Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent

by Judith Reeves-Stevens

  In time he forgot how long he had been running, but in that time the howl of the wind had faded and the decks stopped shaking. It was almost as if he were in space again—safe and secure with the Overseers.

  Buck stumbled down a long, crowded ramp to the final deck. There was a different smell in the air here, almost as if there weren’t as many people around him. The scent of his own kind seemed lighter somehow, the way the gravity felt.

  He moved with the screaming, shouting, jostling crowd, pushing his way past Elders and smaller children. Everyone had the same idea. Run. As far and as fast as possible.

  There was something wrong with the light now, too, Buck noticed. It was too harsh, too bright, even stronger than the ceiling banks in the infirmary. He came to the top of another ramp, and since he knew he was on the bottom level, he realized it was the ramp that led down, out of the disk, to the . . . outside.

  Buck looked up and saw the source of the light. Straight ahead a large red light bank hung against a distant wall. The light seemed to waver, blindingly bright. Only when the crowd behind him pushed him forward did he realize that the light bank was actually the course-correction star. But why its color was different he didn’t know. Maybe because of the transparent wall it shone through in the distance. He wondered if there were other walls on this world.

  Buck ran down the ramp. There was dust or grit in the air that made him cough and sneeze. Everyone around him did the same. He felt strong breezes from some enormous air-circulating pump. He heard a high-pitched thrumming of straining machinery but didn’t know what kind of machinery it was.

  There was a huge dark ceiling above him, and vaguely he realized it was the bottom surface of the disk. He didn’t know what was keeping it up.

  The ramp ended, but the crowd was moving forward so quickly that Buck had taken twenty steps upon the surface of the new world before he actually knew what he was doing.

  Run, said a thousand voices in the crowd. Run and keep running.

  So Buck ran. The deck beneath his feet was covered in dirt and small broken pieces of rounded metal that pushed painfully through the soles of his thin shoes. But he ran and he kept running.

  And he had no idea where it was he was running to.

  Moodri had taken up the position he knew had been assigned to Vondmac—standing watch over cargo ramp twenty-seven. He worked with a crew of twenty young workers chosen for their strength and their speed—binnaum, female, and male—scanning the departing crowds with him.

  Another command had been issued by the rebellion leaders as the Tenctonese had gathered in the lower levels during the descent—no baggage could be taken from the disk.

  Whatever waited for them on the surface of this new world, they would face it without the Overseers’ prods or cutting beams, without canisters of the holy gas, without jabroka or any of the other cruel implements and foul drugs with which the Overseers had ruled.

  More than that, the council of Elders had also known that the Overseers had caches of survival equipment stowed away in secret places in the disk. It would have been useful to have shelters and solar stills and blades and ropes and fire igniters, the Elders had known. But each cache might also have a locator beacon, and because of that fear the council would not risk any of those leaving the disk, no matter what other equipment was lost.

  So Moodri and the others scanned the departing Tenctonese. Every moment, it seemed, one of the crew would have to run into the crowd to see if the object wrapped in a podling’s blanket was really a child and not contraband, but the effort appeared to be working. Since few slaves had any possessions to begin with, the desire to leave with something was minimal, especially considering the urgent orders to run as quickly and as far as possible.

  Moodri also looked out over the crowd for spots he might recognize. There were eight times eight exit ramps on the disk, though, so he thought it unlikely he would see anyone he knew. Still he tried. The goddess could be funny that way.

  Three hours after the disk had finally settled, it gave a sudden lurch, and the few stragglers that still moved down the ramp shouted in alarm and began running faster. One of the crew who had searched the crowd with Moodri took the Elder’s arm and led him to the top of the ramp. “The stabilizers can’t last much longer, Moodri. You should leave now.”

  Moodri knew the young male was right. He and his youthful compatriots could run away from the disk, but Moodri would have to walk—though his knees already felt better in the planet’s low gravity.

  Moodri clenched the youth’s hand in his. “We have done good work this crayg,” he said.

  “We have followed a good plan.”

  Moodri peered down the ramp at the oddly colored soil that lay beneath them. Obviously the disk’s automatics had successfully chosen a suitable hot desert environment in which to land, far from any of this world’s caustic saltwater oceans and where a suitable level of ultraviolet radiation would reach the ground. But he was surprised that no aliens had yet appeared. The disk had been on the planet’s surface for considerable time. “Has there been any sign of the indigenous species?” Moodri asked.

  “Flying machines fill the sky,” the youth said. “We are clearly being observed from a distance.”

  “Good,” Moodri said. “Under such circumstances a long introduction is preferable to a short one. It reduces the chances for hasty mistakes.”

  The young male gently pushed Moodri along the ramp. “Please, Moodri. It would be such a shame to come so far and miss by only a footstep.”

  Moodri doubted that even Ionia would be so capricious but dutifully set off down the ramp.

  As more of the new world came into view beyond the immense overhanging lip of the disk, he noted with satisfaction that the sky was blue. It was one of his favorite colors, as far as skies went, and he hadn’t seen it too often.

  There was a pleasant warmth to the atmosphere as well, and little sign of vegetation. More good signs, as they reduced the probability that they had set down on valuable farmland or that they had disturbed local fauna. With an oxygen atmosphere and intelligent tool-users about, Moodri felt quite confident in assuming that the new planet would have plentiful vegetation and fauna. But he was willing to be surprised.

  At last he came to the end of the ramp, and because he was more than a century old and had a deep and abiding sense of history, he paused for a moment at its edge, where the metal forged from one world touched the surface of another.

  The air smelled dry. It was a good smell. All across the horizon he saw the small dark silhouettes of Tenctonese spreading out from the disk. They would be safe enough when the time came.

  Beyond the disk’s overhang Moodri saw a vapor trail cut across the blue sky ahead and knew it was made by a flying machine. He waved hello to it, not knowing how advanced this planet’s optic systems might be.

  He exhaled the last of the disk’s air from his lungs, then drew in as deeply as he could the oddly scented air of this new world.

  “We thank the goddess for this day.”

  Moodri set foot on the new world.

  “And for each day ever after.”

  George had wanted to find Ruhtra’s body, but the recycling room near the Game chamber was flooded with salt water from the momentary loss of gravity, and Zicree would not let him go in.

  Instead they had stayed in the prisoner cage in the holding chamber, where there had been a bench to sit on. Zicree jammed open the cage’s sliding door so it would stay open. But he said nothing. George felt each shudder of the disk and prayed it would be the one that would sunder the hull and spew him forth to empty space. But by the time the mad rush of the atmosphere began to howl outside the hull, he knew that option had been forever lost to him.

  “How many planets have you been on?” Zicree asked as the gravity lessened, indicating how close they were to the end of the descent.

  “I don’t know,” George said. The thought filled him with sadness. He had set foot on other worlds and did not rem
ember, did not care. “They are all the same.”

  “This one might be different,” Zicree said.

  The disk stopped. There was no sound of wind, no sense of motion.

  “How?” George asked.

  Zicree stood. “This is the first time I have landed on a planet in which it has become my choice whether to leave or stay.” He nodded his head as if he had answered a difficult puzzle. “Have you made your choice yet?”

  George stared at his friend. He had chosen to die.

  “I am going to leave now,” Zicree said calmly. He brushed his knuckles against George’s temple. “I hope we will meet again.”

  Zicree stepped through the open door of the cage. Coolock had stepped through that door. Ruhtra had stepped through that door. But only George and Zicree had returned.

  Long after Zicree’s clanking footsteps had faded away George remained staring at the cage’s open door. He knew a little bit about the ship’s operation. The cargo disk could not remain near the surface of a planet for long, not without its stabilizers giving out or blowing up or some such thing. But there was nowhere else for the disk to go. Any plan for freedom would have to include provisions for destroying the main section of the ship.

  George wondered how they did it.

  He could find out, he knew, just by stepping through the cage door. He could go to the cargo bay, go down a ramp, and step onto yet another world, and there would be someone else there he could ask.

  How did they do it?

  How did anyone else step through the cage door?

  There was no Overseer to lock it. There was no threat of punishment for disobeying. It was up to George and George alone.

  He got up and stepped to the edge of the open door. He put his hand through it, part of him free, part of him a slave.

  What would it take to step all the way through? George asked.

  He didn’t know the answer.

  He thought of everyone he might ask. He knew they would be outside. He wondered who would be most likely to tell him what he needed to know.

  Then it was as if Susan stood before him on the other side of the door, and in her arms was Dareveen.

  They were out there, George knew, in a sudden rush. And whether they had the answers he needed to the troubled mysteries of his life or whether they were just as confused as he was, they were waiting for him.

  It wasn’t an answer, but at least it was a direction. Perhaps, in the end, that was all there could ever be.

  No end to a journey. Only the beginning of the next.

  George stepped through the door.

  He walked slowly toward the cargo bays and the ramps. And he knew he carried the weight of the prisoner cage with him. And he knew that there would be a open door in front of him for a long time to come, with part of him free, part of him a slave, and no one he could ask what he should do until he knew what the question was.

  George stood on the bottom of the ramp and stared out at the surface of the new world. He chose to step out onto it. As he did so he swore this would be the one world he would always remember.

  He began to walk. And when he was about a mile away, one of the last to have left the disk, even as the desert floor suddenly lit up all around him, and even as a second later an angry roar cracked the air, and even as five seconds later a giant hand threw him into the soil of this world as the disk exploded at his back, George knew there was no going back.

  His new journey had begun.

  And there was still another door to step through.

  C H A P T E R 6

  SOMEONE WAS KNOCKING on Sikes’s door.

  He ignored it. He drained the dregs from the can of Bud on the arm of his easy chair, then dropped it to clatter in the pile of other cans on the floor beside him. He squinted at the vertical blinds that covered the window that gave such a nice view of the apartment building across the road. He guessed it was morning again. But he couldn’t be certain.

  Whoever it was pounded at the door again. “C’mon, man. I know you’re in there.” Sikes corrected himself. It wasn’t someone. It was Theo Miles.

  But Sikes kept staring at the flickering television screen. He had had his set on most of the past week. He supposed most every television set in the world had been on most of the past week. As if something important had happened last week. As if anything could have been as important as what had happened when Sikes had arrived at the station house with Amy and Uncle Frank and Randolph Petty’s silent killer. Jesus, Sikes thought. I still don’t even know his name.

  “Sikes, for Christ’s sake, give me a break! I got suspended, too, remember?”

  Not that there had been a lot of choice on all those televisions, Sikes knew. Almost all the footage had been the same, no matter what channel he had turned to.

  The thing, the flying saucer, the starship—whatever it had been that had crashed in the desert that night—there were only a few different shots of it that anyone had managed to get before it had blown itself to kingdom come the next morning. There were plenty of aerial shots, of course. Every news helicopter in California’s Southland and Inland Empire had made it out to the Mojave that day, playing chicken with the military choppers and the jets.

  The daytime aerial shots were truly bizarre, showing the things that had been on the . . . the ship, gathered together in tight little clumps across the face of the desert, as if they had to keep as closely packed outside as they must have been packed inside. The lowest count Sikes had heard was that something over two hundred thousand of those things had come out of whatever it was. Some were estimating even higher—as many as four hundred thousand.

  “I’ll shoot off the lock, Sikes! I really will!”

  There was plenty of footage of the military, too. But in the staging areas only, nothing to show what they were doing where it mattered, inside the limits of the quarantine zone that had been set up—huge ditches that had been gouged into the desert floor and pumped full of gasoline, then set on fire to make the Mojave look like Kuwait City all over again.

  Sikes swore at the screen each time the cameras showed the aerial night shots—the miles-wide ring of fire cutting a lopsided circle into the black desert floor. He knew just the kind of people who were responsible for such a senseless, cruel action—he had shared a safe house with them on the night the thing had crashed.

  The official explanation for the gasoline was to prevent contamination, as if space germs had to crawl across the desert and couldn’t float through the air like every other kind of germ. No, Sikes knew that the gasoline had nothing at all to do with preventing the spread of any space disease. It was an act of intimidation, pure and simple. With emphasis on the pure.

  Sikes thought if he had just landed on another planet and someone set a moat of gasoline burning around him the first night down, he’d be ready to take the next flight home. He was sure that that was the real reason the fire had been set. But the whole point that the military had seemed to miss was that there wasn’t going to be another flight home. That particular airline was deader than Pan Am.

  Sikes jumped as a gun went off in his hallway. His front door swung open. “Domino’s,” Theo said as he burst in, then slammed the door behind him. It wouldn’t stay shut, though, and slowly swung open again.

  Theo stopped in front of Sikes, slipped his gun back into his shoulder holster, then screwed up his face as if he had stepped into a barnyard. “Christ Almighty, boy, have you taken one step out of here in the past week? It stinks like you’re already dead or something.”

  “Or something,” Sikes agreed.

  “Oh, I get it,” Theo said knowingly, “we’re going to be like that, are we?”

  “Get me a beer,” Sikes said.

  Theo went over to the blinds and pulled them open, making them rattle obnoxiously and flooding the apartment with harsh light. Sikes kept staring at the screen. Some intrepid soul had gone into the desert with a home video camera that first day and had managed to get back without having her tapes con
fiscated by the military. In the background of most of the shots she had managed to get, a tall tendril of white smoke hung in the pristine desert air—the aftermath of the early-morning explosion. In the foreground were the first close-ups anyone had managed to get of the things—five of them all huddled together, squatting on the desert floor.

  In the footage they looked to be as frightened as the camera operator had said she was. They were dressed in colorless tatters, everyone wearing the same thing, with huge swollen skulls that were covered with what looked to be birthmarks or radiation burns or scabs or something. And they gibbered away in what some experts were already saying was nothing more than animal sounds and not a true language. Every time the camera had pointed directly at them, they had cowered. The most common pronouncement was that the things didn’t know what was going on any more than people on Earth did. A lot of the creatures seemed to be dying, too. Always with their hands stretching out, as if asking for something that people couldn’t give. Or didn’t know how to give.

  Theo came out of the kitchen. “Don’t you have any real food in this place?”

  “Beer or Jack Daniel’s,” Sikes said. He sort of felt sorry for the poor things. “The number for Pink Dot is on the fridge if you want some Twinkies or something.”

  “What would you do if Kirby came over?” Theo asked in frustration.

  “Kirby’s never coming over here again,” Sikes said matter of factly. That particular call from Victoria’s lawyer—the first of many—had been waiting on his answering machine when he got home, suspended. Perfect end to the perfect day, he had thought at the time. Not only was Victoria planning to lay charges of reckless child endangerment against him, she was sending Kirby to school in Switzerland. Sikes decided that meant their reunion was off. Oddly enough, he hadn’t been as upset as he thought he might be.