by Robert Reed
He saw her point and grinned.
Then she said, “Tell me. What gave you the idea?”
Her talent, and his father’s paranoia, too. “You were watching the sky, knowing it would Change. And my dad guessed that someone with special knowledge wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to watch.”
“A clever man,” she admitted. “But there has to be more, right?”
He told about the detective who examined her past. “He found one, and it seemed real enough. Your parents have a history, two family trees and so on. Tax forms on file. References to past addresses. Your mother even got a speeding ticket in the eighties, according to someone’s records.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
“Holes. Oddities. Tendencies.” He thought he heard motion, turned and saw no one. He made sure before he said, “Your mother is supposed to be an orphan, her foster parents long dead. Your father, bless him, pulled himself out of an old coal town that had the good grace to die and blow away in the intervening years. Both have reasonable records, but a lot of past employers have dissolved. No comprehensive records left.” A pause, then he explained, “The records got a lot clearer eight months before the Change. That was the telltale clue.”
“What does your detective think?”
“That your folks are in one damned good witness protection program.” Cornell grinned and asked, “Are you proud of me?”
“Very proud.”
“I figured it out for myself, didn’t I?”
Porsche turned her head, hearing something now.
A low voice? He rose and saw nothing, then kneeled and asked, “But why join the agency? If you can go wherever you want—”
“Why be human at all?” she asked point-blank. “We go from world to world because we’re good at it. Because we’re curious and rootless. We aren’t a species, Cornell, so much as we’re a collection of ideas, of common assumptions—”
“You’re here because you are curious?”
“Aren’t you?”
Of course. He was enormously curious about their fate.
“I let myself be found,” she admitted. “We wanted someone on the inside, which is only reasonable.”
He said, “Sure.”
“There’s something else,” she began to say. “Something obvious about the disks, if you think about it—”
—and she paused, turning as something approached. Four stout bodies were walking toward them, the faces intense, the eyes fixed on them. No, on something else.
Logan made a sound, brief and soft. Wrong.
A chill moved through Cornell, and he recognized the sensation. Porsche was already on her feet looking out over the river. He saw a low gray body moving against the current and some part of him stupidly wondered why a downed tree would head upriver. But it was far off, almost hugging the canyon’s opposite wall, which made it an enormous tree—
—and Logan’s bodies said, “Stay. Where you are.”
Except it wasn’t his voice, and the eyes had a sudden sparkle to them. It was someone else saying, “How many are you? And why are you together this way?”
The tree was some kind of powerful boat.
Porsche said, “Oh, shit.”
Logan’s bodies lifted their hands, gazing at them while saying, “All the way from the top of the world, you are. And together.”
A long pause, then it said:
“No, from someplace even farther. You are.”
Cornell took a step backwards.
Said the alien, “Strange strange, you are. All of you.”
4
The alien boat disappeared upriver, then made the long turn and came back hugging the near shoreline. What could they do? Cornell asked Porsche, and she glanced up at the canyon wall, as if wondering whether they could climb to escape. Ten seconds left in the game; they were twelve points down. Other people had seen the boat, bodies moving to the shelf’s edge, fear and curiosity showing on the faces. There was a hum of engines, low and steady, and a whiff of something chemical—alcohol?—carried on the breeze. A gunlike projection stood on the bow. A huge body, perhaps a foot tall, waited beside the gun. A small, scared voice asked, “Should we fight?”
“No,” said Porsche. “No, don’t.”
There was a dull explosion, smoke from the gun and an impact beneath them. Cornell guessed it was a warning shot then saw the line leading back to the boat and a harpoon driven into the rock. A mooring line, sure. The engines throbbed, and he watched the boat maneuver, its stern swinging out into the current and downstream as the engine noise rose to a higher pitch. A second boom. A third. Scrambling bodies of every size, every shade, tied off the lines. The boat was longer than the shelf, a bright aluminum hull and a wooden superstructure with a streamlined profile and what looked like a pilot turning a wheel inside a crystal-walled bridge. The pilot was blind. By accident or design, its eyes had been carved from their sockets.
“Who are you?” asked Logan’s bodies, again with the odd cadence.
Porsche asked, “Where’s Logan?”
“Who are you?”
“What did you do with our companion?”
“Who are you?”
In a soft, angry voice, she said, “Humans.”
“Humans,” the bodies repeated, the single whistle liquid and brief, tinged with an amused scorn.
Some kind of gangway was unfolding, tall strong bodies climbing out on it before it reached the shelf. They wore belts and slippers and odd partial gloves, each one carrying some kind of firearm, too stubby to be rifles and too intricate to be primitive. Their eyes were a new color, tropical blue and small. They showed every sharp tooth, and each one aimed at a different human body.
Porsche stepped toward the soldiers, extending her empty hands.
In an instant, Cornell was terrified.
“We are a long way from home,” she said, standing her ground. “We are lost. We need help. Can you help us?”
Cornell felt a presence, thick and close. Familiar.
One voice said, “I have sensed you coming, all you tiny ones…together, coming…”
“And we felt you too,” Porsche admitted.
The air around them felt electric, alive. It was as if they were being caressed by invisible hands, meat and minds probed with an intensity that left the fur on their bodies standing on end.
Cornell swallowed, then made himself ask, “Who are you?”
“The City!”
Every mouth spoke. Shouted. It sounded outraged that its identity was in doubt.
“I am the City!”
Soldiers moved across the shelf. Blue eyes gazed up at the ramp, its remnants clinging to the canyon wall.
“You are clever people,” the City assured them.
A pause.
Then it added, “You are stupid people.”
Cornell did nothing, feeling another electrical surge.
“More stupid than clever,” was the verdict. Yet in the voice, from some of the mouths, came a grudging, baffled admiration.
The soldiers found the human minds, grabbing harnesses and jerking them into motion. An instinct was triggered, or maybe he panicked. Either way, Alan let out a scream and charged, spears raised and useless. A single soldier selected his mind, one shot fired. Cornell felt the blast against his faces. A slug pierced bone and brain, and Alan was dead, his bodies pressing their attack for a moment, then slowing, faces a little lost before a repossession took place. Along with Logan’s bodies, they said, “Climb on board and behave, you will. Now.”
Porsche said, “We have to,” with angry resignation.
A thousand points down; no time on the clock.
“Leave your sharp sticks, humans.”
At once, they obeyed.
Walking up the gangplank, Cornell had a thought, and he remarked to Porsche, “This is ironic.”
She said, “How?”
“Here I am,” he said with a soft, scared voice, “abducted. By an alien and against my will
.”
She managed a soft half-laugh, saying, “You’ll have to tell your father, soon as you get home.”
The City left two minds on the shelf, the dead one and Logan’s spent one. The rest of the minds were stowed on the deck, in the open, while the bodies were herded into a deep hold, a fishy smell in the air and a nameless grease coating every surface.
“It wants us,” Porsche offered, her voice calm but tired. Calm and sad. “We’ve made it curious, I think.”
There was a powerful surge of the engines, an acceleration and little navigational motions. The only light fell through a single grate, and sometimes bodies walked over the grate. One pair of bodies knelt. They were Logan’s, already carrying guns. No need for training; no litmus test of trust. Those were the City’s eyes peering down on them, and there was a kind of curiosity in the expressions. Cornell hoped so. There were worse things to hang your fate on.
They waited, nobody wanting to talk. Cornell thought of a hundred questions he would ask Porsche—about her family, life and goals—but it was too late. The boat’s progress was marked by the presence of the City, invisible but obvious, threads of power coursing through the leaden air, every moment taking them deeper into the organism.
Cornell napped, then woke.
Porsche whispered, “Sleep well?”
It was night, utterly black in the hold. He felt a momentary panic, then managed to say, “We’re close.”
“It feels close, doesn’t it?”
Hearts beat faster. He took deep breaths, making himself sick on the rich oxygen. Porsche’s bodies were curled up beside his own; he knew them by feel and the strong touch of their hands. What was going to happen? Nothing worthwhile, he knew. Most likely death. He waited to feel misery, grief and regrets. Cornell even put one of his mouths next to an ear, ready to apologize to Porsche for every shred of bad luck. But all he felt was a kind of sturdy joy, a closeness and a sense of peace. “Is the City doing it?” he whispered.
“Doing what?”
Or was it his joy?
Around him bodies stirred, someone crying out in a dream.
“What are you thinking?” Porsche asked.
He said nothing.
Then with a soft, almost soundless voice, she said, “We have a belief, some of us do. A faith.”
We. She meant her nameless, speciesless people.
Mouth to his earhole, she said, “Death frees the soul, and it falls through the worlds until it finds another home.”
“Yeah?”
“Some of us even use our marker disks as dying sites for the old and ill. We hope our honored dead end up in the better worlds we left behind.”
The idea intrigued Cornell, and he nearly asked about what she had said, about something that was obvious about the disks. But before he could open any mouth, there was a loud crump and the engines quit. Their boat was drifting. Everyone was suddenly awake, alert. A hatch opened, light falling over them, starshine mixed with something nearer and brighter. Then the City spoke from the grate and the hatch, telling them, “Humans, come here. Now.”
The river was broad and smooth, flowing the last few feet to the ocean. Cornell smelled salt and smoke and their own filthy bodies. He and Porsche huddled together on the bow with the others, superfluous guards surrounding them. Where could they run? The shoreline was a mass of buildings lit from within, and it was a city only in appearance. Only in a snapshot sense. So quiet…an unnerving silence imposed by the uniting self…and over the sound of lapping water, someone whispered, “What do we do?”
To Porsche. She wanted Porsche’s best guess.
It was Cornell who said, “Look fearless.” A pause, then he added, “We’re representing a powerful world. We should act like it.”
Porsche nodded, saying, “Why not?”
A smaller boat approached, the gangway lowered to it. Their minds were loaded first, stacked two-deep while coal smoke belched from the boat’s little smokestack. Then their bodies were ushered down to join the minds, and they started for shore, another blind pilot at the helm, undistracted by its own eyes while dozens of others gazed in all directions.
The buildings were enormous on any scale.
Cornell saw the sameness in them—variations of the same taste, the same ideal—and there was a palpable sense of great age. Not centuries, not millennia. More like geological time. Everything was built of stone, cold and tired, cracked by the eons. The City’s onboard bodies threw lines to bodies on the closest dock—big bodies with bulging backs and arms—and every mouth said, “Humans, pull yourselves to me.”
Cornell went to his mind, hands trembling with excitement and relief. At this moment, he was alive. Functioning. He wrestled the mind up onto the dock, following Porsche, all of their bodies wearing the harnesses and scarcely breathing, empty hands hanging at their sides.
The street was wide and eerily clean. Its stone face smelled of soaps, absolutely free of dirt. Here was the ultimate totalitarian state. The buildings on both sides of them were full of a weighty yellow light that poured from the windows, coloring every surface, every face. Cornell saw no rooms inside, just vast spaces and supporting pillars, countless bodies gazing at this most peculiar parade: freeborn souls moving among perfect slaves.
They didn’t need to ask for directions. They could feel the City’s center straight ahead, the powerful sense of union sickening. Unwavering. Real cities had street-level shops and people chattering, fighting and repeating old jokes, invisible honored lines marking property. But this place was the antithesis of every city and everything interesting. Cornell had to smile nervously, feeling a mild pity for the beast. It was like some enormous anal bachelor, isolated and unhappy, filling its days making everything clean, perfect and bland.
Cornell remembered his own advice: “Look fearless.”
Dragging his mind up a long slope, he managed a sturdy, calm gaze. If not fearless, at least he was in control of his emotions. And he made a show of smiling at the various bodies standing to the side, allowing the City to see his alien expression, trying his damnedest to unnerve the creature the littlest bit.
A different kind of building stood on the high ground, not as tall and with rounded faces in contrast to the pragmatic cubic structures behind him. Cornell thought of a covered sports arena. And he knew in a dream-certain way that here was the reason people had taken risks and done questionable deeds; here was something alien and intelligent, superior in its fashion, and this was a historic moment for his species, his world.
A vast doorway swung inward with a rattling of metal gears and chains. A sudden wind blew at their backs, helping to push them inside, harsh arc lights above and the windy air blending with heavier stuff. A rich fecal stink made them cough. Porsche was still ahead, pausing now. Cornell pulled up beside her and saw a single enormous room, the floor made of footworn stones, descending toward a living mind.
Voices said, “Closer.”
Cornell saw traces of older buildings, smaller and dismantled, where nothing remained but tough stone buttresses worn slick by countless hands and feet. The voice came from thousands of bodies, all speaking while toiling beside their single mind. Otherwise, the great building was silent. Cornell’s mind was a watch battery; this mind was a fusion reactor. It was that kind of contrast, vivid and demoralizing in the same instant.
“Closer, closer. Closer.”
Yet Cornell tried for a courageous walk. Eyes up, he studied how the City cared for its soul. A latticework of aluminum surrounded it. Attending bodies seemed to endlessly groom the pale white fur. Others brought meat and bright fruits carried to the mouth with pneumatic lifts, the mouth opening, the throat large enough to swallow whole cattle. Then the mind exhaled, vapor and spit rising in a fountain. Elaborate blowers came to life, and a portion of the domed roof opened, stale air replaced with the outside air. The mind took a deep breath in response, holding it, and the roof closed again, sealing with a harsh crunch.
“It’s another species.”
Porsche was talking, her voice diluted by the spaces around them. “It must pirate bodies, somehow. Takes them and uses them as it needs.”
Logan’s bodies approached, three-fingered hands curled around the gun stocks and the barrels pointed at the floor. “Humans,” they said, “from where do you come?”
Someone said, “The earth.”
“Another world,” said another.
“We mean no harm,” begged a third.
“I am grateful,” said the City. “You look like mighty fighters.”
A long silence.
Then each of Logan’s bodies touched the prisoners, free hands groping faces and crotches and ankles. “Once before, ages ago, I met creatures such as you. Small. Desert-built. But not right. Minds that didn’t feel proper to me, like yours feel wrong.”
“Let us go,” said Porsche. Not with force, but with a reasoned tone. “We want to go home again. Please.”
“The other strangers threatened me,” said the City, apparently amused. “I thought they were creative liars. They spoke of another world, single bodies with the mind carried everywhere with them. I assumed they were liars and insane, too, since only warped souls can live in groups.”
A long, tense pause.
Then the City asked, “Are you from their world?”
“Describe it,” said Porsche.
The City resurrected ancient memories, describing creatures that sounded like elaborate praying mantises and a tiny weak sun. To those strangers, this world was fiercely hot and quite bizarre. Water was a mineral on their world. On their home, people lived for ten thousand revolutions around the distant sun, and the thought of an early death had terrified them.
“What did you do with them?” Porsche asked.
“I took their bodies. I ate their minds.”
Cornell felt a weakness, a certain resignation. He had a clear premonition about the future, hopeless and brief—
—then Porsche amazed him, saying, “As you should have done. You were being true to your nature, weren’t you?”
Cornell was amazed, and perhaps the City, too. Logan’s faces didn’t blink, but some kind of reaction showed deep in the eyes, in the quality of the golden light shining on them.