Buck seemed to hear two of every word T’ksam said. He tried to push himself up from the ground, but his left arm had no strength. He looked at it. It was bent as if he had another wrist in his forearm. His face began to throb.
T’ksam was beside him. “You’ll be all right,” the Overseer said. “A broken arm is a good wound to take from your first battle. Your family will be proud of you.” He prodded the sorest parts of Buck’s face. “Too bad,” he said. “It won’t even earn you a scar of valor. Maybe next time.”
He stood up and held out his hand to Buck. “If you want, you can examine their vehicle. It’s very primitive. I’ll hide their bodies.”
Buck almost fainted with pain as T’ksam pulled him to his feet. He stared down at the bodies of the dead aliens, fascinated, catching his breath. If he didn’t look at the creature’s horribly misshapen heads, they weren’t all that different from Tenctonese. By their body shapes, one even seemed to be a male and the other a female. He wondered what their binnaum-ta looked like.
T’ksam walked over to their vehicle and came back with what turned out to be a folded shovel. Buck realized that the creatures were dressed in uniforms—oddly patterned in desert colors, but clearly a standard system of dressing. He wondered if these were this world’s Overseers. If so, the slaves must be incredibly feeble.
“You go lie in the sun,” T’ksam said kindly. “I’ll get you back to a medical specialist before you know it.” Quickly he began to dig a hole behind the rise. Within minutes there was no trace of the bodies. Buck wondered if he should say a blessing to Andarko and Celine so the sold’yurz could find their way past the wall. He didn’t know if Andarko and Celine could guide the serdos of monsters, but in the end he decided it couldn’t hurt to ask. The sold’yurz had died doing their work. That had to be good for something, even on an alien world.
Buck looked up at T’ksam. His arm and face throbbed painfully with each double beat. “When they came, were you speaking their language?” he asked.
T’ksam helped Buck walk to the rumbling vehicle. Its power plant was still in operation. “I know a few words. Already we’ve had representatives speaking with these creatures’ leaders, correcting the lies that the cargo is attempting to spread.”
Buck sat in one of the vehicle’s chairs. It was surprisingly more comfortable than anything on the ship. “Do you know what the name of their world is?” Buck thought that it was important that he know that. He wanted to be able to include the name in his prayers.
“I think it translates as dirt,” T’ksam said. “This area we crashed on seems to be part of a tribal tract called Kwarnn’teen. At least, they keep telling us that’s where we are. Odd-sounding language, isn’t it?”
Buck started to nod but stopped. His face felt as if it were catching fire. T’ksam sat in the vehicle’s other chair. There was some sort of large valve-release wheel in front of him. He pulled his ring out of his tunic and checked the direction of the beacon they had been tracking. Then the Overseer pushed a lever between the seats, and there was a horrible grinding noise. Buck tensed. His arm blazed with fiery pain. And then the vehicle lurched forward.
T’ksam laughed. “It works just as I was told it works. They have no sense of security.” He used the valve-release wheel to alter the direction of the vehicle, then tapped his foot back and forth along the vehicle’s floor in front of his chair. He hit a part of the floor that sounded different to Buck, and the vehicle slowed. He hit something else, and the vehicle sped up.
“That’s the one,” T’ksam said. Then he pushed his foot down, and the power plant roared, and the vehicle moved away from the desert toward a nearby range of small hills. He sang a Watcher’s song of victory.
Buck didn’t join in. He stared out the vehicle’s window without seeing the desert beyond. As the world spun around him in pain, all he could see was the creatures’ faces as they had lain dead. In his growing delirium, each one of them looked just like Vornho.
There was something wrong, Buck knew. Something terribly wrong. But he couldn’t tell if what was wrong was something in this alien world or something within himself.
Perhaps there is no answer, he heard someone say. Perhaps that is a choice to be made and not a question to be answered.
Buck stared at T’ksam. The Overseer had said nothing.
Buck felt tears fall from his eyes. It took him a long time to realize they were not because of pain.
He thought about choices until he passed out.
C H A P T E R 1 0
SIKES GRIMACED AS the wheels of his Humvee slipped sideways in the desert sand. It was like driving in snow. And he hated driving in snow. That’s why he had left Detroit in the first place.
“Easy there, son,” Theo said from the back. “We got nowhere to go, and we don’t have to get there fast.”
Sikes swore as he brought the balky vehicle back on track. There was sweat dripping down his forehead and his nose in the desert heat. Driving in snow and sweating. What could be better? “We’re chauffeurs, Theo. We’re nothing but goddam chauffeurs for a bunch of men from Mars.”
“No, not men from Mars,” Miss Laurie said from the passenger seat. Sikes could hear the smile in her voice. She was always smiling. “I myself, female from Tencton. Not male. Don’t know Mars.”
Sikes turned to look at the tall, slim alien at his side, listening to English tapes on a Walkman. Her head was swollen up like a sponge that had been dipped in water. Her scalp was balder than Sinead O’Connor’s, and it was covered in hundreds of squiggly-looking freckles. But she had a nice smile, he could give her that. Nice smile and a chipper attitude that made him want to punch the roof and the steering wheel at the same time.
He felt Theo’s hand pat his arm. “You let me know when it’s my turn to drive.”
“Yeah,” Sikes said. “Another half hour and you can take us in.”
He kept driving across the desert. Looking for stragglers, the official word was. That was the assignment they had been given. Not important enough for the army guys. Just drive through the desert looking for stragglers—Tenctonese who had strayed so far away from the crash site that they were outside the ACP. Sikes had never had a more boring job in his entire life.
So far, in three days of duty, he and Theo—and their ever-smiling Tenctonese observer, Miss Laurie—had rounded up fifteen aliens. Sikes knew that something funny was going on because a few of them sure hadn’t been on their own out in the desert since the first night. Most of them looked well fed. A few even wore the orange jumpsuits that had been provided to replace the gray rags they had arrived in. The stragglers’ condition told Sikes that the blazing pits of oil and gas hadn’t been completely effective in keeping the Tenctonese in the quarantine zone, and the new fencing that was going up to replace the fire pits wasn’t doing much better.
“You know,” Sikes said for the fifth time that day, “nothing out here is what they say it is. The military has gotta be stringing us along again. They got some kind of hidden agenda going on here.”
He heard Theo sigh from the backseat. “Kid, the government wants the spaceship. That’s all it comes down to, and you can’t blame them. They don’t want anyone sneaking out of the area with any pieces of advanced technology, and they don’t want spies sneaking in. It’s as simple as that.”
“Naah,” Sikes said. “There’s more to it than that. I can smell it, and it stinks.”
From the corner of his eye he saw Miss Laurie smile at him and then cover her mouth as she laughed.
“Smell it,” Sikes said to her again. “You like that, huh? You think that’s funny?”
Miss Laurie waved her hand in front of her nose. “Lee p’sh—you say: on ship. Everything all time smell son. Very very son. Like monk. You know monk?” She looked at the roof of the Humvee and made a grasping motion with her free hand. “Shitty. Kwen, that right. Monk. Shitty. Bad all time.” She gave Sikes her smile again. “Down here, smell so good. All time good. Breathe deep. No monk. You
. . . humans complain bad smell. We think good. You think bad. We laugh. Funny.”
“Hilarious,” Sikes said flatly.
Miss Laurie went back to her Walkman. In the three days Sikes and Theo had been driving her around the Mojave, she had progressed at the rate of a full grade of English each day. At the rate she was going, she’d be speaking better English than Sikes inside of a week. Apparently they were all like that. Their brains were also like sponges. Soaking up everything.
Miss Laurie suddenly pointed over to the left. “There,” she said urgently. She took her job seriously, as if work was the most important thing in her life.
Sikes looked in the direction she pointed. Desert. Nothing but desert.
“Two Tencton-ta. Hend miles.”
Theo held his hand out for Sikes, spreading his fingers. “That’s five miles, kid.”
“I don’t see a thing,” Sikes said. He pulled off his sunglasses. Still nothing but superheated glare.
“You know better than that,” Theo said, “if Miss Laurie here says she sees two of her people five miles away, then she sees two of her people.”
Sikes sighed and changed the heading of the Humvee until Miss Laurie told him they were traveling straight for them. Of course, it had to be over the roughest part of the desert floor, making the vehicle shake like a Piper Cub in a thunderstorm.
How their Tenctonese observer got the name Miss Laurie, Sikes didn’t know. All the Tenctonese who were working with humans had been given human names, mainly because humans weren’t as fast to learn Tenctonese pronunciation as the Tenctonese were to learn English. It also made it easier to write reports. The human names were given to the Tenctonese by the people they worked with, and it had quickly become clear that the Tenctonese treated their human names as some kind of status symbols. Apparently there was a Tenctonese male working in the engineering section who had been given the name Rover because of his eagerness to please. Even when it had been explained to him what the name actually meant, he hadn’t wanted to give it up. In the Tenctonese culture, the briefing officers had told Sikes, names were extremely important and were not given or treated lightly.
But Sikes didn’t care. Sikes was getting tired of the whole thing. He knew Kirby would kill him for his lack of imagination and sense of wonder, but when it came right down to it, without ray guns, spaceships, miracle cures for cancer, or an invitation to join a galactic brotherhood, the Tenctonese weren’t what a lot of people, including him, had expected space aliens to be. At the end of the day they were just another group of people in trouble who didn’t speak the language. And the world was full of those.
According to Theo’s soap-opera index, by which he measured the relative importance of news stories by the length of time they managed to preempt afternoon television shows, the Tenctonese crash-landing had scored a record eight out of ten. The air war in Iraq had been a one, and the L. A. riots a two. But now, almost two weeks after the first shock, as everyone realized that any secrets in the spaceship wreckage were going to be hard to come by, “The Young and the Restless” was running again, and the saga of the stranded aliens had been reduced to five-second sound bites on the national newscasts, just like everything else.
It all made Sikes want to go back to where he belonged. He wanted to be a cop again. Even if it meant completely giving in to the captain and signing a Security Oath and living the rest of his days knowing he had let a murderer get away with his crime, Sikes wanted to go back to doing what he knew he had to do. Theo had been right. He was a cop. He’d made his decision, and now there was nothing he could do about it.
He saw a speck on the horizon. “Okay. I see one of them,” he told Miss Laurie.
“Adult male carry child. Maybe hurt. Ouch bad.”
“Better get the first-aid kit ready,” Sikes said over his shoulder. The pressure points for stopping bleeding weren’t the same, but the briefing officers had said that bones could be set on a Tenctonese the same as on a human. And if any other treatment was required, that would be the responsibility of the Tenctonese observer that rode with each team.
Two minutes later, Sikes slowed the Humvee by an adult male Tenctonese carrying what seemed to be an unconscious ten-year-old boy, just as Miss Laurie had said. Part of the problem, Sikes could see right away, was that the child’s clothes had been taken off. Except for a small gray fabric bundle that was lying on his stomach, the kid was naked. He was going to fry.
Sikes, Theo, and Miss Laurie jumped out of the Humvee at the same time.
“Tell him to cover the kid up,” Sikes said. He could see that the boy’s face was swollen and that his left forearm had a bad break.
“Sun is good on skin,” Miss Laurie said. “Make strong.” She walked quickly to the Tenctonese male and began speaking in their own language.
The male cut her off. Sikes didn’t understand a single word of what was being said, but he heard the tone in the male’s voice. He was telling her to drop dead and mind her own business. Surprisingly, the talkative Miss Laurie shut up. Still carrying the child, the male began to walk toward the back of the Humvee.
“That’s it?” Sikes asked Miss Laurie. “You’re not going to help the kid out?”
Miss Laurie had lost her smile. “Child okay. Hurt make strong. Go back now.”
Sikes looked at Theo. “Hurt make strong?” Theo shrugged. The male roughly put the unconscious child into the backseat, then pushed in front of Miss Laurie and took her place in the passenger seat.
“Hey,” Sikes said. “That’s where Miss Laurie sits. You get back there.”
The male stared at him, and Sikes saw that arrogance appeared to be the same throughout the universe.
“Okay, fine,” Miss Laurie said. “I sit back here. He sit there. Okay fine.” She said something to the male. He replied. She said to Sikes, “He say you can go now.”
Sikes didn’t get it. “Well, thank him for his kind permission,” he said sarcastically. “What is he, Miss Laurie? Some kind of commanding officer or something?”
Miss Laurie spoke to the male again. He replied again. “His name T’ksam. Ordinary Tenctonese.”
Sikes thought his name sounded like someone sneezing. “Tell him he’s got a new name. I’m going to call him Sam. You tell him that and it’ll make his day.”
Miss Laurie explained it to him. T’ksam stared at Sikes with an odd expression. “Sam,” he said, as if trying it out. He pointed to his chest. “Sam.” Then he pointed to Sikes.
Sikes said his name. The male’s eyes widened, and he looked like he was going to burst into laughter. Then he caught himself. “See-iiks,” he repeated. “See-iiks, See-iiks, See-iiks.” He pointed to his chest and said, “Sam.” He pointed at Sikes again, expectantly.
“Sikes,” Sikes said, pointing to himself again. “I thought you guys were supposed to be smart.”
“Vot keeps urs,” T’ksam said, as if trying to keep back a smile.
“What did he say?” Sikes asked.
“You speak the truth,” Miss Laurie translated. Even she acted as if some sort of joke was being made.
Sikes didn’t get it. It would be five years before anyone explained to him the significance of his own name in Tenctonese.
As they arrived back at one of the main gates leading into the ACP, Sikes noticed that during the whole drive back T’ksam had kept the child’s clothes bundled up on his own lap. He hadn’t even offered them as a pillow for the kid. Pretty callous, Sikes thought. Maybe they don’t care about their kids the way we do.
At the entrance gate, Sikes waited in a line-up of other military vehicles for an MP to wave him into an open vehicle bay for inspection. The gasoline pits had been replaced over the past few days by a pair of fifteen-foot-high chain-link fences that were eventually to form a double boundary around the entire quarantine zone. It was more humane than the ring of fire, Sikes knew, but it made the purpose of the AQF painfully obvious.
Another MP came up to Sikes’s side of the Humvee carrying o
ne of the ubiquitous metal clipboards. “What have we got here?” he asked. He wrote down Sikes’s badge number as he waited for a reply.
“Five coming in,” Sikes said. “Two human.” He gave his name and Theo’s. “One Tenctonese observer: Miss Laurie. And two stragglers.”
“Got names for the stragglers?” the MP asked.
“Yeah,” Sikes said, glancing at T’ksam. “This one’s Sam.”
“Sam what?”
“How the hell should I know?”
The MP frowned. “The computers need at least two names to keep track of them all, detective.” He looked across at T’ksam. “Sam, initial I., Am. That should do it.” He wrote it down.
“We got a kid in the back, too,” Sikes added. “Hurt pretty bad.”
“What’s his name?”
Before Sikes could ask Miss Laurie to ask T’ksam what the child’s name was, the MP looked in at him. “No, don’t tell me,” the MP said. “I know. He’s Buck. Buck Nekkid.”
Sikes made a face. He had the feeling that a lot of aliens would be getting their new names this way soon.
The MP walked around the vehicle to finish his inspection, then returned to Sikes. “Unload the child here so we can send him inside in an ambulance.” The MP turned away and blew two quick blasts on his whistle.
Sikes got out. Theo, Miss Laurie, and T’ksam followed. Theo went over to talk to the MP as Sikes told Miss Laurie to tell T’ksam that he wasn’t going anywhere and to get back into the Humvee. He knew whatever was going on between Miss Laurie and T’ksam was serious because Miss Laurie didn’t laugh when he said the word “Humvee.” Apparently it had some kind of sexual connotation in their language, but they all seemed too embarrassed to explain exactly what. There were some subjects, it seemed, that none of them would talk about, almost as if they had all been given orders not to talk.
But T’ksam didn’t get back into the vehicle. He was still carrying the kid’s clothes under his arm. Sikes wished he had his gun, but all the military would let him carry was his cuffs. Not even a nightstick. Nobody wanted to see the Tenctonese with weapons.
Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent Page 41