by Dean Ing
Of course I understood. I signed “yes.”
She patted her empty pouch, held both hands out, drew them toward her. In any language, a bereft mother was imploring me for the return of her baby.
I signed “no,” then gritted my teeth against the fit of coughing that overtook me, and this time I knew the salt taste was blood in my throat. When I looked up, I knew the cough had saved my life; the dewclaw was an inch from my belly, and she was dribbling something like dark saliva from her fanged mouth while she insisted “yes,” and “yes” again.
I ducked my head and formally grunted. I was hurt, I was sorry. I pointed to the image of the infant hunter, made the negative sign again, again the sign for my pain. Anguish can be mental, too; we seemed to agree on that.
She withdrew the threatening scythe, wiped her mouth, changed the display again. Now it was an image of the infant with an image of me. Expectant stare.
I denied it, pointing off in the distance. She quickly multiplied the image of me, made them more slender. Other men had her baby? I agreed.
She showed another swarm of dots moving between her baby and the men’s images, waited for my answer.
Negative. Her baby wasn’t communicating with us. I don’t know why I told the truth, but I did. Eventually she’d get around to the crucial question. If I lied she might take me hostage. If I told the truth she might mince me. She sat for a long moment, swaying, staring at me and, if the dark runnel meant what I think it did, sobbing. I also think she was as nearly unconscious as I was.
At last she fumbled the display into a single outline of her baby, then-with evident reluctance-made an adjustment. The image collapsed into shapeless fragments.
I started to make the “pain” sign, but it developed into the real thing before I could recover. Then I signed “yes.” Her baby was dead.
She tucked her muzzle into forearms crossed high, soft grinding clicks emanating from-I think-some head cavity, swayed and snuffled. Not a message to me or anyone else. A deeply private agony at her loss.
My next cough brought enough blood that I had to spit, and I put one hand out blindly as I bowed to the pain. I felt a vast enveloping alien hand cover my own, astonishingly hot to the touch, and looked up to find her bending near me. Her tobaccolike exhalation wasn’t unpleasant. What scared me was the sense of numbness as I tried to get my breath. I slumped there as she withdrew her big consoling hand, watched dully as she pointed to the image of the infant’s remains.
She motioned that she wanted the body. I thought if I stood up, I could breathe. I signed “yes” and “no” alternately, then tried an open-handed shrug as I struggled to my feet. It helped, but even as I was making the sign for her to wait, she kept insisting. Yes, yes, give me my baby. The big dewclaw came out. I couldn’t blame her.
But the way I could get her baby back was by calling a mayday, and my microvid with its transmitter was in the sunken Porsche. As I turned, intending to gesture into the pool, I saw that the Porsche hadn’t completely sunk after all, was floating still. Maybe I could find the microvid. I stumbled backward as the huntress lurched up to stop me, signing negation with murderous slashes.
She came as far as the shallows, erect, signing for me to wait as I kicked hard in the best one-armed sidestroke I could manage. I was giddy, short of breath, felt I wasn’t going to make it; felt the grating in my collarbone, told myself I had to, and did.
My next problem was getting into the car and, as my feet sank, they touched something smooth below the car. My mind whirled, rejecting the idea that the bottom was only two feet down. But a faint booming vibration told me the bottom was hollow. Then I knew where the huntress kept her vehicle. My Porsche had settled squarely atop an alien ship, hidden beneath the surface of that stagnant pool.
I got the door open, sloshed inside, managed to find the microvid with my feet and brought it up from the floorboards with my good hand, coughing a little blood and a lot of water. The car’s running lights worked even if the headlights were under water, and I found the mayday button before I aimed the gadget toward the huntress. She had staggered back to shore, dimly lit by the glow of the Porsche’s rear safety lights, and was gesturing furiously.
As near as I could tell, she was waving me off with great backhanded armsweeps. She pointed down into the pool, made an arc with her dewclaw that ended in a vertical stab. I could barely see her but thought I understood; it wouldn’t be healthy for me to stay there when she lifted off. I agreed and signed it, hoping her night vision could cope with my message, showing her my microvid and signing for her to wait.
The last I saw of her, the huntress was slowly advancing into the depths of the pool. She was signing, “No! Clear out.”
I wanted to leave, but couldn’t make my muscles obey. I was cold, freezing cold; bone-shivering, mind-numbing cold, and when I collapsed I lost the microvid over the side.
Not far out from the Porsche, a huge bubble broke the surface, a scent of moldy cavendish that must have come from an alien airlock. They aren’t really all that different from us, I thought, and I wish I could’ve told somebody that and ohjesus I can feel a vibration through the chassis. Here we go . . .
Olfactory messages have got to be more basic than sight or sound. By the smell of starch and disinfectant, I could tell I was in a hospital long before I could make sense of the muttered conversation, or recognize that the buttercup yellow smear was featureless ceiling. In any case, I didn’t feel like getting up right then.
Just outside my private room in the hall, a soft authoritative female voice insisted that she would not be pressured into administering stimulants at this time, exclamation point. Rackham had bled a lot internally from his punctured lung, and the ten-centimeter incision she’d made to reposition that rib was a further shock to his system, and for God’s sake give the man a chance.
Other voices, one female, argued in the name of the national interest. If the good doctor watched newscasts, she knew Harve Rackham was in a unique position vis-à-vis the human race.
The doctor replied that Rackham’s position was flat on his arse, with a figure-eight strap holding his clavicle together and a pleurovac tube through his chest wall. If Miz Martin was so anxious to get stimulants into Rackham, she could do it herself by an old-fashioned method. Evidently the doctor had Dana Martin pegged; that was the first time I ever knew that caffeine can be administered as a coffee enema.
A vaguely familiar male cadence reminded the doctor that Rackham was a robust sort, and surely there was no real risk if his vital signs were good.
The doctor corrected him. Vital signs were only good considering Rackham’s condition when the chopper brought him in. His heartrate and respiration were high, blood pressure still depressed. If he carried twenty less kilos of meat on him-at least she didn’t say “flab”-he’d be recovering better. But the man was her patient, and she’d work with what she had, and if security agencies wanted to use Rackham up they’d have to do it after changing physicians. Then she left. I liked her, and I hadn’t even seen her.
Dana Martin’s trim little bod popped into view before I could close my eyes; she saw I was awake. “Harve, you’ve given us some anxious hours,” she scolded cutely.
I’d heard some of that anxiety, I said, and flooded her with questions like the time of which day, how long would I be down, where was the alien, did they know it was a female.
“Hold on; one thing at a time, fella.” Scott King stepped near, smiling, welcoming me back as if he meant it. Scotty, Dana’s area SAC, was an ex-linebacker with brains. I’d met him years before; not a bad sort, but one who went by the book. And sometimes the book got switched on him. From his cautious manner I gathered he was thumbing through some new pages as he introduced me to Señor Hernan Ybarra, one of the non-permanent members of the U.N. Security Council. Ybarra, a somber little man in a pearl-gray summer suit that must have cost a fortune, showed me a dolorous smile but was barely civil to the two Feebies, managing to convey that there was
nothing personal about it. He just didn’t approve of the things they did for a living.
I put my free hand out, took Ybarra’s. I said, “Security Council? Glad to meet a man with real clout.”
The eyes lidded past a moment’s wry amusement. “A relative term,” he assured me. “Our charter is to investigate, conciliate, recommend adjustments, and-” one corner of his mouth tried to rebel at the last phrase, “-enforce settlements.”
“What’s wrong with enforcement, per se? I’ve been in the business myself.”
With softly accented exactness: “It is an egregious arrogance to speak of our enforcing a Sacramento settlement.”
“The clout is with the hunting people,” Dana chimed in, patting my hand, not letting it go. Her sex-appeal pumps were on overdrive, which meant she was on the defensive.
I let her think I was fooled. “Hunting people? You’ve found more, then?”
“They found us,” King corrected me, “while we were draining that sinkhole in the middle of the night. Smart move, immobilizing that shuttle craft by parking on it. We owe you one.”
I thought about that. “The huntress didn’t lift off, then,” I said, looking at King for confirmation.
A one-beat hesitation. “No. Paramedics realized you were lodged on top of something when they found you. The most important thing, right now, is whether you had any peaceful contact with the female hunter before you zapped each other.”
“Is anybody taping us now?”
Ybarra and King both indicated their lapel units with cables snaking into coat pockets. “Rest assured,” King said laconically.
I told them I’d managed a couple of lucky hits with the medicated slugs. When I mentioned that the visual hallucinations and the shallow whatthehell feeling stopping after I hit a piece of the huntress’s equipment, a sharp glance passed between Ybarra and King.
“So: it would seem not to be an organic talent,” Ybarra mused with relief. “Go on.”
I gave a quick synopsis. The hovercraft that passed downriver-chartered by Chinese, Ybarra told me-, the way I’d managed to get myself walloped when falling from my Porsche, my sloppy sign language with the huntress, my despairing retreat to the half-sunken car to find my microvid.
“So you made no recording until you were safely distant,” Ybarra muttered sadly, sounding like a man trying to avoid placing blame. “But still you were making sign language?”
“Mostly the huntress was doing that. She wanted me the hell out of there. I wanted to, believe me.”
King, in hissing insistence: “But where is the microvid unit?”
“You’ll find it in the pool somewhere,” I said. The shrug hurt.
King shook his head. “No we won’t. Maybe the hunting people will.” At my glance he went on: “Pumping out the pool must have given them a fix. They came straight down like a meteorite and shooed us away before dawn this morning. No point in face-to-face negotiation; anybody that close, acts like he’s on laughing gas. But they’ve been studying us a while, it seems.”
“How’d they tell you that?”
“Clever system they have,” Ybarra put in; “a computer-developed animation display that anyone can receive on VHF television. The hunting people make it clear that they view us as pugnacious little boys. The question before them, as we understand it, is whether we are truly malign children.”
“You can ask the huntress. She’s reasonable.”
“That is what we cannot do,” Ybarra said. “They acknowledge that the female came here mentally unbalanced.”
Scotty King broke in, waving his hand as if disposing of a familiar mosquito: “Spoiled young base commander’s wife; serious family argument. She takes their kid, steals a jeep, rushes off into cannibal country. Kid wanders off; distraught mother searches. Soap opera stuff, Harve. The point is, they admit she was nuts.”
“With her baby dead from cannibal incompetence,” I added, spinning out the analogy. “Who wouldn’t be half crazy? By the way, what base do they command?”
King looked at Ybarra, who answered. “Lunar farside; the Soviets believe their site is just beyond the libration limit in the Cordillera chain. The hunting people are exceedingly tough organisms and could probably use lunar mass to hide a fast final approach before soft-landing there.”
“You don’t have to tell me how tough they are,” I said, “or that we reacted like savages-me included.”
“It is absolutely vital,” Ybarra said quietly, “that we show the hunting people some sign that we attempted a friendly interchange. If we cannot, our behavior is uniformly bad in their view. Some recording of your sign talk is vital,” he said again.
“Find the microvid. Or bring me face to face with the huntress, since she didn’t lift off after all.” I brightened momentarily, trying to be clever. “The vital signs are hers, after all.”
Silence. Stolid glances, as Dana withdrew her hand.
“You may as well tell him,” Ybarra husked.
“I wouldn’t,” Dana warned. She knew me pretty well.
Scotty King: “It took a half-hour to find you after your mayday, Harve; and two hours more to pump the water down to airlock level. The female had turned on some equipment but she never tried to lift off. There were no vital signs when we reached her.”
Dana Martin cut through the bullshit. “She’s dead, Rackham. We don’t know exactly why, but we learned that much before their second ship came barreling in.”
I made fists, somehow pleased at the fresh stabbing twinge through my left shoulder. “So I killed her. No wonder you’re afraid of a global housecleaning.”
King: “Not much doubt they could do it.”
“And they might exercise that option,” Ybarra added, “without a recording to verify your story.”
Dana Martin sought my gaze and my hand. “Now you see our position, and yours,” she said, all the stops out on her Wurlitzer of charm.
I pulled my hand away. “Better than you do,” I growled. “You people have taped this little debriefing. And the flexible display the huntress used seemed to have videotape capability, or it couldn’t have developed an animation of me on the spot. She was taping, too, out there on the rockpile.”
King, staccato: “Where is her recording?”
“Ask the hunting people.” My voice began to rise despite my better judgment. “But don’t ask anything more from me, goddamn you! Take your effing debrief tape and run it for the hunting people. Or don’t. Just get out and leave me alone.”
Scott King cleared his throat and came to attention. “We are prepared, of course, to offer you a very, very attractive retainer on behalf of the State Department-”
“So you can pull more strings, hide more dynamite, slip me another weapon? Get laid, Scotty! I’ve had a gutful of your bloody mismanagement. My briefings were totally inadequate; your motives were short-sighted; the whole operation was half-assed, venal and corrupt.”
Dana abandoned the cutesypie role; now she only looked small and cold and hard. “How about your own motives and venality?”
“Why d’you think I’m shouting,” I shouted.
King became stiffly proper. “Let me get this straight for the record. You won’t lift a hand for the human race because you’re afraid to face the hunting people again.”
“Don’t you understand anything, asshole? I’m not afraid: I’m ashamed! That grief-stricken predator showed more respect for life processes than all of us put together. In the most basic, vital way-the huntress was my friend. You might say yes when your friend says no, but once you’ve agreed to defer a selfish act you’ve committed a friendly one.”
Ybarra had his mouth ready. “Don’t interrupt,” I barked. “The first agreement we made was to hold back, to confer; to wait. I know a cheetah named Spot who wouldn’t waste a second thought on me if he thought I’d had anything to do with killing one of his kits. He’d just put me through Johnny Rubeck’s machine. And I wouldn’t blame him.”
Ybarra’s face reveal
ed nothing, but King’s was flushed. “You’re inhuman,” he said.
“Jesus, I hope so,” I said, and jerked my thumb toward the door.
Well, I’ve had a few hours to think about it, mostly alone. What hurts a lot more than my collarbone is the suspicion that the huntress waited for me to clear out before she would move her ship. Okay, so she’d wasted some lives in her single-minded desperation to recover her child. In their ignorance those killed had been asking for it. Me? I was begging for it! It was no fur off her nose if I died too, and she was lapsing into a coma because I’d shot her full of drugs that may have poisoned her, and other humans had used her own baby’s tissues to fashion weapons against her. And there she sat, for no better reason than an uncommon decency, waiting. And it killed her.
It’s bad enough to get killed by enmity; it’s worse to get it through friendship. In my friend’s place, I know what I’d have done, and I don’t like thinking about that either. When you’re weak, waiting is smart. When you’re strong, it’s compassion. Compassion can kill you.
As soon as I get out of here I’m going into my smithy in the shadow of Mount Diablo and pound plowshares for a few weeks, and talk to Spot, and mull it over.
If I get out of here. Nobody seems very anxious to stick to the hospital routines; they’re all watching the newscasts, essentially doing what I’m doing.
What the hunting people are doing.
Waiting.
MILLENNIAL
POSTSCRIPT
Today, Harve would have a cell phone, a GPS unit, and night vision goggles. The nuclear club has no Soviets as such; they’re Russians again. And the club members include India, Pakistan, and others too depressing to mention.
That new bridge from Orangevale to the Interstate? It was only a good idea when I wrote about it, but it’s in place as of this writing. No predictions: in California, you never know what next week’s temblor will bring.
Harve’s Porsche is still a pipe dream because, as car freaks get dumber, even Porsches get heavier. We may not see real improvements until fuel gets truly pricey or-a worse scenario but more likely-laws penalize grossly overpowered cars.