Alien Nation #6 - Passing Fancy

by David Spencer

  Paul Bearer, while growing up on the slave ship, had developed into an expert pickpocket, which was sometimes of benefit to his nearest and dearest—and always a good way to confound the Overseers.

  And putting something into a pocket was not really so different from taking something out of a pocket.

  That was the special thing Paul could do.

  Having done it, he closed in on Bob Sled to find out what had gone awry.

  George kept an eye on the monitor while Matt tracked the dealer as he emerged from See Gurd Nurras, heading (they hoped) for a nearby car.

  “Ask him what happened,” George said into the walkie-talkie.

  “I’m ahead of you, Detective,” Bearer said respectfully, and George watched the black-and-white screen as the young rookie walked into the frame, flipped his ID for Bob Sled, who couldn’t have seemed more surprised, and led the little pharmacist over to the shelf that displayed the scalp conditioner box in which the minicam was hidden.

  “It’s in there?” Bob said. “All this time I’ve been on television? Hey-hoo, Ossifer . . .” Bob leaned into the lens, and George got a good view of his nostrils.

  “Just tell Detective Francisco what you told me,” Paul said wearily, pulling the little man back.

  “He insisted we go into the back to talk in private. So I knew somethin’ was different. I tried to argue with him that someone had to watch the store, but he was gettin’ steamed, and I knew if I pushed him too far, he’d get suspicious. So into the back we went. That’s where he told me he was reconsidering some of his outlets. Our arrangement was over, thank you very much, and he appreciated our brief, but fruitful association.”

  As Bob was talking, Paul removed the earphones from his head and positioned the earpiece between himself and the druggist so that both could hear George’s questions.

  “Did he indicate why? Did he feel there was any heat or pressure to—”

  “He didn’t say, and you can just bet I tried to ask him.”

  “And he evidenced no fear that you would try to blackmail him or turn him in?”

  “With what leverage? I still dunno who the hell he is, and I was in on it, too.”

  “George,” Matthew interrupted, an alert informing his tone of voice.

  George shifted his gaze from the TV monitor to the street. The dealer was getting into a powder blue midsize ’93 Mazda.

  George turned on the ignition of their cruiser, let it idle as they waited for the dealer to pull away from the curb. Into the walkie-talkie, he said, “Close down the store, collect the electronics, and take Mr. Sled into custody. You performed nobly, Officer Bearer, and it will be duly noted on your record.”

  “Hey-hoo,” said the young rookie wryly, and George turned off the monitor just as Bob Sled was giving his police guardian a comic look of surprise.

  At that same instant, Matthew was activating the tracer. The beep it sounded was frequent, strong. The dealer’s car pulled out into traffic. After a respectable pause, George did the same.

  “Boy, I do not wanna go belly-up on this one in the worst way, George.”

  “I feel the same, Matthew. We can only hope the ‘gentleman’ leads us where we’d like to go.”

  “Question is, what the hell are we gonna do when we get there? If we get there? We got nuthin’ to go on here. No probable cause, nuthin’.”

  “Except your conviction from the start that it needed doing. That is not nothing, Matthew.”

  Matthew looked sideways at him. “Thank you, George,” he said with an unusual gentleness. And then, adjusting his tone quickly, “So you think that means I’ve earned the right to hear that damned anagram?”

  “What, you mean the reworking of See Gurd Nurras?”

  “Yes.”

  “Taken from Tenctonese and translated into English?”

  “Yes.”

  “The dirty one? There are several oth—”

  “Yes, George, the dirty one!”

  George told him.

  Matthew’s face paled a bit.

  “Jesus, George, that really is disgusting.”

  George kept driving, smiling.

  C H A P T E R 1 3

  WHEN CATHY THOUGHT back on it, she supposed there was probably a reason why she’d forgotten to take off her shoes, a subconscious instinct that made her want to have something with her that was hard, that could do damage. She couldn’t imagine, in the end, that it had been total coincidence, negligence, or even a simple, mortal mistake. The kind of efficiency her life-style and her career required, she didn’t make those kinds of mistakes.

  She’d spent the night on her cot in the nurses’ dorm, as she had the previous night. She’d gotten to sleep shortly after dinner, which she’d had down in the cafeteria. A slow and carefully eaten dinner it had been, too, Cathy mentally battling the sympathetic nausea that lingered faintly from her last session with Fran. The symptom being psychosomatic, she was determined, while she could, to be stronger than it was. And because she had been concentrating so hard, dinner had hardly been pleasant . . . but it had stayed down. As it would have to. She needed, would be needing, the fuel.

  She slept lightly and never for more than one or two hours at a time. Twice she stirred awake, sensing that Fran had done the same. Groggy-headed as she was, the simple act of putting on shoes seemed the most onerous of chores, but it would have to be done. Exhaustedly, she would sit on the edge of the cot, holding her head as she bent down to reach for and strap on her high heels—the only shoes she had, not having been home since her night at the theatre—and then, zombielike, she’d go dutifully click-clacking down the hallway, into the elevator and, finally, down that corridor on the fifth floor to look through the window into Fran’s cubicle.

  But both times she arrived, Fran was curled up, asleep. It looked to be a sleep of dark dreams, but it was sleep nonetheless.

  Either Cathy was being oversensitive (responding to signals that weren’t Fran’s or that were wholly products of Cathy’s imagination), or Fran’s periods of wakefulness simply weren’t sustaining for very long.

  Cathy didn’t even remove her shoes the second time she climbed back into bed. If Fran needed her, she’d just be ready to go. And Cathy fully expected a third wake-up call.

  As it turned out, ironically, Fran didn’t stir for the remainder of the night—at least according to the night nurse at the desk who periodically checked the monitor—and come morning, Cathy woke before her charge, which left her the option of trying to grab either a few minutes more of rest or a quick breakfast. Feeling about as rested as she expected to be—not very, but enough—she opted for the latter, keeping it simple, dry cereal topped with fruit juice.

  She was on her last bite when she felt a tightness in her chest, a sensation more like heat than pain; it was compounded by a vague woolliness at the back of her skull. And now she had no doubt. Fran Delaney was absolutely awake. Experiencing a drug-deprivation “hangover.”

  Cathy sat an extra minute at the cafeteria table, closing her eyes and waiting with dread for the sympathetic feelings to spread to her stomach, but they stayed where they were. Good. Breakfast, like dinner before it, was safe, and she’d be fortified for the trial to come. Maybe.

  She arrived at the door to the detox cubicle, punched in her code, opened the door, entered as it shut behind her—and toppled face forward onto the floor mat.

  “Damn,” she muttered over the sound of Fran’s laughter, which sounded irksomely cruel this morning.

  “Fantastic entrance there, Cath! Not much use for Ibsen, but wait’ll they see you in Feydeau.”

  “You sound altogether too chipper for a woman who feels rotten,” Cathy said. She struggled into a sitting position and shook her head slightly at her feet.

  “I takes my entertainment as I gets it,” Fran quipped, and laughed again.

  Cathy unstrapped her shoes. She’d forgotten about the high heels; upon contact with the floor’s rubber padding, they’d sunk right in and unbalanced her
. She placed them by the wall behind her, under the keypad, not even pausing to consider her usual routine of leaving them without.

  She slid over to Fran.

  “How did you sleep?”

  Fran smiled the charismatic smile of one possessed.

  “You should kno-ow.”

  The mischievous inflection conveyed an ugly implication: that Fran, aware of the bond between them, had been deliberately disrupting Cathy’s sleep pattern through the previous night. Why? To keep Cathy from being as fully rested and completely alert as she might be. To take advantage.

  The notion that Fran would do something so malicious angered Cathy. Considering all she was doing for this woman, how could she—

  Careful, a little voice reminded her, careful. Fran’s withdrawing from a drug, her erratic sleep pattern was entirely normal, no more consciously induced than breathing. She just wants you to think she did it on purpose. She wants to throw you off guard, get the upper hand, manipulate your emotions. Fully in keeping with that temporary psychosis Steinbach warned you about. Remember what he told you about this phase of it: “The only power she has is the power you give her.”

  Cathy decided it was best not to banter with Fran, to avoid anything that smacked of competition, not that she had the patience if she’d felt otherwise.

  “Nice try, Fran,” was all she said.

  Fran’s face betrayed no disappointment.

  “And you can’t blame a girl for trying,” she said airily.

  So far, Cathy thought she had met two Fran Delaneys: a smart, sensitive artist and an embittered woman, too angry for her years. The actress swung from one extreme to the other, sometimes without segue or warning, and Cathy knew that was a result of the withdrawal and its concomitant depression. But the truth of who Fran Delaney really was lay in some combination of the two. Cathy wondered what the natural proportions were . . . wondered if she could possibly even like this actress-being once she was whole again (assuming she was ever whole again) . . . wondered what Matt saw of value in her besides artistry, which, alas, was not the sole province of nice people . . . found herself, for the first time, fighting a twinge of jealousy.

  “I don’t know what I can blame you for,” Cathy said suddenly. “I don’t know how much of your behavior is due to the withdrawal and how much is just plain old mean spiritedness. I don’t know what my rights are here. I don’t know when I’m entitled to be angry—or if—or when I’m supposed to make allowances for your condition. I only know that I don’t like being treated badly. And I wish you’d stop and think about that. You may not be entirely responsible for everything that has happened or will happen—but you’re alert enough right now.”

  Cathy found herself instantly proud of the speech—also feeling that it had been something of an inspiration. Rather than try and dance around the problem, she’d confronted it directly, labeled it precisely. For all the many types she’d met on the slave ship and here on Earth, Cathy didn’t flatter herself as much of a psychologist; but she had learned that often the best defense in the face of attempted emotional manipulation was to draw a line in the sand: Define your space, refuse to let it be violated.

  And now she had done so.

  Fran seemed to take it all in stride.

  “And if I abuse you again, what? You’ll leave?”

  Having an open and honest personality, Cathy was susceptible to attack—but also difficult to co-opt.

  “I didn’t say that, don’t put words in my mouth. I told you I don’t want to play mind games, that’s all. What you do with that information is up to you.”

  “Maybe I can’t help myself.”

  “Maybe that’s your whole problem.”

  The split second it left her mouth, Cathy regretted the sentence. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, softly.

  Fran, though she seemed to have been stung, covered it in a shrug restricted by the straitjacket.

  “Nah, don’t be. Maybe I deserved it.” Then, after a beat, she blinked her left eye rapidly. “Dammit.”

  “What?”

  “Something in my eye. Third time this morning. Dammit, I wish I had my hands free!”

  Cathy didn’t know if this was a trick or not, but she doubted it. Among other things, it was too blatant, too unrefined, too—well, too stupid to fall for.

  “Try to keep your eye open and don’t blink,” Cathy said. “If something’s there, you don’t want it getting trapped under your eyelid.” She rose, crossed to the sink, moistened a paper towel with warm water, then moved to kneel by Fran, saying, “Hold still, now.”

  She positioned her thumb on Fran’s cheek and, ever so gently, used her forefinger to hold Fran’s eyelid in place against the bone above the eyeball, widening access to the surface of the eye. She moved in for a close look . . .

  Saw it.

  Pretty big offender too, as eye irritants went, though she wasn’t quite sure what it was.

  “Hold still,” she said again, and, with an expert touch, dabbed once lightly against the eyeball.

  She inspected the moist surface of the paper towel.

  “Did you get it?” asked Fran, blinking, testing the sensation. “It sure feels like you got it!”

  “Yes, it’s here,” Cathy replied, her voice toneless as she looked at what she’d removed.

  “You make it sound like it’s the proverbial plank,” Fran commented. Cathy didn’t understand the reference, didn’t know the proverb, just recognized the stark shift in Fran’s expression when the actress shifted her gaze to the paper towel and she, too, saw what the object was.

  An eyebrow hair.

  Third time that morning, Fran had said.

  She was losing her facial hair.

  The women looked at each other.

  Then, in a hoarse whisper, Fran breathed:

  “Fe dessa etoe nigebnog.”

  Oh, Goddess, it’s starting.

  For a moment Cathy thought it was a comment on the eyebrows beginning to fall away—then she realized Fran had been talking about something else altogether, as the actress’s body tensed.

  “Scalp itches,” Fran whispered.

  Cathy could feel it too, a sympathetic echo on her own scalp, a tingling that started to burn, not unlike the chemical heat from a medicinal ointment.

  “God, I wish I could scratch it or rub it or something!”

  “Here, let me,” Cathy offered, quickly encircling Fran’s shoulders with one arm, bringing her close, taking her free hand to Fran’s head. She felt presumptuous scratching or rubbing without a specific directive to do so; so she tenderly did what seemed warranted and right—spread her fingers and passed them through Fran’s thick hair like a comb, staying close to the skin.

  Something felt odd.

  She pulled her hand away.

  Clumps of hair came away with it.

  She shivered involuntarily, shook the hair off, and looked up to see the appalled expression on Fran’s face.

  “I’m starting to look like you,” the actress said quietly, and it sounded like an accusation.

  She scuttled about two feet away from Cathy, and then her eyes rolled up so far only the whites were exposed, and she moaned “Oh-ohhh-OHHH!” and a violent spasm threw her head back and arched her body. A wave of discomfort hit Cathy, too, but nothing that made her muscles act involuntarily, nothing like what Fran was experiencing; and then there were tremors that rippled through Fran’s body, one, two, more, seemingly countless, and Cathy was about to press the emergency button on her wrist band—

  —when everything stopped.

  It was as if some invisible being that held Fran in its grip had suddenly just let go, and she collapsed limply onto her back.

  Her shape looked funny under the straitjacket. Weird around the right collarbone.

  Fran moaned softly in pain.

  “What is it?” Cathy asked.

  “Shoulder,” came the reply in a strained, gasping voice.

  It wasn’t a pain that Cathy shared on any sy
mpathetic level, but it seemed apparent enough what had caused it. The spasm had been so brutal it had dislocated Fran’s right shoulder.

  “Hold still,” Cathy said, scooting to Fran. Gingerly she rolled Fran over, to expose the straitjacket straps.

  “You don’t want to do that,” Fran husked. “Don’t cause yourself trouble. Call for a doctor, I’ll wait.”

  “No time,” Cathy said, undoing the buckles. “It’s dislocated. It has to be reset immediately or it’ll swell up. In your condition, I don’t want to chance that.”

  The buckles undone, Cathy set about gingerly unwrapping the sleeves from about Fran’s body and even more gingerly maneuvering the straitjacket off, over her arms in short, gentle tugs . . .

  The nurse at the fifth floor desk looked up at the monitor just at the point when Cathy was stroking Fran’s head. Good bedside manner, our Ms. Frankel, the nurse thought, and turned away from the screen, having noted that things seemed under control.

  Which gave her license to make a quick trip to the ladies’ room.

  Which left the monitor unobserved and unattended for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

  Which was all it took . . .

  Fran was sitting up, Cathy positioned behind her. Cathy put one hand on Fran’s right shoulder, the other encircling the top of the arm where bone was supposed to meet socket at the joint.

  “Relax now,” Cathy said. “The sensation might be a little jarring, but it shouldn’t hurt. Okay . . . one . . . two . . .”

  As if by magic, Fran’s shoulder snapped back into place all by itself, Fran brought her elbow forward, said, “Three!” and slammed it back into Cathy’s gut. Cathy went back and bent inward at the same time, in pain, unable to catch her breath; and the next thing she knew, Fran was on top of her, pinning down her shoulders, trying to unfold her legs, the better for Fran to put her knees to Cathy’s chest and really nail her guardian to the floor.