Worst Contact

by Hank Davis

  “Why, you lousy—

  “Please!” Sliggert said sternly. “Let’s keep our heads. If you can hold out for a few months, we might be able—”

  “I can’t! The air! Water!”

  “Fire!” cried Rinek, his face contorted. “By fire, we will chain the demon!”

  And the Protec snapped on.

  Bentley tried to think things out carefully in the darkness. He would have to get out of the Protec. But how? There was a knife in his tool kit. Could he cut through the tough plastic straps? He would have to!

  But what then? Even if he emerged from his fortress, the ship was a mile away. Without the Protec, they could kill him with a single spear thrust. And they were pledged to, for he had been declared irrevocably evil.

  But if he ran, he at least had a chance. And it was better to die of a spear thrust than to strangle slowly in absolute darkness.

  Bentley turned off the field. The Telians were surrounding him with campfires, closing off his retreat with a wall of flame.

  He hacked frantically at the plastic web. The knife slithered and slipped along the strap. And he was back in Protec.

  When he came out again, the circle of fire was complete. The Telians were cautiously pushing the fires toward him, lessening the circumference of his circle.

  Bentley felt his heart sink. Once the fires were close enough, the Protec would go on and stay on. He would not be able to override a continuous danger signal. He would be trapped within the field for as long as they fed the flames.

  And considering how primitive people felt about devils, it was just possible that they would keep the fire going for a century or two.

  He dropped the knife, used side-cutters on the plastic strap and succeeded in ripping it halfway through.

  He was in Protec again.

  Bentley was dizzy, half-fainting from fatigue, gasping great mouthfuls of foul air. With an effort, he pulled himself together. He couldn’t drop now. That would be the end.

  He found the controls, overrode them. The fires were very near him now. He could feel their warmth against his face. He snipped viciously at the strap and felt it give.

  He slipped out of the Protec just as the field activated again. The force of it threw him into the fire. But he fell feet first and jumped out of the flames without getting burned.

  The villagers roared. Bentley sprinted away; as he ran, he dumped the linguascene, the tool kit, the radio, the concentrated food and the canteen. He glanced back once and saw that the Telians were after him.

  But he was holding his own. His tortured heart seemed to be pounding his chest apart and his lungs threatened to collapse at any moment. But now the spaceship was before him, looming great and friendly on the flat plain.

  He was going to just make it. Another twenty yards . . .

  Something green flashed in front of him. It was a small, green-furred mog puppy. The clumsy beast was trying to get out of his way.

  He swerved to avoid crushing it and realized too late that he should never have broken stride. A rock turned under his foot and he sprawled forward.

  He heard the pounding feet of the Telians corning toward him and managed to climb on one knee.

  Then somebody threw a club and it landed neatly on his forehead.

  “Ar gwy dril?” a voice asked incomprehensibly from far off.

  Bentley opened his eyes and saw Huascl bending over him. He was in a hut, back in the village. Several armed ghost doctors were at the doorway, watching.

  “Ar dril?” Huascl asked again.

  Bentley rolled over and saw, piled neatly beside him, his canteen, concentrated food, tools, radio and linguascene. He took a deep drink of water, then turned on the linguascene.

  “I asked if you felt all right,” Huascl said.

  “Sure, fine,” Bentley grunted, feeling his head. “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Over with?”

  “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? Well, let’s not make a production out of it.”

  “But we didn’t want to destroy you,” Huascl said. “We knew you for a good man. It was the devil we wanted!”

  “Eh?” asked Bentley in a blank uncomprehending voice.

  “Come, look.”

  The ghost doctors helped Bentley to his feet and brought him outside. There, surrounded by lapping flames, was the glowing great black sphere of the Protec.

  “You didn’t know, of course,” Huascl said, “but there was a devil riding upon your back.”

  “Huh!” gasped Bentley.

  “Yes, it is true. We tried to dispossess him by purification, but he was too strong. We had to force you, brother, to face that evil and throw it aside. We knew you would come through. And you did!”

  “I see,” Bentley said. “A devil on my back. Yes, I guess so.”

  That was exactly what the Protec would have to be, to them. A heavy, misshapen weight on his shoulders, hurling out a black sphere whenever they tried to purify it. What else could a religious people do but try to free him from its grasp?”

  He saw several women of the village bring up baskets of food and throw them into the fire in front of the sphere. He looked inquiringly at Huascl.

  “We are propitiating it,” Huascl said, “for it is a very strong devil, undoubtedly a miracle-working one. Our village is proud to have such a devil in bondage.”

  A ghost doctor from a neighboring village stepped up. “Are there more such devils in your homeland? Could you bring us one to worship?”

  Several other ghost doctors pressed eagerly forward. Bentley nodded. “It can be arranged,” he said.

  He knew that the Earth-Tels trade was now begun. And at last a suitable use had been found for Professor Sliggert’s Protec.

  HER SISTER’S KEEPER

  by Sarah A. Hoyt

  The aliens claimed they had come in peace, even if their gigantic starship had flattened blocks of a crowded city. Just an accident. Even advanced aliens can make a mistake. Their next mistake was causing a very determined xenolinguist’s sister to disappear.

  ***

  Sarah A. Hoyt won the Prometheus Award for her novel Darkship Thieves, published by Baen, and since has authored Darkship Renegades, A Few Good Men,and the forthcoming Through Fire, more novels set in the same universe. She has written numerous short stories and novels in a number of genres, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical novels and historical mysteries, some under a number of pseudonyms, and has been published—among other places— in Analog, Asimov’s and Amazing. For Baen, she has also written three books in her popular shape-shifter urban fantasy series, Draw One in the Dark, Gentleman Takes a Chance, and Noah’s Boy. Her According to Hoyt is one of the most interesting blogs on the internet. Originally from Portugal, she lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons and the surfeit of cats necessary to a die-hard Heinlein fan.

  “Lillian, what do you think you’re doing?” Xavier asked.

  What I was doing was looking for a pair of night vision goggles someone had requisitioned to look at alien writing—piles and piles of thin, metallike material inscribed in increasingly-more-decipherable squiggles—which had been turned over to the newly founded Bureau of Alien Contact, after a ten-block wide alien spaceship had flattened the Denver capitol and everything around it for . . . well, ten blocks.

  No one had any idea why they’d wanted the night vision goggles, but they’d also wanted to look at it in various color lights. It had revealed nothing more than what could be seen in daylight. But the goggles were still around, and I wanted them.

  Xavier was my boss and here, where he won’t read, I can admit he had also been my crush since college.

  He’d been one of very few people on Earth—twenty-three to be precise and one had died of old age three days before the landing—who had devoted their lives to studying the possibility of xenolinguistics. A subject without an object, it would seem, for all this time, save for the exchange of papers, speculation and discussion on what an alien language wou
ld look like and what we’d do to recognize it when we found it.

  That last turned out not to be necessary, after all, but never mind. He’d devoted his entire life—well, to the age of forty-five—and obsessed every day on the possibility that there was another intelligent race out there in the universe and that it would try to communicate with us someday. He’d hoped it would happen when he was alive, but he’d left a lot of documents explaining precisely what he’d thought and done and calculated, so that even if he should be long dead people still alive could follow his reasoning and perhaps be there in his name to greet what he referred to apparently without irony as our brothers from the stars.

  His brilliant melding of mathematical and psychological principles, his study of the most obscure languages and extrapolations to other, more obscure, methods of signaling between intelligent species, even his daring studies of other terrestrial species and their means of communication: all of it had attracted me to the study of xenolinguistics and brought me here, to be his assistant.

  Here, where he was glaring at me from the door, his dark eyes intent and worried under dark eyebrows.

  I sighed. At least he hadn’t seen me secrete into my pocket the gun I knew I shouldn’t have had in my desk at work. Honestly, I didn’t even know why I had it, except that there was this sense of looming danger.

  “It’s Cressy,” I’d said.

  “Cressy?” He lowered his eyebrows and shook his head. “Who is Cressy?”

  “My sister,” I said. “My baby sister, only that seems funny to say now she’s thirty. You see, she was born when I was eight.”

  “What on Earth,” he said, giving me the once over, “can your sister, thirty or not, have to do with your being here, in the middle of the night, dressed in black and grabbing night goggles?”

  “It’s the aliens,” I said.

  This time his eyebrows rose and I realized that for a linguist I was making a fine mull of telling him anything that mattered. This of course made perfect sense, since I’ve always thought xenolinguistics should cover the communications between human sexes, too. I sighed at his expression and said, “Cressy was very excited about the aliens landing, see?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t see. Everyone, us included, has been very excited for the last three weeks. I mean, the news can’t talk about anything else. And it’s right, of course. All these millennia we’ve been living alone in the universe. How are we to know what we’ve learned and what we’ve done is for the best, or even if it makes any sense without anyone else to compare it to? We were like—”

  “Orphans locked in a darkened room,” I said, tartly. “Yes, I’ve read the poet laureate, too.” It was churlish of me to say it. Because Xavier was not one of the talking heads prattling on endlessly about nothing much. He was genuinely interested, for genuine reasons. “But you don’t know Cressy.”

  He came into the room and sat on my desk, facing me. “All right. Tell me about Cressy then, and why you think you need to break into a spaceship because of your sister.”

  “When Mom disappeared—”

  “Disappeared?”

  “Oh, probably died. She was a landscape photographer, and did many of her trips on small, privately leased planes. She was taking pictures of a storm off the East coast of the US—”

  He made a sound deep in his throat and I said, “Yes, there. Anyway, she disappeared. It’s presumed she crashed and the plane went down somewhere where it was never found, but no one knows. And I was ten, and Cressy was two and someone had to look after her.”

  “You don’t have a father?”

  “My father . . . Hey, you took math in undergrad, and Farewell is not that common a name. You’ve probably heard of him? Doctor Ignatius Farewell?”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes, and don’t get me wrong, wonderful man. But he doesn’t have a connection to reality at the best of times, and even as a child I kind of got that. We had sitters and nannies, but . . . Cressy is pretty, you see?” He raised an eyebrow, as though doubting it. “No, really. We don’t look anything alike. I look just like Dad, but she looks like Mom. Now she’s this beautiful, Scandinavian looking blond goddess, but when she was little, she was small and chubby, with a round face and enormous blue eyes that melted the heart of all our caretakers. Which means they all treated her as if she were an angel. And of course, she isn’t.” I tried to explain, “You see, I tried to get her to study and to work, but she . . . she could get away just sliding through life with a smile and a thank you, so she never worked a day in her life. Which means. . . . Well, she dropped out of high school and started a feng shui business. Then she set up as an astrologer, but she couldn’t hack the math. The last thing she was working at, and I use working loosely, because without dad and I making her an allowance she would starve, is astral massage, whatever the heck that means.”

  He was looking amused. “I see, and what does this have to do with aliens?”

  “Well. The last time I saw her, she was waving her hands and talking ten to the dozen about the brotherhood of sentient beings and how these star creatures had come to Earth to show us the error of our ways, and how now we’d have peace and justice and all that . . .” I trailed off before saying “all that rot,” because I realized at the last minute, Xavier who’d been indefatigably working so we could talk with these beings and the greater brotherhood and all that, probably believed in it too.

  But he sighed and said, “I’ve never understood people—and they’ve always been around, long before this—who think the possession of a star drive means that aliens are a sort of angel, with all the fine qualities we don’t have. It’s just as likely that they consider everything we find despicable a virtue, and that mass cannibalism is the top of their attainment.”

  I looked at him, stunned, because I’d always assumed he was the prototype of scientist idealist, somewhere between my father and my sister. He sighed again, this time more deeply. “That’s why I came in after hours, Lil. Because I think there is something wrong in those documents they gave us. It’s like they carefully censored the entire history of their star travel device. They have FTL, clearly, but they’re not willing to share. Now, to an extent I understand it, of course—”

  “Perhaps we have to develop our own drive before—”

  “Being admitted to the federation of star-traveling beings. Too much science fiction, my girl. No, I can see them not wanting naked apes in the stars,” he said, and smiled a little, because the aliens looked like those spider-monkey dolls, very fuzzy, about a meter and a half tall. “But all the same, some of what they censored is the history of the drive, which wouldn’t tell us how to use it. Also . . .” He shrugged. “I know they’re talking peace and brotherhood, and our lovely president and politicians are swallowing it but two things stand out. First, they knew precisely what they were doing when they landed in the middle of a crowded city. Yes, I know they said it was an emergency, but how hard would it be for a starship to aim slightly away and land in an area in Colorado where they’d not hurt any humans? The second part is that in our own history, when a civilization with the means to travel establishes trade relations with a civilization without such means, the civilization that can’t travel always ends up with the short end of the stick. It can be colonization or . . . or glass beads for their most valuable resources.” He frowned. “Oh, there is a third lesson. I get the feeling these documents have been purged for the eyes of Earthlings, which means this is not an unexpected landing, with no previous contact. I think . . . well. There is a good chance these things have been the UFOs people have been talking about for centuries.”

  “Mass delusion,” I said.

  “Maybe, but what if not? What if all those kidnapped people really were kidnapped? It doesn’t give you the best view of them, does it?”

  I shook my head and he said, “What I still don’t understand, is why you think, excited or not, your sister would be inside the alien ship. I mean, the world must have fifty million
chowderheads like Cressy, but how would she have made it past their sentinels, or even our sentinels, to be inside the ship.”

  “But that’s just it,” I said. “You don’t understand. Remember when I told you I was my sister’s keeper, since she was very little? Well, I developed a sense for where she was likely to be. And my sense tells me she’s in the ship. No, don’t ask me how. I don’t even know how to get in.”

  “Well, as to that,” he said. He pursed his lips in a silent whistle. “Well, as I said, I’ve been suspecting something is wrong there, and I’m not alone, whatever the president—” he spat out the word “—thinks, or emotes, or feels, so I have been collecting data. We all have. So I have some idea how to get in, but that ship is a small city. How do you plan to find your sister, even supposing she’s in there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Except for using my sense of where she’s supposed to be.”

  “You do realize this is coming dangerously close to telepathy or a woman’s way of knowing, or other claptrap like that?”

  “Yeah, I do, but . . .”

  “But what if not?” he said. “Right. Okay. Tell you what, let’s go and take a gander.”

  “We?” I said, aghast, as he stood up, off the desk and gave me a grin that can only be described as piratical. “Lil, my dear friend, you’re not going to keep me out of this one.”

  I tried to talk him out of it, but he was as stubborn as I was, and twice as misguided. His view was that if I felt responsible for Cressy, he felt responsible for me, and therefore he would do his best to keep me safe.

  Okay, so he surprised me even more by actually having guns in his desk—not one but two—even though I was absolutely sure it was against policy. They looked like antique pistols, with tooled grips, and were probably inherited from the Spanish ancestor after whom he was named. He also knew where to find another pair of night vision goggles. I started wondering if perhaps he was different than I’d imagined him, not so naïve as I’d been told.