Reincarnations

by Harry Turtledove

  A guaranteed regular paycheck-yeah, that was one thing that kept him coming to the office every morning. The other was something he hadn’t thought through when he’d taken this job: now that he’d worked for the Intelligencer, no real newspaper would ever take him seriously again.

  He saved the patch story, got to work on the sumo-wrestling stag beetles. He took a certain perverse pride in the way he reworked it to fit the Intelligencer’s style: breezy, breathless, no paragraph more than two sentences long, no words more than three syllable if he could help it. Besides, Katie’d given him a deadline for that one, and he always met deadlines.

  He was just heading into the wrapup when the lights went off.

  "Oh, shit," he said loudly, an editorial comment echoed and embellished all over the office. When the lights went off, so did the computers. Mort hadn’t saved the stag beetle story as he worked on it, so it was gone for good. He’d have to do it over from scratch, and doing it once had been once too often.

  Besides which, with the power gone, the inside of the Intelligencer office was black as an IRS man’s heart: no windows. The publisher, three floors up-he had a window, and one with an ocean view. The peons who did the actual work? They got peed on, as their name implied.

  Katie Nelligan’s voice cut through the chatter: "Does anybody have a flashlight at their desk? There’s supposed to be an emergency kit in here somewhere, but we haven’t needed it for so long, I’ve forgotten where."

  No flashlights went on. Mort didn’t even have a luminous watch. He just sat at his desk, figuring the only thing he was likely to do in pitch darkness was stumble over somebody’s chair and break his fool neck.

  Wouldn’t that be a great way to go? If a network correspondent cut himself shaving while he was covering a war, he turned into a national hero overnight. But if a tabloid reporter killed himself trying to get out of his office, he might make page seven on the inside section of the newspaper. Having his passing altogether ignored was a hell of a lot more likely.

  Somebody else did get up, and promptly tripped. Feeling smugly virtuous, Mort stayed put.

  Then, all of a sudden, he could see again. Standing in the doorway were four slim, manlike shapes, each glowing a slightly different shade of bluish green. All together, they put out about as much light as a nightlight.

  "Give me a break," Mort said. "Who’s the practical joker?" Slim, glowing aliens were as much an Intelligencer hallmark as no funnies was with the New York Times. He’d written at least half a dozen stories about them himself. They all contradicted one another, but who kept track?

  "I’ll bet I know who did it," Katie Nelligan said: "San Levy at the News of the World." The News of the World specialized in aliens, too, generally warty yellow ones; Levy, who held down Katie’s job over there, was a notorious prankster. Katie turned to the glowing quartet. "Okay, boys, you can knock it off now. We’re wise to you. How about turning the lights back on, too?"

  The four guys in the alien suits (Mort thought of them as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, which does a good job of dating him) didn’t answer. One of them- -George-started walking up toward the ceiling. There weren’t any steps, but that didn’t bother him. He just went up and up, as if the air were solid beneath his feet.

  A couple of people broke into applause. "Hell of a special effect," someone called.

  Mort gaped along with everybody else. It was a hell of a special effect. He would have been impressed seeing it on a movie screen. Seeing it for real, live and in person, was… unbelievable. You could put somebody in a suit that made him look like a freeway emergency light, yeah, but Mort knew for a fact that the ceiling didn’t have any wires in it. Which left-what? Antigravity?

  "Holy Jesus," he said hoarsely. "Maybe they are aliens."

  The chorus of derision that brought down on his head couldn’t have been louder or more scornful at an Air Force UFO debunking unit. People who worked for the Intelligencer wrote about aliens, sure, but they weren’t dumb enough to believe in them. That was for the yahoos who bought the paper.

  Then the fellow in the suit up by the ceiling pointed an (inhumanly?) long finger at Katie Nelligan. He didn’t keep a flashlight in his fingernail, а la ET, but, with a startled squawk, Katie floated slowly off the floor and up toward him. "Somebody do something!" she yelped.

  Mort sprang up, sprinted down the aisle, and grabbed her around the waist (he’d fantasized doing things like that, but not under these circumstances). He tried to pull her back down to mother earth. Instead, she rose higher and higher-and so did he.

  He let go of Katie as soon as his feet left the ground, but that was too late. Up he went anyhow, toward the-well, if he wasn’t an alien, he’d do until somebody showed up with Mars license plates.

  About halfway to the ceiling, Mort remembered that once upon a time he’d been a pretty good reporter, and here he was, floating up to the biggest story in the history of mankind. "Get a camera!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. "We’ve got to have pictures!"

  "Oh, good for you, Mort," Katie exclaimed. "God, we’ll sell fifty million copies and we won’t even have to make anything up." No matter that she’d been captured by aliens and was probably heading for a fate worse than taxes-she worried about the Intelligencers circulation ahead of her own.

  Down on the ground, first one flash camera and then another started going off, strobing away until the office reminded Mort of nothing so much as a psychedelic ‘60s dance. Had the aliens smelled like pot smoke, the illusion would have been perfect, but they didn’t smell like anything.

  Only after he shouted for a camera did Mort stop to wonder whether the aliens would mind having their images immortalized in the Intelligencer. If they had minded, things might have turned decidedly unpleasant for the person on the wrong end of the Nikon. But they didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

  Then he wondered if anybody kept a gun in his desk or her purse. He didn’t think the aliens would be able to ignore bullets like flash photography. If anybody was toting a piece, though, he didn’t open up. That removed one of Mort’s worries.

  A bigger, more urgent one remained: now that the aliens had Katie and him, what would they do with them? The beings the Intelligencer featured were always looking out for humanity’s best interests, but how likely was that really? Was a species that could invent pasteurized cheese food product worth saving anyhow? Mort had his doubts. Which left-what?

  The first thing that sprang to mind was experimental specimen. That was a long walk off a short pier. Number two was zoo specimen. That might have its moments if they tried to establish a breeding population with him and Katie Nelligan, but in the long run it wasn’t much better than number one: medium- to long-term insanity as opposed to instant anguish.

  He flapped his arms and kicked his legs in midair, none of which changed his trajectory a bit. Whatever the aliens were going to do to him, he couldn’t stop them.

  His feet were still within grabbing distance of the ground, but when somebody-he didn’t see who-made the same sort of run at him as he’d made at Katie, one of the aliens who’d remained by the doorway held up a hand like a traffic cop and his would-be rescuer bounced off an invisible wall. Pictures the aliens didn’t mind; they wouldn’t put up with anything more.

  The one floating up by the ceiling-George-made a come-hither gesture to Mort and Katie, who duly went thither. The closer Mort looked at George, the less he looked like a human being, or even a Star Trek makeup job. For one thing, his head was too small. Making a head look bigger than it really is wasn’t any great trick, but how did you go about shrinking one unless you were a South American Indian?

  Nose, ears, mouth-details were all wrong: nothing you couldn’t manage with makeup on any of them, maybe, but why would you? Besides those come-hither qualities, George’s fingers had a couple of extra joints apiece. He had no nipples, further down… well, Mort was damned if he’d let a makeup man do that sort of thing to his family jewels.

  And if Georg
e wasn’t an alien, what was he doing up here by the ceiling, and how had he got Katie and Mort up here with him? Mort’s gut had needed a little while to catch up with his brain, but now he believed all over.

  The alien extended the middle finger of his left hand toward him, the middle finger of his right toward Katie. Mort wanted to flip him off right back, but didn’t have the nerve. George’s finger touched the center of his forehead. He’d expected blazing heat. Instead, it was cool.

  After that-the only person who understood what happened to him after that was Katie Nelligan, and only because it happened:o her, too. He felt his brains getting systematically emptied and copied, as if he were a floppy being backed up onto an enormous hard disk. Everything he remembered, from the Pythagorean theorem to losing his cherry under the football stands in high school, got sucked up and flowed out through the alien’s finger.

  So did things he’d never imagined his brain retained: what he’d had for breakfast five years ago last Tuesday (two eggs over medium, wheat toast, grape jam, weak coffee); what his father had said when, sometime under the age of one, Mort spat up on the old man’s best suit (not to be repeated here, but prime, believe me). Amazing, he thought, and hoped he’d keep one percent of what the alien was getting.

  Even more amazing, though, was the backwash he got, as if a few random little documents from the hard disk snuck onto the floppy while the floppy played out onto the hard disk. Some of them came from Katie: the smell of her corsage on prom night, a sixth-grade spelling test where she’d missed the word revolutionary, what cramps felt like, and a long-distance call to her sister in Baltimore the spring before.

  And some of those little documents had to come from George the alien: using those peculiar private parts in the manner for which they were intended, what felt like a college course on how flying saucers or whatever they were worked (which would have been worth a mint, and not a chocolate one, if Mort had understood the concepts), the taste of fancy alien food (by comparison, that ever-so-ordinary breakfast seemed nectar and ambrosia).

  Mort also picked up a few impressions about what George thought of mankind. In two words, not much. He went about his job with all the enthusiasm of an Animal Regulations officer counting stray dogs around the city dump, except an Animal Regulations officer might actually like dogs.

  The alien didn’t like humans. Mort could think of a lot of reasons why benevolent aliens wouldn’t like humans: they were busy polluting their planet; they fought wars; they discriminated on the basis of color, gender, sexual preference, and the size of your bankroll. If any of that had been in the backwash from George, Mort would have been chastened but not surprised.

  It wasn’t. George felt about humans much as a lot of nineteenth-century British imperialists had felt about the peoples they ruled: they were wogs. They were ugly, they smelled funny, they had revolting habits, and, most of all, they were stupid. George’s view of what humans had in the brains apartment was somewhere between a badly trained dog and what that badly trained dog was liable to leave on your front lawn when it went out for a walk.

  Given that George was currently pumping him and Katie dry of everything they’d ever known, Mort had to admit that, from his point of view, he had a point. But if George was a benevolent alien, he devoutly hoped he’d never run into one in lousy mood.

  All of a sudden, he was empty. The inside of his head seemed to be making the noise a soda straw does when you’re still sucking but the soda’s all gone.

  A couple of more impressions backwashed into the sodaless expanse between his ears. One was a mental image of two scared-looking rubes in hunting gear getting the same treatment he as undergoing now. I’ll be damned, he thought. They weren’t making it up after all.

  The second was a flash of alien mentation: As long as we have todo it, this is the perfect spot for the survey. They’d never- He never found out who they were or what they’d never. The document was incomplete.

  George turned to his buddies by the door. He wiggled his ears. Mort didn’t know what that meant, but the rest of the green-and-glowing Fab Four did: job’s over for today. They went out the door. They didn’t bother opening it first.

  The floating alien looked from Mort to Katie and back again. Mort got the idea that if it had been up to him, he’d have dropped them both on the floor, kersplat. But maybe he had a supervisor watching him or something, because he didn’t. He floated them down the same way they’d come up, only faster.

  As they were descending, George went down the invisible stairs he’d gone up before. He left the Intelligencer office the same impossible way his colleagues had, except he left his nether cheeks on this side of the door for a couple of seconds while the rest of him was already on that side.

  "Jesus," Mort said. "The moon from outer space."

  Katie laughed-hysterically, sure, but can you blame her? Mort couldn’t see what anybody else was doing, because the room was dark again now that the nightlights that walked like men had gone.

  Then the lights came back on. It was as if that broke a spell; for all Mort knew, maybe it did. People started jumping and hollering and running to the door (but not through it) to find out if the aliens were still in sight. Mort didn’t run to the door. Having seen the aliens more up close and personal than anybody but Katie Nelligan, he didn’t want to see them again.

  Katie said, "Whoever was taking those pictures, get them developed this instant, do you hear me? This instant! Don’t leave the shop while they’re being processed, either-wait for them right there."

  That got three people out of the office. Mort glanced down his watch, wondering how long he’d floated by the ceiling, hat he saw made him blink and exclaim, "Katie, what time do you have?"

  She looked at her watch, too, then stared at him, bright blue eyes wide with surprise. "It felt like we were up there for an hour, not a couple of minutes." She pointed to the wall clock. "But that says the same thing. Weird." She was not the sort of person to let weirdness overwhelm her; that was one of the reasons she was editor and Mort, older and arguably more experienced, just a staff writer. "We’ll do drafts of the piece right now, while we still member everything. When we’re done, we’ll compare notes. This one has to be perfect."

  "Right." Mort all but sprinted for his computer. He’d never imagined being in the middle of a story like this. Woodward and Bernstein, eat your hearts out, he thought as he hit the keyboard.

  He plunged in so hard and deep that he started violently when Katie tapped him on the shoulder. "I just wanted to say thanks," she told him. "That was brave, what you did."

  "Oh. That. Yeah. Sure," he said. "Listen, why aren’t you writing?" Katie laughed softly and went away.

  The next thing mort remembered apart from words flowing from his mind to the computer was the pictures coming back. For that he was willing to get up from his desk. He’d expected something would go wrong-they’d be fogged, or black, or something. But they weren’t. There was the alien, doing the mind-probe on him and Katie while all three of them floated in midair. There were the other aliens by the door. Shot after perfect shot-it was just a matter of picking the best ones.

  "We’ve got ‘em," Katie said. Everybody nodded.

  Five o’clock came and went. Mort never noticed. Neither did Katie. Finally, at about half past six, she printed her story. Mort said, "I’ll be done in just a few minutes." He pulled his sheets out of the laser printer when he was through, then said, "We both must have run way long. Shall we"-he hesitated, then plunged-"compare and cut over dinner?"

  She gave him not the wary, thoughtful look he’d expected, but a sidelong glance and half a smile, as if she knew something he didn’t. "All right," she said. "Let’s go to Napoli. It’s right down the street, and we have a lot of work to do to get this the way it has to be."

  They went through each other’s stories alongside lasagna and Chianti. Time on real newspapers had made Mort sharp at writing lean and tight; he boiled away a quarter of Katie’s piece without touc
hing the meaning at all.

  She attacked his differently, looking more at what it said than how it did the saying. About halfway through, she looked up and said, "Backwash? That’s a good way to put it. I felt it, too. I wondered if you had. But somebody reading the piece is going to need more explanation than you’ve given it here." She scribbled a note in the margin.

  Over spumoni ("To hell with the waistline; today I earned it," Katie said), each looked at what the other had done. Most of Katie’s comments asked for more detail here, less there, and made Mort’s story more tightly focused and coherent. He tipped the cap he wasn’t wearing. "Thanks. This’ll help."

  "I like what you’ve done with mine, too," she answered. "It’s lot crisper than it was. We make a pretty good team."

  "Yeah." Mort beamed. He’d had just enough wine to improve is attitude, not enough to hurt his thinking.

  Katie dabbed at her lips with a napkin. "Now let’s get back to the office and hammer ‘em together."

  Mort almost squawked, but he didn’t. What did he have to go home to? An empty apartment and celebrity dog wrestling on ESPN? Real work, important work (something he’d never imagined at the Intelligencer till now) was more important than that, and the company better. He took out his wallet, tossed bills on the red-and-white checked tablecloth, got to his feet. "Let’s go."

  "Hey, I was going to pay for mine," Katie said.

  He shrugged. "I’m not broke, and I’m not trying to take advantage of you. If you want to buy for both of us one of these lays, I’ll let you."

  She gave him that funny sidelong look again, but rose from the table without saying anything more. The night watchman scratched his head when they went back to the Intelligencer office. "You folks don’t usually work late."

  "Big story-a real ‘Hey, Martha!’ " Katie said solemnly.

  "Yeah?" The watchman’s eyes lit up. "Does it have Madonna in it?" When Mort and Katie both shook their heads, his shoulders slumped in disappointment. "How can it be a big story if it don’t have Madonna in it?"