Trust Territory

by Janet Morris

  The car slid up to the tubeway entrance, opened its door, and purred. Inside, she'd barely initiated a security block before she was patching through to the psychometry station in Customs.

  When she reached the station manager she asked for a report from South's therapist.

  The report came up on her car's cam screen: PATIENT IMPROVING. MEMORY BLOCK PARTIALLY REMOVED. SOME VIOLENT SIDE EFFECTS. HOSTILITY TOWARD THERAPIST NOTED. THERAPIST DUMP TWICE DAILY RECOMMENDED IN CASE OF DECOMMISSIONING.

  What did it mean? She stared at the red letters. Did the therapist think South was going to trash it?

  It sounded like that to her.

  So she called her office and told her secretary, "Have South come back in from Spacedock Seven. I want him at these alien meetings. He's the only one who's had contact with— Never mind. Just override any other orders. He's on this Earth junket's roster. I need him here. ASAP."

  She wasn't sure why she'd done that, except that she didn't know what to do about the coming confrontation between Cummings and the aliens. The Secretary General's office didn't understand Richard the Second.

  Unfortunately, Riva was beginning to think that she did.

  Maybe she should assign Cummings a therapist. But he wouldn't stand for it.

  The next best thing to a therapist intimate with Cummings would be time to model the NAMECorp CEO on Mickey Croft's psychometric sampler/modeler.

  She grinned, as the car accelerated in the tube. She had just enough time to beg modeler time from Mickey, grab some lunch, and change before the meeting with Remson.

  Croft still owed her a favor, didn't he?

  But when she reached Croft's office and asked to talk to him, she was cold-shouldered.

  So she went over to the modeler facility. She hadn't used up the time that Mickey'd allotted her.

  She could walk in and use the equipment.

  She hadn't been here for ages. The staff had redecorated. Or Mickey had spruced up the place.

  Even the lift, when her car sighed open before it, was newly tinted a silver-gray.

  Nice. She got in and pushed the indicator for the floor she wanted. The lift checked her fingerprint, and she felt the scanner overhead verifying that she was admissible.

  Everything here was very civilized. No guard to ask for her credentials. No need to stick your face in a derma/retinal scanner and steel yourself for the sharp puffs of air against your eyes.

  When the lift opened onto the modeler floor, a chime sounded and a soft voice-warning said, "This is a restricted area. Please observe all appropriate security measures. Proceed to the scan gate for further instructions."

  All of this was new. Probably brand-new—security instigated in response to the presence of the aliens on Threshold.

  As she stepped out into a maroon-and-peach hallway with deep carpet, she could feel the mixed field-scanners going over every inch of her body.

  She'd gotten this far without the proper identification. Could she still be fried where she stood?

  Could be. The hall was soundproofed. Her footfalls were swallowed up. She couldn't even hear herself breathe.

  There were no other doors leading off the hall, and that was new. There had been, once. New, but not remarkable.

  The remarkable thing was the presence of a human at the Security Scan Station. Mickey's staff wasn't taking any chances.

  "Director Lowe?" said the stem-faced man behind the desk. "We don't have you on—"

  "I have some modeler time due me. I thought I'd just use it up while I was in the area." She realized how lame it sounded.

  The man looked at her as if she'd gone mad.

  She stared back. What was going on around here, anyway?

  He looked away from her and punched three buttons, then typed a message, then looked up.

  "You can go through, Director. But you'll need to leave your things here. And please change into one of the white suits in the control room before you go into the sampler/modeler room."

  "I understand," she said, although she did not.

  She hated to leave her purse, even though the man couldn't have rifled it if his life depended upon it: its seal opened only to her touch.

  Still, there were things in there that would be difficult to replace. She said, "Don't lose this."

  The fellow's chin doubled with officiousness. "We never lose anything, Director."

  "I'm sure you don't."

  She moved by him, into the room that had once been the external control chamber for the sampler/modeler.

  Then she began to understand. There were seven people crowded into that room, looking through the glass at what was going on in the inner sanctum.

  And inside, behind the glass, were Mickey Croft and one of the aliens.

  Riva Lowe's breath caught in her chest. She'd never seen anything like that alien. She'd seen bioengineered subhumans, designed for mining worlds and terraforming duties, but those had been designed from a human template.

  And she'd seen lower forms of life indigenous to planets from three hundred suns. But they were nothing like . . . this.

  This was ... a creature ... of immense presence.

  It had a conical hat or a conical head. It had huge, sad eyes that seemed to float out in front of it and envelop its body, or supersede its body.

  The eyes made it difficult for her to see the rest of its shape, because those eyes mesmerized her.

  She forgot about putting on the white suit and pushed her way toward the glass.

  "Hey," said someone she'd jostled.

  She tore her gaze away from the alien, and there was Remson.

  She looked up and smiled wanly. "My god," she said.

  "Pretty spectacular," Remson said, in a way that made her wonder what he was hiding and what he was lying about.

  Obviously Mickey was modeling the alien being, and the model was giving information so classified that nobody but the Secretary General himself was allowed in the room.

  So what?

  Remson could have told her, that was what.

  And why were all the others out here, watching?

  And . . . "What's with the white suits, Vince?"

  "It's not really worried about our germs, but it thinks we should wear clean suits to protect ourselves from some sort of submolecular non-native pollution."

  "What's that mean?"

  "Probably that it wants to be alone with Mickey."

  "So that's not—"

  "Not a simulation, no. They've been modeling . . . history, I guess. Simulating things I've never seen. I don't know what some of the stuff was. Places, maybe. Hyperspaces. Maybe it's giving Mickey a physics lesson. Or maybe he's trying to show it that we're capable of some high technology ourselves."

  "Maybe he wants to show it that we're not afraid," she murmured, pressing her face to the glass without thinking, so that she bumped her nose against it, hard.

  "Or maybe," said Remson harshly, "he's trying to convince it that we're capable of understanding what it's got to say. Whatever it is it's taking a long time, and they're not talking out loud at all."

  "What?"

  Remson reached into his pocket and pulled out a transducer with an earpiece. "If you'd be a good girl and get into your suit, you'd find your own comlink to the inside. But don't bother using it. They haven't said a word, either of them, for an hour. They merely look at one another, and the modeled simulations change."

  There's nothing being displayed by the simulator at the moment, she thought. Then she looked again. She'd come in here once on her own and modeled a person. You could create a holographically displayed template of a specific individual and ask it questions. It would react and respond very much the way the person might, theory said. So you could ask questions that would prepare you for a difficult diplomatic session. Find out how someone might react to a line of inquiry or to a proposal. Without having to ask and be rebuffed. Without the other person ever knowing that you'd launched such a line of inquiry.

  But
the thing, if thing it was, in the modeler display area did not resemble a person. It resembled, now that she looked closely, an enlargement of a few excited photons dancing in a microscopic display, with a swirl of iridescent gases in the background.

  "What do you think they could be?"

  "We don't know. And Mickey's being . . . uncommunicative with us."

  She looked up at Remson sharply. "Vince, are you saying . . . ?" He was worried. Clearly.

  "I'm not saying anything, here. I'm watching. I'm waiting for my boss to indicate what he wants to do. I'm wondering where to go from here if he doesn't. And I'm wearing my white suit because I was told to, by Mickey. You should, too."

  She went to get it and put it on.

  So Remson wasn't angry at her, or worried about her failures with Cummings. He was distracted. Something was happening between Mickey and the alien being that no one was qualified to assess.

  That would really hurt Remson. Remson was Mickey's bird dog. Remson was Mickey's right hand.

  When the right hand is cut off from the body at the owner's request, the hand dies. The owner lives.

  She found a suit. The ankles were elasticized. So were the wrists. She nearly fell over, trying to get it on over her clothes. As she was doing that somebody behind her spoke.

  "Look at that. What the fuck is it?"

  The sound was so startling in the silence that she nearly jumped. Then she turned to look.

  The modeler was now showing a geometry. Or something like a geometry. An embedding diagram. A hypnotist's tool. A mandala. A vista. A place. A space. A hearth and home. Colors beyond rapture.

  Stairs that climbed everywhere. Circles that wound in and out of your brain.

  And strata of distance that went forever, because you could fly down them with your eyes and your body followed.

  She wasn't sure she was still standing where she last remembered standing.

  She was whizzing through a kaleidoscoping swirl to a place she'd always been, but never visited.

  And then she was right where she'd been before, with her hips in the white suit and Remson shaking her shoulder.

  "Let's get out of here. We've got the Cummings meeting to prepare for." His eyes seemed sunken into his head.

  So then she had to take off the white suit and scramble after Vince, a huge, solid, stolid shape against which everything she'd just experienced seemed to collide and shatter.

  Outside the control room full of observers, he hushed her and led her to the elevator.

  They reached it before she remembered she'd forgotten her purse. "Wait," she said. "I left my—"

  And then she was zooming down the hallway, headfirst, as if she were flying. She found her hand outstretched for the purse and her body back at the Security Scan Station, in the blink of an eye.

  As if she'd really flown that far. And the man there held out the purse to her as if nothing untoward had happened.

  But when he bid her good-bye, the words dripped off his lips like molasses.

  And now here was the lift, and Remson holding open the door.

  This time she'd had no sensation of flying headfirst. But she'd . . . slid the distance.

  Her stomach was still fluttery from the speed of it.

  She opened her mouth again but Remson held up a forestalling hand: Don't talk.

  In she got, and the lift closed and descended. She felt the wavebath of the lift sensors, checking her.

  They recognized her, or the lift would have stopped between floors. So she was still the same person who'd gotten into the lift.

  Wasn't she?

  When the tubeway door opened, Remson's car was there. He motioned her inside: "We'll take mine. Send yours along."

  Inside, she'd no sooner settled back against the plush than he was slapping drinks out of the bar. The car was already under way, blue flashers strobing, siren screaming so loud she could hear it, even inside.

  "What are we going to do?" Riva said. A dumb question, considering all she'd seen.

  But Remson said, "Good question. I hear South is on his way back. You ordered that?"

  "I thought— Well, South thinks he's seen aliens. . . . Maybe they're the same aliens."

  "Good thinking. I should have done it—never mind. We need to get Cummings his interview with these aliens, and soon."

  "What?"

  "I've got to get Mickey away from it—from them. There's two others we've seen—three, in the formal contact party. The other two seem to appear less often. Of course there could be fifty and we can't tell them apart. At least two more, though. I guess they stay in their ships. This one's the 'Interstitial Interpreter,' according to Mickey. The other two are 'honor guard.' And that's all we know."

  "We haven't been on the ships?"

  "Nope. Unless you count Mickey's having been on them. But he's not making much sense about what he saw there."

  "If what he saw is like what we were seeing in the sampler/modeler how could he make much sense, trying to describe it?" she asked.

  Remson nodded his head. "That's a good point. But I need to know: How xenophobic is Cummings, really? If we arrange the meeting, is he going to be able to handle it?"

  "You were going to chance it, without warning me what they were like. I just walked in on that little scene back there. You didn't invite me in on that, or anything...."

  "Easy, Riva. Seeing them—that stuff—makes people jumpy."

  "I guess. But what about Cummings?"

  "I told you, I want to separate Mickey from that stimulus. So far, Cummings is just on for a meeting with you and me. We've got to decide if it's safe to let him spend time with . . . one of those things."

  "Don't we have to ask the aliens? I mean, will they see anyone?"

  "It's a contact delegation," he reminded her. "I want to put South with them and see what happens too—in case I forget to tell you later. As soon as he gets back."

  South, with those aliens? She thought she'd object, but couldn't say more than, "His therapy reports say he's beginning to remember what he saw, or thinks he saw, on X-3."

  "Good. We're due for some sort of luck, don't you think?" Remson sipped his drink and stared into it—either contemplatively or morosely, Riva wasn't sure which.

  "Vince," she said. "You don't think this contact is beneficial?"

  "To whom? In what way?" Remson wanted to know.

  And she said, "South's all right. Mickey will be all right." And that was foolish, because there was no evidence that Mickey was not all right, or that South's purported encounters with aliens on his X-3 flyby were in any way connected with this.

  Remson laid his head back, balancing his drink on his stomach in the car that moved so quickly through the tube. "Riva, I don't understand this at all. I don't like what my instinct is telling me. And I'll tell you one more thing."

  "What's that?" she asked when he didn't.

  "Mickey thinks he's met the ancestral gods of the human race."

  CHAPTER 19

  Classified Information

  Mickey Croft didn't understand his staffs reaction to the aliens' presence. Or to Mickey himself, now that he'd come back from his trip inside the teardrop.

  The Interstitial Interpreter, who was the only alien to which anyone could speak, was "Mr. Interpreter." He called Mickey, "Secretary Mickeycroft," and Remson, "Assistant Secretary Vinceremson."

  The Interpreter was physically present. That ought to have answered some of the questions on the faces of Mickey's people. But it hadn't. Not even now, after a grueling session in the sampler/modeler room, did Mickey see so much as an initial glimmering of acceptance on the faces of Remson, Riva Lowe, or the representatives of ConSec and ConSpaceCom now gathered in his office for an historic tête-à-tête with humanity's future.

  Mickey said, "Please tell us, Mr. Interpreter, about the Council and the Unity behind that Council." Might as well begin at what Croft perceived as the beginning.

  If the people gathered here couldn't accept even the real
ity of change as it was currently embodied in the alien in their midst, then evaluating that change was going to be nearly impossible. That was why Croft hadn't balked when Remson had insisted on having an AIP-T—an Artificially Intelligent, Preprogrammed Therapist—at the table. A human emissary might have been insulted to have a four-foot canister of electronics there evaluating its every move and word, and the motives behind its behavior.

  But the Interstitial Interpreter wasn't insulted. He wasn't even curious, it seemed. Sometimes Mickey wasn't sure how much of human artifactual spacetime the interpreter could comprehend.

  After all, Mickey hadn't been able to make much sense of what he'd seen in the alien ship—at least not the sort of sense that could be translated into comprehensive chunked bits that in turn led to literal assessments such as: "so big"; "so hard"; "so near"; "so dangerous."

  Fight-or-flight reactions were still the only ones Mickey recognized on Remson's face. Which was impossibly silly. One couldn't flee facts. Reality wasn't contestable.

  The Interstitial Interpreter was here. Here physically. Here phenomenally. Here historically.

  Everything else relating to those facts might be matters for interpretation, but the II's presence wasn't.

  That was what Remson called the alien when he'd told Croft he was insisting on the AIP-Therapist's presence at this meeting: the II.

  Perhaps if everything about this encounter with aliens from another dimension could be reduced to acronyms, then the humans would have an easier time accepting what they were seeing. "Aye-Aye." It sound affirmative. Mickey had smiled, albeit a bit dazedly, when he'd realized what it was that Remson was referring to.

  "It" was the creature who now rose to its feet in a completely human gesture of respect for protocol. Except, of course, that it didn't truly have feet. The footlike appurtenances at the bottom of the skirtlike manifestation, which supported the expected trunk and arms and, of course, the conical head, all shimmered with a sort of evanescence that came, Mickey was certain, from forcing itself to be manifest in the spacetime that mankind knew as its physical realm.

  The II said, opening its mouth and manipulating air with that sad, wide orifice, "Secretary General Mickeycroft is wanting a reassurance for the people. Harm is not coming from the Council, we. The Council, we, represents the Unity, it, of smart beings." The II paused and "looked" around.