IGMS Issue 38

by IGMS

  "If it's not the sickle-tooths, it'll be some rancher salvaging the film for the silver value. We'll walk them out ourselves."

  Renner shrugged, and started organizing what we had taken out of the jeep, giving me time to consider exactly how we were going to walk those film cannisters out. We could blow away titans and coffin-mouths until we didn't have anything left to shoot. It was the sickle-tooths that were bringing the others back, so it was the sickle-tooths that we needed to take out. The problem was, they didn't have any reason to come out from behind cover. There were enough skeletons in the stones at the High Malafan that we'd run out of food and ammunition years before they ran out of things to throw at us.

  "How far are we from our first camp, d'you think?" asked Renner.

  "No idea," I replied. "Why?"

  "Because I think the flood has washed away the fossil dust we used to pin down Corder's ghost."

  I looked downstream. There was a black cloud coming up the canyon, rolling up as fast as the flood had come down. As one, the beaked striders ran and leapt towards us. The water was shallower, and not flowing with as much force. They screamed when they hit the water, and they didn't stop screaming, but they didn't lose their footing either; they waded out, fighting to keep their balance. The cloud hit them, and they were dust.

  The cloud hit us as well, a wave of heat and the smell of cigarette smoke, and it passed. The terrain where it had passed was as soaked as it had been, but it looked somehow cleaner. The ghost of a necromancer is a fearful thing.

  The sickle-tooths seemed to know that as well. As the cloud blew further upstream, a wall of white light sprang up near another knob of rock, drew a circle, and the black cloud could not push through it.

  "Hell with it," I said. The sickle-tooths were hiding behind that shield, and if the beaked striders could cross the stream, I could. I slid down into the canyon, and went ahead.

  As soon as I put my boot down in the stream, the water clawed at me, trying to pull me down and break my head against the rocks. But it didn't seem like we'd be getting a better chance at the sickle-tooths. I went down twice, and came up twice, covered in mud and soaked to the skin. But I made it to the other side, and up the equally muddy slope there.

  There were the shallow tracks of striders in the mud, as well as the massive prints of coffin mouths, but there wasn't anything moving that was out of its time. I brought my shotgun up as I ran, and hoped that I had kept it dry enough that it'd work; the black cloud of Corder's soul was growing ragged, pierced by beams of light from behind that wall.

  There were five sickle-tooths behind that shield, drawing patterns in the mud with their teeth and forepaws. I saw them before they saw me. I lined up my shot, fired. The fossil load went through the shield, brought down one of them. The rest turned at me, charged, looking just like the one that Corder had raised when it went after that rabbit. I held my ground, fired again. I missed, fired and missed again. They were moving fast, and I was worn down.

  Fortunately, Corder's spirit hadn't been finished. One of the sickle-tooths went down, convulsing, when the black cloud touched it, and then another went the same way. The remaining two didn't stop charging. I waited, breathed, and then took my shot. I turned one of them to dust, but there wasn't going to be time for me to load and fire again. A shot rang out from behind me, and finished off the last of the sickle-tooths as it made its leap for my throat.

  As it fell to dust, the ground beneath my feet shifted, like there had been an earthquake or a bomb detonation deep in the High Malafan, and the wind changed.

  I hadn't noticed the smell before -- perhaps I had grown used to it. But there had been a hint of dead leaves and swamp gas in the air, and then it was gone, replaced with the aroma of clean wet desert.

  "Was that all of them?" asked Renner, coming up next to me, even muddier than I was.

  I shrugged. "Hope so," I said. "If we had the radio we could check, but as things stand, it might be worth getting a move on."

  Even without the sickle-tooths, the High Malafan isn't a friendly place. We stumbled in to Talapathas two days later, half dead of heat and thirst.

  It took a couple of days before the rest of the world took notice, but we had come out with the film cannisters intact, so take notice they did; for a couple of months, we were the nearest thing paleontology had to celebrities. That died down pretty fast, but the professional interest in our story didn't.

  A few months after I finally made it back to Halbston, an expedition from the Gray Orb school went up into the High Malafan and tried to fill in some of the blanks. They didn't have much luck; the magic that the sickle-tooths used was too different from anything they knew. Still, there was enough of Corder's spirit still lingering to make it clear that neither Renner nor I had killed him, and to give them some outlines of what the sickle-tooths had done.

  Both Renner and I are still working with fossils, and while Renner has moved into laboratory work, I still go out to the field. However, while I'm always open to new technique and practices, I haven't supervised any field revivifications since that outing, and I don't have any plans to start.

  Rights and Wrongs

  by Brian K. Lowe

  Artwork by Nicole Cardiff

  * * *

  "Tell me again who I pissed off to get this job?" Carefully unwrapping my roast beef on wheat, I used the paper as a holder to keep mustard off of my lap.

  "I thought you wanted the job," Rusty said. "I thought you were taking it as some kind of personal challenge." Russ Becker and I ate lunch together almost every day. "Rusty" was another assistant district attorney, and we'd bonded over a mutual disdain for other lawyers. Things being what they were, though, sometimes we got drafted to work the other side, and I'd drawn the short straw here, with Rusty as my prosecutor.

  "Hell, no, I didn't want it! The Jan'i killed my parents, Rusty. I had to break into their house and find them on the floor, blood coming out of their ears. I couldn't even bury them; they had to burn down the house with them still inside." I stopped to pull myself together. "This is somebody's idea of payback, probably Bertoli. She's still mad at me because she thinks I screwed up the Andelson case."

  "All right," he said. "What's done is done. But she's doing you a favor here. Nobody expects you to win this one; heck, nobody wants you to win this one. The only reason the alien's even getting a trial is because the administration wants to make this look like a regular murder instead of another terror attack. It's not like we're pushing for human rights for non-humans here. You sit next to him, I present my case, the judge finds him guilty. They'll be strapping him down for an injection before we can find an open bar."

  "Wait a second," I said, putting up a hand. "Are you saying I should throw over the defense? Just phone it in?"

  "No! No. I'm saying it's not going to hurt you when you lose. You take one for the team, Bertoli leaves you alone."

  "Good. Because I'm going to give that alien son of a bitch the best defense I know how. You're going to have to work to convict. And when you do, and they strap him down and put those needles in him --

  -- then we can have that beer."

  "Please put your briefcase on the table." I followed Deputy Berman's instructions, stood back, and stuck my arms out to the side. Another marshal stood by stoically, one hand on his sidearm. "Who did you piss off to get this job, anyway, counselor?"

  "I wish I knew. I was just asking somebody that same question."

  "Human rights for non-humans." Berman indicated that I should open my case so he could glance inside. "It's just nuts."

  I found my client curled up on his bunk. While he was masquerading as one of us, under the name "Edward Kane," he was five-ten, brown hair, a prominent chin. Now he was a seven-foot, shimmering silver Gumby with large eyes and four-jointed fingers.

  The guard turned to go.

  "Excuse me," I said. "Aren't you going to unlock his cell?"

  He shook his head. "Nope. Nobody goes in there unsupervised."
>
  "I'm not going to interview my client from the hallway."

  "If you go in, I have to stay right here and watch you. We want to be sure the same guy who goes in is the one who comes out, not just a Jan'i look-alike." He pointed to the upper reaches of the cell. "See that? Video, 24-7."

  I silently counted to ten. "Open the door. Then get lost."

  "You realize that if he tries something, and we come down here and there are two of you, we have orders to shoot."

  I hadn't. No one had seen fit to tell me that little factoid, but I wasn't going to back down now. In the end, I got to go inside, but only after another guard was called to witness my decision. Then they left.

  By then, my client had sat up to watch.

  "My name's William Goudreau. I'm your court-appointed attorney." I didn't shake hands. "What should I call you?"

  "You can call me Ed. It's what everybody's called me for the last ten years."

  "I don't think that's a good idea. It sounds like you're still trying to pass for human."

  He blinked. "You couldn't pronounce my name anyway, so let's just leave it."

  "All right, Ed. I want to review the specific charges against you again before your bail appearance tomorrow. I was just talking to the ADA on the case. He's going to seek the death penalty."

  "I didn't kill Dr. Farmer."

  "I'm not asking. But I read the reports. The police found you lying near the body. You had blood on your clothes. It had been raining all the night before, and the grass from the garden gate to the lab was wet, but there were no footprints but yours. You and Farmer had a fight. He hit you, but you killed him before you lost consciousness. Sounds like an open-and-shut case."

  He sighed the way you do when you've told the same story many times already.

  "Does that make any sense? Could a man be hit hard enough to lose consciousness, but still have the strength to kill his opponent?"

  "You're not a man. We don't know what your soldiers might be capable of."

  "I'm not a soldier. I was a transport operator. I didn't even get off the ship until right before your people counterattacked and it was sealed off. I couldn't go back, so I tried to blend in. I took a dead man's wallet and got myself a job. Everything was a mess; no one cared who I was. Eventually, I met Dr. Farmer. We became friends. I went to his home to see him and found him on the floor. I tried to revive him, and someone hit me. When I woke up I was surrounded by policemen with big guns all pointed at me. That was when I realized I no longer looked human."

  "So when you hit your head you lost your ability to control your shape?"

  "I keep telling you people, I'm not a shapeshifter. We are not shapeshifters."

  "Then how did you make yourself look human?"

  "I can't tell you that."

  "Fine. I'm trying to help you, but if you don't want my help . . . Right now, the whole world is having a paranoid panic attack because of you. Everybody thought the Jan'i threat was over fifteen years ago, that they were all confined to the camps -- and then you show up. Now nobody trusts anybody, and it's all your fault. Because if there's one shapeshifter out there masquerading as a human being, there could be hundreds -- or thousands -- waiting to bash our heads in, push people in front of subways, or who knows what."

  "Or drive ice cream trucks through your neighborhoods?"

  I closed my eyes and clenched my fists. "Don't say that. Don't ever say that again, or I will personally squeeze your head right through the bars."

  When I opened my eyes he was standing up, watching me closely.

  "Why are you mad at me? I didn't drive one of those trucks."

  "It doesn't matter. Your people did. They poisoned children, they started wildfires, they set loose the beta virus. They killed my parents."

  Ed blinked again. "Your parents died in the attack, and you're my lawyer?"

  "Everybody lost somebody."

  He was silent for a moment. "I'm sorry about your parents. But what does all that have to do with me and Dr. Farmer?"

  "Because nobody cares about you -- you're Jan'i, and they want you dead. Do you have any idea how afraid people are? I am amazed the Pasadena PD didn't shoot you on sight.

  "To make it worse, Dr. Farmer was working on finding a cure for the beta virus. His daughter has it, but of course you know that. As long as the virus is still infecting people, it's like the invasion is still going on. Finding a Jan'i next to the dead body of the man who has the best chance of curing the virus the Jan'i set loose just feeds the fears of everyone out there who thinks they could come again -- which is everybody.

  "Believe me, if you're found guilty you'll be dead before I can start the appeals. But maybe we can bargain -- give the government what it wants, the secret to your shape-shifting, and maybe I can get them to take the death penalty off the table."

  He wouldn't look me in the eye, preferring to stare through the bars behind me. He spoke softly, and with utter conviction.

  "You don't care. You're my lawyer, and you want me dead. I don't want to die, and I don't want to live in a camp."

  "Okay, look. Let me explain how privilege works. Anything you tell me about the invasion or about the murder, that's private. That stays between us. But that doesn't extend to illegal acts you may contemplate in the future. If you're planning to escape so you can make a new run at world domination, I have to tell the judge."

  Ed glanced up at the camera and made an undecipherable Jan'i expression. Then he shook his head.

  "World domination? Please. You never did understand what brought us here. You've spent centuries trying to conquer each other and it hasn't worked; do you honestly think we could conquer your entire planet with 30,000 troops? We were a raiding party, not an invasion. We were supposed to frighten you, drop down on a few cities, and demand tribute: heavy metals, maybe some technology. By the time you got an effective resistance going, we'd have taken off with all your stuff and 50,000 slaves to sell. We wouldn't know what to do with your planet if you gave it to us.

  "If I could get out of here, I'd go as far away as possible and drink until I forgot who I was."

  "Could you do that?" I asked. "Could you maintain a human shape for the rest of your life?"

  He shrugged as well as a Jan'i could, then he lay down on his bunk and turned toward the wall.

  "I'm going out to Dr. Farmer's house to talk to his daughter. Is there anything you want me to tell her?"

  Ed rolled over. "Please tell her I did not kill her father. And tell her I would like her to visit me."

  I thought about the media frenzy if Regina Farmer came to the jail. Oh, yeah. That was going to happen.

  I was escorted to Dr. Farmer's house by two U.S. marshals, almost identical in their dark suits, dark glasses, and blank faces. They made me memorize a code word and a counter-sign, so they could tell the real me from a Jan'i who had made himself look like me, and I could do the same for them. Very cloak and dagger.

  Dr. Farmer had lived on a narrow tree-lined street in an older section of Pasadena. The house was only two bedrooms, but featured a spacious living room with Japanese screens, and woven floor mats instead of rugs. I was told the house was built into a small hill that sloped down in the back, allowing for a basement to be hollowed right out of the earth. That was where Dr. Farmer had done his research, and where they'd found Ed lying next to his body. The house was cool and dark, perfect for a woman with the beta virus.

  Regina Farmer could not have been more than twenty-five, dark, pretty in a well-padded way. We were just finding that in some people the virus could lie dormant for years, then flare up without warning. Regina was one of those. Her thick glasses, evidence of the virus's optical degeneration, were incongruous on her cheerful face.

  "Thank you for seeing me," I said after she'd offered me coffee. "You didn't have to."

  "No, I wanted to."

  She poured the coffee, using one hand to steady the cup. I wanted to help, but I let her do it. Pretty soon she wouldn't be doing much
of anything for herself. She smiled as she handed it to me.

  "The coffee cups are warm, and my hands are always cold. I know you're busy, Mr. Goudreau, so I won't waste time. As I told the police, I was in my room, trying to sleep. It's all I can do sometimes. I can't read any more, and even books on tape put me to sleep." She sighed. "Of course, pretty much everything puts me to sleep. This virus has sapped all my energy."

  "So you didn't see anyone? You didn't see Ed come over, for instance?"

  Regina shook her head. "You don't have to get to the lab through the house; you can reach it from the outside, by going around the side of the house from the front gate, so anybody could have come in without me knowing -- or without my dad knowing, for that matter. I didn't know Ed was here until the police knocked on my door."

  "It was your gardener who called the police, right?"

  "I think so. He didn't say who he was, but it sounded like Jorge's voice on the tape the police played for me. It would have been his day to come by. Jorge Sandoval," she added, as I took notes.

  "Why wouldn't he stick around?" I asked, although I could guess.

  Regina put on a guilty face. "He's probably illegal. We never checked. Dad didn't care." Suddenly she began to laugh, bit her lip, and wiped her eyes with a napkin. "I guess that's pretty ironic, huh? He didn't care about illegal aliens."

  "Did you know Ed was a Jan'i?"

  Regina's shoulders slumped. "No, I didn't. But I don't believe he killed my father. Why would he?"

  "Did your father have any enemies that you know of? Maybe there was a fight over grant money, something like that?"

  "The only fight over money my dad had lately," she said, picking up her coffee, "was with Jorge."

  "Jorge? The gardener?"

  "Dad wasn't happy with the work he was doing, and Jorge wanted more money for clearing the brush on the fence. I didn't think it was that big a deal, but when I went into the kitchen for a glass of water, I heard them arguing outside. But it was cold, so I closed the window, and even then I had to go put on my gloves."