements, turns acidic. There’s hardly any implement we can use to touch it that doesn’t dissolve. It’s just one of the things we haven’t figured out yet.”

  “Still,” I prodded, “You’ve been here a long time. Don’t they eventually die of natural causes? Sooner or later you find road kill, don’t you?”

  Chantal opened her mouth to speak, but Tad cut her off again.

  “We haven’t found the Secret Xeno Burial Ground yet.”

  I pretended not to notice the discomfort between them.

  “Well, it’ll be in the same place as the lost hangers and safety pins.”

  After several minutes I was finally able to take my eyes off the astonishing presence of the stuffed alien, and my skin crawled when I did. I still had the idea it would come back to life. I had to force myself to look around the chamber. The whole room wasn’t much taller than the alien trophy, and only about ten by ten feet, shaped in a pentagon, with five interlocked pre-fab walls. It was also a museum of alienhood. Much of the wall area was devoted to racks of file boxes, probably full of specimens of things I’d seen and things I hadn’t yet. This was a scientific archive. I recognized it because we’d had three rooms like this in our house while I was growing up. We only had six rooms, and three of them were this.

  Except in our house we didn’t have parts of deadly creatures mounted on the walls. Almost as astonishing as the giant stuffed creature was the extended disembodied tail of another of its kind, cut off at a point that must’ve been very close to the body. The tail hung suspended near the low ceiling, extending all the way across one wall segment and halfway across the next. Its blunt end was mangled, but its serrated tip still intact and quite horrifying. Mounted on other parts of the wall were three alien hands, a foot, and an impressive collection of claws. There were also four siphon tubes, the snorkel things on their backs, the back part of a head, and two long squared-off . . . I reacted with a flinch when I realized those were two sets of the inner jaws, somehow cleaved from inside the throats of two aliens.

  “We don’t want to examine dead ones,” Tad said bluntly, determined to get me off that track, ironic considering the macabre collection. “Before our expedition here, human experience with Xenos has been limited to the way they interact with humans. On this planet, we’ve been able to observe how they interact with other life forms.”

  “Where did you get all this stuff?” I asked.

  “Road kill,” Tad said. Was he making a joke?

  I decided to leave that one alone and go after the other angle. “Do they do something different with other life forms than they do with us?”

  “No,” Chantal perked up. “They have the same kind of reproductive imperative—”

  “Chantal,” Tad warned. “This isn’t your field of expertise.”

  “Sorry . . . ”

  I glanced from one to the other. “So this is like spending years and millions of dollars to do a study to tell us that girls are different from boys. Anybody with kids can tell you that.” Moving as far away as the chamber allowed from the alien trophy, I tried to steer the conversation my way. “Well, this is all damned impressive, I have to say . . . Chantal, maybe you know this. I was going to ask my mother, but I forgot. What happened to the people in the huts back at that camp? Why were they inside there? We couldn’t figure out whether they were hiding and just got caught by the face things, or, y’know, what they would’ve been doing inside with the door panels just open a few inches. Were they in there for protection? Or maybe they were hiding from those things. I mean, who wouldn’t hide? First they scare you to death, then they finish the job.”

  I gestured up at the enormous stuffed adult alien and implied I was making some kind of joke, to see if there were any takers.

  Chantal blinked, but that was all the body language Tad’s glower allowed her. “We . . . we . . . ”

  “She doesn’t know,” Tad said. “It’s not her area.”

  I dropped the routine and turned to face him. “Is it yours?”

  Tad bristled. “Jocasta warned us about you. She said you don’t understand scientific research at all and that we shouldn’t even address the issue with you.”

  “Yeah? What ‘issues’ would those be?”

  I moved closer to him. Intimidation is an art form.

  “In about two hours,” I said slowly, “I’ve seen some pretty horrible deaths, as deaths go. This planet is a slaughter field. And no matter how many heads I count, the number comes up short. That’s my kind of scientific research. I admit it’s simple, but in it the questions can be almost as important as the answers. You’re the stealth specialist, aren’t you?”

  “I sure am.”

  “You’ll have to give me a tour of the technology you use to hide. I’d really like to see that. I guess the only way not to be their target is if they don’t know you’re here.”

  He paused for a spell, measuring me, measuring Chantal and the intrusion on their private territory that I represented.

  “I don’t think you’ll be around long enough for tours,” he said.

  * * *

  Probably a big mistake, but I cut to the chase and cornered my sister next.

  I listened around, then followed her voice when I heard it, and tracked her through one of the shorter corridors to a cramped chamber where she was giving instructions to Neil. Odd, because I thought Neil was the camp director and Gracie would be taking orders, not giving them. Then, being a Malvaux carried some weight here for her too.

  My sister was an odd combination of a follower and a leader. She was a prime follower of a leader, willing to keep everybody around her in line behind the leader. She had the spark of science in her mind and her talents, but had always been overshadowed by our mother, always assumed to have gotten the degree or the job or whatever because she was Jocasta Malvaux’s daughter. All her life, and all mine, we had been known not as Rory and Graciella Malvaux, but as “Jocasta Malvaux’s son” or “Jocasta Malvaux’s daughter.” We each coped in our own way, Gracie by embracing the role, and I by rejecting it.

  I didn’t fit into my mother’s world of research, awards, expeditions, more awards, discoveries, and even more awards. In fact, I’d always found it kind of distasteful. Gracie always said it was because I was never the one getting the awards and I was bitter. On some level she was probably right. But on my own level, I’d always found the spectacle gauche and pretentious, especially the way our mother enjoyed the glow of the spotlight. I always had the idea she was making history so she could get another fix of that glow.

  Maybe I was wrong. There certainly wasn’t much of a glow way out here in the hindquarters of space. And she’d have to go a long way back to get it.

  “Gracie,” I began. “Can I have a word?”

  S
he glowered at me, then nodded to Neil to leave us alone. He seemed glad to do it, and disappeared down a corridor I hadn’t even seen, a short one that went off upward and that he actually had to climb to use.

  When the scrapings of Neil’s escape faded away and I thought we were probably alone—although I had no idea what kind of surveillance they used or how paranoid my mother was—I tried to modify my tone to be non-confrontational, although I did cut to the subject without any frills.

  “You’ve lost weight,” I mentioned.

  “It’s hard to stay fat on rations.”

  “Or is it from running?”

  “We don’t run. We hide.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I hear. What are those things, Gracie? What kind of environment creates beasts like that?”

  “A complex one, that’s what. So what? You don’t care.”

  “We don’t know where they come from, do we?”

  “No.”

  “Clark says they hitchhike around from place to place. Apparently our own space ships have given them a couple of free rides.”

  “I don’t know, Rory. They’re here. That’s all that counts.”

  I leaned against a thick case of processed, flash-dried foodstuffs. “Not very curious, for a scientist. Come on, tell me something.”

  She poured herself a tin cup full of iced coffee—iced, so there was no aroma—and tapped artificial sweetener into it. “They’re somewhere between instinct and intellect.”

  “Where?” I asked. “Like dogs or like dolphins?”

  “We don’t know where they are on the line. We know they communicate, and we know they learn. And we know they forget. After five months of perfect hiding, they finally forgot about us and stopped looking. They went back to their genetic imperatives. But it took five months. That’s a lot longer than any animal on Earth. They’re smart.”

  “And this genetic imperative is to spread out? And continue sucking up the life forms on this planet?”

  “The planet will adjust.”

  “How many people have you lost?”

  The question set her even more on edge than she was, but she tried to control her answer. “We lost some right away, before we learned to cope.”

  “You mean, when you found out that camp of huts wasn’t going to protect you from those monsters?”

  Her green eyes flashed at me the way they had when we were children and she felt slighted by being the younger child. “Yes, then, all right? Things don’t always go right. This is a wilderness compound. We had a few accidents and then we got control. Just like you and the people you brought here today. You should all have known better than to come into an unstable environment without specialists.”

  “Maybe,” I allowed. I didn’t want to waste time arguing the wrong points. “Where’d you find these people?”

  “They applied,” she said. “You know that.”

  “So did thousands of others.” I folded my arms and fought off a shiver. They kept it too cool in here. Probably as a precaution, to avoid putting off heat signatures. “I mean, people like Yuki and Ethan and Zaviero. Do you really think they had a perception of the brutality of this environment?”

  “I wasn’t in the screening process. You’re talking to the wrong person.”

  “I know. I should be talking to M’am, but I don’t think I could get an honest assessment out of her.”

  “Actually, we don’t have to talk to you at all. It’s not your business to ‘assess’ us or our expedition.”

  “I’m the only one who can,” I stated bluntly. “Most people get goggled-eyed around M’am. She casts some kind of superstar spell on them. I’m just wondering whether she didn’t take advantage of that to surround herself with people she could control. As scientists go, they’re all pretty young. Nobody old enough that M’am couldn’t be his mother. It’s how she keeps authority, isn’t it? She also has twenty years more experience than anybody here.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” she snapped.

  “Unless you’re the inexperienced one.”

  She spoke through set teeth. “These are qualified professional scientists and interns with specialties of use to this mission. They willingly came. They knew what they were getting into.”

  I moved closer to her, and leaned in such a way that she couldn’t avoid looking directly at me. “Did you?”

  She took a gulp of her iced coffee and made a throaty sound of disgust. When she swallowed, taking her time to do it, she shook her head in frustration. “Nobody wants you here.”

  “Maybe, but that’s not my problem.”

  “What is your problem, Rory? Because, damn . . . ”

  “Maybe that I’ve only counted thirteen people here,” I pointed out. “M’am says you’ve lost nine. Where are the other thirty people, Gracie?”

  “They’re out,” she said instantly. “On remote expeditions.”

  “When’s the last time you heard from them?”

  “I don’t know . . . few weeks.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Gracie started moving around the little room, picking up bundles of the neon-blue suit I’d seen some of the researchers wearing. If I counted right, there were at least enough for everybody. She gathered them into a bundle in her arms, which got bigger with each suit she rolled into it. “Why should I know? It’s not my job. We’d go crazy if we tried to watch over each other too much.”

  “I don’t buy it. This is a dangerous environment where people live intimate lives. They get to know everything about each other and every bit of information is absorbed voraciously.”

  “When did you become a psychologist?” She snatched up another blue suit from a hook on the side of a shelf unit.

  “You’re lying and I want to know the truth,” I said. “Where, precisely, are the other thirty people?”

  She pushed me away and made room for herself to slip toward the tunnel.

  “Get away from us, Rory. Go away. Go home. Go—get fried or get laid or dig a hole or live your own life, but get off our backs.” She dumped the pile of blue suits into a sterilizer unit and cranked the controls to turn on the microwaves that would do the sterilizing. “It’s time for dinner. And you’d better be respectful. We don’t discuss business at dinner.”

  * * *

  “Dinner” was happening, near as I could figure, around what would normally be lunch for the rest of the universe. I didn’t question it. I had other questions, and maybe they called it this because it was the main meal of the day and they wanted to normalize at least one parcel of each day. Why they couldn’t do it in the evening, I had no guesses.

  In the twenty-foot-wide chamber which was apparently the central clearinghouse, the same chamber where I’d been pulled into the blind, they had set up a makeshift table made up of wall components on a trestle of long, narrow containers. They’d moved some shelves, making the chamber more like twenty by twenty-five, to make room for the extra people, and the table just got longer the more containers and components used. There were containers all over the place, each with markings and scratches and handles. Used for toting and storage, they were also used for furniture.

  Another interesting feature—the projector curtain which had saved my life and which separated us flimsily from the dangerous outside world, was no longer transparent. While I had been able to see through it to the landscape before, it was now on some kind of “rest” mode, looking pretty much like a big metallic bathroom shower curtain with little squared cells in the fabric. Those must be the projectors. They could project an image on the outside, and project back into this area whatever was on the outside. Very fancy, as one-way mirrors go. Darkened as it was now, it created a neo-designer sensation to the basement-like chamber and made things feel more intimate, probably in deference to “dinner.”

  The campers had lit a line of electrical votives along the center of the table, simulating candlelight. Real candles would’ve created a scent. They’d managed to create a little living environment here d
espite strict restrictions on behavior, sound, and function. I looked at the fabric-like wall of special sheeting that masked the hideaway. It looked almost like a clear curtain from this side, except for a faint bluish tint, but I knew it wasn’t see-through at all. We could look out, but no one could look in. I found it disconcerting to be standing here in front of what appeared to be a big open garage door, and I had to discipline myself to the idea that I wasn’t visible from out there.

  Nope . . . couldn’t relax yet. The curtain had no lock-down, but just hung there, slightly weighted at the bottom. Anything could walk through—if it knew where to walk.

  I stayed away from the long table as the campers went about their routine of setting up dinner. They didn’t speak, except to point out what was needed, and set out sealable storage containers of various types of—I guess it was food. From here, most of the food appeared processed, dried, or distilled to an essence. Other than the colors— green, tan, reddish—I couldn’t identify the food. They were all native edibles, to make sure that all bodily discharges didn’t smell different from the environment. These things were no surprise. My mother had always embraced survivalism and guerrilla tactics, one of which was to eat only indigenous food, so body odor and discharges all smelled natural to an area. Soldiers had long practiced the trick to mask their presence. Of course, that meant the whole crew of the Vinza and the Marines and me smelled all wrong. I probably should’ve thought of this and told Clark well ahead of time. But then, we hadn’t expected to take up residence.

  Still, I should’ve warned him. I’d been too casual, too much of an outsider. I should’ve embraced the mission and done everything in my power to warn him, to inform him, make him understand what he was really dealing with.

  Should I speak up now? Be seen whispering to him in a corner? Or would that do more harm than good? We were already getting suspicious looks and touchy glances and cold shoulders.