Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  “Have you nothing more to say?” Melgil asked.

  “No,” Moodri said simply.

  “What more could he say?” Vondmac asked. She rose stiffly from her chair and walked uncertainly over to Melgil. At her age, the many sudden shifts from the artificial gravity field of the ship to the work camps of other worlds had caught up with her more quickly than it had the others. Quantum compression was what the Elders who once were physicists called it. “What Moodri has stated is supposition based on facts—possibilities to be examined until we can divine which is more likely or that all must be discarded for yet another, newer theory. His reasoning is solid, his explanations succinct. Until new data are available from the bridge, further pontificating is unproductive.”

  “But . . . but the decision we must make, the hidden council must vote and . . .” Melgil looked at Moodri. There was apprehension in his face. Everyone knew what the cost of that decision would be, especially for Moodri.

  But Vondmac gently put her hand on Melgil’s withered arm. “We don’t know enough to vote yet. On the one side we have Moodri’s four theories. On the other we have the certainty of Terminus. For now our course of action is clear and indisputable.”

  Terminus. Melgil trembled at the word as he had at the thought of meeting Those Who Made the Ships.

  Terminus. A port at which this ship had never called, but a port each Tencton knew. The stories of its horror were as old as the alien names for this vessel, as dark as the hell of Tencton legend.

  Terminus. A vast and artificial world system of linked and orbiting toroids larger than any planet. It was there that the ships were repaired and their machines exchanged. Where cargo was off-loaded, processed, and sent on its way to other sectors of the galaxy, to other worlds, perhaps even other dimensions and times. For the stories said that all manner of ships docked at Terminus eventually, including some that made what the Tenctonese rode now look like a pleasure cruiser.

  And it was at Terminus that the cargo was culled.

  Living beings from all different species and races and worlds were continually propelled down endless, gravity-free tunnels by technologies no sane mind could describe. The bleating and screaming and wailing of a thousand stolen cultures filled those lightless tunnels as individuals were plucked from the streaming, terrified mass of alien flesh to be surgically restructured, or medically blended, or even disassembled into a mist of conscious cells that would better be able to withstand a voyage that might take millennia through regions that were not part of space and time.

  Some aboard this ship would survive this process, in body if not in mind, but once they had been off-loaded and selected and reprocessed, the stories made it clear that the survivors would never again return to their home sector of space. For how could a slave even think of home if home was so far away in space and time as to have no meaningful existence?

  Terminus was the nightmare of the ships a thousand times over—the promise that they were not just an aberration of one small group of stars in one small galaxy at one short moment in time, but that their influence spanned the universe with mindless cruelty.

  The stories made it abundantly clear. When this ship docked at Terminus what little culture the Tenctonese captives had maintained, what memories of their home and their history and their beginnings they had relayed from parent to child over two generations would be lost forever.

  The Tenctonese would be no more.

  There would only be soulless biological working machines. No past. No future. No present but pain and fear.

  Up to now the Tenctonese had only been in transit, stopping off to take care of an odd job here and there.

  But soon, only two course corrections away, the real horror would begin, the real nightmare.

  What they had experienced, what they experienced now, was nothing compared to what awaited them.

  All else was prologue.

  “Terminus?” Melgil repeated in a whisper. “Are you certain?”

  “I have seen the charts,” Vondmac said. “We have been in transit long enough. This ship and its cargo are to be . . . processed.”

  Melgil staggered against the frame of a pod swing, seeking to hold on to it for balance. “What will we do?” he said plaintively. “What will we do?”

  “For now,” Vondmac said, “we will prepare as we have planned. We can always stop our preparations if need be, but we will not be able to stay on schedule if we do not begin now.”

  “But the hidden council . . .”

  “The council will vote when we know more. It is too early to make any decisions now.”

  Melgil’s spots had paled dramatically in the past few minutes, but as he took deep breaths they began to darken again. He looked to Moodri, still carrying the podling.

  “You knew about Terminus?” Melgil asked.

  Moodri nodded yes.

  Melgil’s breath caught in his throat. “And yet you appear so indifferent. Either way this goes we face doom, and yet you remain so unaffected.”

  Moodri smiled peacefully. “I have no burden because what happens next is not up to me,” he said, blowing warmly against the podling’s minute ear valleys, making it gurgle with delight.

  Melgil calmed himself and adjusted his robes. “Yes, you are quite right,” he said. “It is not up to us. It is up to the goddess, Ionia.”

  Moodri’s easy smile never left him, but he knew his friend was wrong. In the final accounting, of course, what would happen would be up to the goddess, Ionia. But over the next few dozens of shifts what would happen was in a completely different set of hands.

  Everything that would happen next was up to his grand-nephew, Buck. And it was time that Buck learned the truth.

  C H A P T E R 6

  GEORGE CLOSED HIS EYES against the purplish glow of the ultraviolet light banks overhead, luxuriating in the soothing warmth they spread upon his scalp. He closed his ear valleys to the loud, low rumble from the furtive conversations of the hundreds of other off-shift workers packed into the metal-walled light bay. He concentrated only on the hand that was in his, squeezing it softly, feeling it squeeze back in turn.

  Beside him on the hard metal floor, sitting so she was side to side against him, Oblakah made a subtle though surprisingly sexually explicit humming sound in her throat, so softly that only George could hear. The most sensitive spots in the small of his back immediately began to feel as if they fluttered against his skin, sending anticipatory thrills of pleasure radiating through his midsection. But he was acutely aware of those hundreds of other workers surrounding him, and so George did not do what he wanted to do, but only what he could do. He laughed, more from embarrassment than with amusement.

  Oblakah’s gentle laughter joined with his, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. George opened his eyes again and looked at her—his life partner, mother to his children, the hearts to which his own hearts answered, beat for beat. In the language of the world that waited for them, Oblakah would be named Susan Francisco, and her relation to George would be categorized as wife. But it would not be the first time that a language of that strange planet did not do justice to the range of emotions it attempted to describe so simply. For now, George couldn’t even find the words in his own, more complex language to describe all that he felt for Susan, other than that in the midst of this hell she remained the focus of everything. Sometimes, especially when they were in a privacy chamber and he heard that gentle hum building in her as she nuzzled his back, he could almost think that the two extremes of his life were in balance—that life on the ship was reasonable payment to be made to the universe in return for knowing Susan and sharing his life with her. In that, George knew that what they shared was exceedingly rare among the captive members of their race, and thus even more precious.

  But for now George lightly tapped a knuckle against Susan’s temple—a playful admonishment more appropriate to children than to two adults, unless the two adults were lovers. “Stop that,” he whispered unconvincingly. “We a
re not alone.”

  Susan snuggled closer, fitting perfectly against him. “Mmm, I wish we were.” She began to hum again, teasingly, and so much more loudly that George looked nervously around to see if any nearby could hear.

  “Oblakah, shhh,” George said, feeling his eyes begin to water in the Tenctonese equivalent of a human blush response. Another couple behind them in the crowded light bay were now grimly staring at George and Susan, and George was familiar with their expression because he had seen it often. Almost all the marriages on board the ship were arranged by the Overseers for reasons George had never been able to understand. Complete strangers were suddenly forced to spend their lives together, no matter how incompatible they might be, and such couples had little tolerance for that handful of true-mated Tenctonese who discovered that they would have chosen their assigned mates regardless of the Overseers’ decision. As had Susan and George.

  But, typically, Susan didn’t care who was listening. “Shhh yourself,” she said with a giggle. “I’m remembering the time we were in the privacy chamber with the asha lotions and you—”

  In a panic George placed his hand over Susan’s mouth. Tears rolled from his eyes. How could she even think of talking about the asha lotions with so many others so close? “People can hear,” he pleaded.

  Then Susan laughed again and took his hand from her mouth, giving his fingers a fleeting kiss. “Honestly, Neemu, sometimes I think you’re turning into an old binnaum on me.”

  As she called him by her pet name for him George recognized the playful look in her dark eyes and understood that she was only teasing him once again. She had not planned to say anything more than what she had said, hoping only to get a reaction from him by pretending that she intended to say more. The asha lotions would remain their secret. They had to.

  “But if you could see the way the others are looking at us,” George said, struggling to maintain a semblance of dignity while registering his disapproval of her supposed joke.

  “I don’t care,” Susan said.

  “It is not safe to attract attention.”

  Susan narrowed her eyes. He recognized that look as well. “We’re not doing anything wrong, Stangya.” Her use of his real name indicated her abrupt change in mood.

  “We must stop being—” George suddenly realized what he was going to say and stopped before he said it.

  Happy. He was going to say happy. As if being happy were wrong. As if finding that some small part of his soul had real sunshine in it, not artificial wavelengths from naked overhead light banks, was somehow incompatible with how the universe was supposed to be.

  Susan understood. She always did. It was her turn to whisper “shhh,” and her face reflected the sudden onset of unhappiness that George felt. “Why don’t we go back to the dorm?”

  This time George didn’t speak because he didn’t know what to say. He and Susan still had a quarter shift of UV allotted to them. The Elders had explained that the lighting tubes in the bulk of the ship didn’t provide the wavelengths necessary for Tenctonese health, so the Overseers had outfitted large chambers with UV lights like those in the ’ponics chambers in order that the Tenctonese could receive periodic megadoses to keep their spots dark and their faculties intact. George had never tried to understand how light could be nourishing. All he knew was that the periods spent sitting idly in the light bays were the closest thing to time off that any of the workers had, and that he and Susan were so seldom assigned the same UV schedule that this shift felt almost like what Moodri described as a holiday—entire remarkable days on Tencton during which whole tribes had not worked. George didn’t want to lose a second of this time.

  “Please, Neemu,” Susan said. “Little Dareveen is with Peetmor and Laynzee.” She tightened her grip on his hand. “Most of the others in the dorm are on shift. So perhaps”—she dropped her voice to the barest whisper—“there will be a privacy chamber free.”

  George looked deep into Susan’s eyes and marveled at her. Like him, she had been born on the ship, lived all her life with its rules and its schedules, and yet she could circumvent them as easily as if she were an Elder. To suggest going into a privacy chamber during a shift break? It was so outrageous an idea that George was certain that there wasn’t even a rule about it.

  “Oblakah, the schedule says we’re supposed to remain here until—”

  Susan looked directly at him. “Neck the schedule.”

  George flinched at Susan’s language. “You are talking like a vat worker.”

  “I want to be with my husband.” She spoke in the tone that George knew meant there was nothing he could say to argue with her. Susan stood up without relinquishing her grip on his hand. “Come along, Stangya.”

  George felt the eyes of everyone else in the light bay turn to him. Susan was the only one in the crowded chamber who was standing. But an argument would only attract even more attention, so he reluctantly rose up beside her.

  Susan began threading her way through the dense mass of bodies, heading for the short entrance tunnel that led to the corridor. George followed, feeling almost as if he were being dragged. As he carefully placed his feet between the scattered hands and stretched-out legs of the seated workers he mumbled over and over: “Early shift . . . I’m sorry, excuse us . . . early shift starting.” He hated to stand out. It was only an invitation for trouble with the Overseers.

  But when they reached the corridor George was almost sorry that there was no Overseer standing in their way to help convince Susan that it might be better, and less trouble, if they remained in the light bay. The corridor was deserted, filled only with a fresh, thick mist of low-lying holy gas. As he and Susan stopped outside the light bay tunnel it was still spewing forth from the overhead nozzles, dark purple in color and not yet oxidized to white, indicating that the gas had been released just in the last few minutes.

  “That’s odd,” George said as Susan turned to the right to continue down the gray, pipe-lined corridor to a branching intersection. “The gas usually isn’t this thick when we’re in transit.”

  Susan’s feet cut through the mist, making it roll away in slow waves of purple-white whorls. “At least it means there won’t be any Overseers around,” she said.

  That was true, George knew. The holy gas of obedience was a double-edged sword. At high concentrations it made the Tenctonese passive and completely responsive to the Overseers’ orders. However, it also reduced workers’ stamina, strength, and reaction time and made them completely incapable of handling an unexpected situation. At low concentrations workers were almost unimpaired but were far more capable of resisting the Overseers’ commands. The pattern that therefore had been established kept the gas at low levels throughout most of the ship most of the time, with greater numbers of Overseers on duty at the most critical work stations. During ship-to-ship rendezvous, or while orbiting planets, the gas concentration was increased in almost all areas of the ship except for the bridge and the power plant facilities in order to prevent any attempt at revolt. And during those times Overseers were seldom seen in the areas where the gas concentrations were highest.

  Personally, George didn’t understand the Overseers’ reasoning. He had been off the ship often enough to know what it felt like to be gas-free. There was an unexpected, if mild, clarity of thought and feeling of increased energy that came upon him at such times—though that could just as easily be attributed to low-gravity fields and higher oxygen concentrations. But once back on the ship it really didn’t seem to matter whether the concentration of the holy gas was high or low. He seldom felt any different. And certainly Susan didn’t seem to be slowed down by the gas the way so many others were, except when she was freshly exposed after being off-ship for long periods of time. Under those circumstances she could succumb to the gas instantly. But after a long period of exposure she was almost as untroubled by it as was George.

  George laughed out loud as a sudden thought came to him. Susan glanced at him suspiciously. “What?” she as
ked.

  “I have just now realized the real reason why we are so much more content than other mated pairs,” George said, squeezing Susan’s hand. He gestured to the layer of mist that covered the floor of the corridor. “Here we are in the midst of full gas concentration, yet we are searching for a privacy chamber.” That was the other common side effect of too much gas—most Tenctonese completely lost the desire to couple under its influence. But the more George thought about it, the more he realized that he and Susan had never felt so constrained. Certainly their intimate times together were infrequent prizes in the mind-numbing routine of the ship, but on those rare occasions when their schedules overlapped at the same time a privacy chamber was available, it had never really seemed to matter what the concentration of the gas was.

  They reached the branching intersection, and Susan stopped in the middle of it with a thoughtful look on her face. In all eight directions the corridors were deserted, almost eerily. “You’re right,” she said. “I never really thought about it before.” She gave a small cough—the first sign that the extremely high level of gas was finally beginning to have an effect on her.

  George slipped his arms around Susan, knowing that within an hour at most the gas would take its toll on her. But an hour would be enough time for him to get her away from the highest concentrations.

  He looked all around them, treasuring the feel of her within his arms. “It must be proof of our love,” he said. That certainly made sense. To couple without love was almost unthinkable as far as George was concerned. And no doubt those who had been assigned to each other by the Overseers, without a chance for love to enter their unions, shared that feeling—which might explain the jealousy that George so often felt directed at him and Susan. It might also be the reason why the birth rate on board was so low. Dropping precipitously, the Elders said.

  “Proof of our love,” Susan repeated as she returned George’s hug at the same time she gazed up and down the empty corridors. “Either that, or the sardanac I’ve been slipping into your meatgrowth is finally beginning to work.”