The larger Ghobot separated from the smaller one and faced them, in a manner. I wish to thank you, Quiti and Idola, for taking care of my son.
“Pause,” Gena said. “We appreciate that Ghobots do not speak verbally, but since we humans do, and we have a telepathic environment here, let’s automatically translate Orchid’s thoughts to be received as verbal. We know that others won’t hear her speak, if they’re aware of her at all, but we are the ones who matter in this circumstance.”
“Thank you,” Orchid said.
Just like that!
“Flower helped a lot,” Idola said. “We loved those E-Bombs.”
“E-Bombs?”
“Emotion Bombs,” Quiti said, sending her a descriptive thought. “They stopped the Worms from catching us.”
“Ah.”
“Idola, why don’t you take Flower out and show him the neighborhood?” Gena suggested. “There is a significant chance that he will remain on Earth, so it may help him to better understand it.”
“Oh, poo! You’re banishing the children from the hot sex talk.”
“Of course, dear. Nominally protecting your fraying innocence. You won’t be servicing any pedophiles.”
Idola grumbled, but obeyed. “Come on, Flower. We can maybe toss some Disgust Bombs at passing matriarchs.”
“Idola—”
The girl laughed. “Maybe not today. We want to lie low.” She had been teasing her mother back.
The two of them departed.
“What is on your mind?” Quiti asked.
“If we are to invite the Ghobot clan to come to Earth,” Gena said, “we need to be sure there is suitable work for them that won’t stir controversy. Orchid is unfamiliar with the nuances of our global culture, so I thought I’d bounce them off you.”
“But I’m not objective. I want to help them.”
“To be sure. But you will be aware of the pitfalls.”
“Go on.”
“I am thinking of the things that Ghobots can do that we can’t. Such as yes, Emotional Enhancement. Also spot Teleportation. And slight Precognition. There could be a potent market for such things here.”
“A dangerous one,” Quiti said.
“Exactly. I don’t think we can afford to advertise them.”
“Then how can we use them? Word will get out the first time they are used in public.”
“Yes. The key may be to conceal their use.”
“You have any idea how to do that? There’s no concealing the effect of a Sex Bomb once it detonates.”
“Ah, but there may be. An impotent man with an appealing woman in a conducive environment may attribute his surprising success to that environment.”
“And think she’s faking it,” Quiti agreed. “Or that she’s carried away by his sheer masculinity. Men like to think that.”
“Yes. Men can be manageable. As for the others, Precognition can be taken as a lucky guess. But Teleportation is a challenge, unless done unobserved.”
“So there may be ways to conceal the use of Ghobot powers,” Quiti said. “Where is this leading?”
“It seems possible that on other planets, the full potentials of the Ghobots were not at first appreciated. But when they became apparent, and public hunger for them went on a rampage, the danger made the visitors unwelcome.”
Quiti looked at Orchid. “Is that what happened?”
“To a degree,” the woman said. “We tried our best to conceal them, but the necessity to earn our living required us to use our abilities more than was in retrospect wise.”
“Like hunger forcing theft of a loaf of bread,” Quiti agreed.
“I do not understand.”
That was right: Ghobots did not eat. “Bread provides sustenance,” Gena explained. “It is food. Without food, we suffer and die.”
“Oh, yes. We have seen that elsewhere. I was thinking of the hunger for status, love, or sex.”
“Which doesn’t come in loaves,” Quiti said. “But if you don’t need to eat, and I think you don’t need housing or clothing, what is it you have to trade for?”
“Status. We want to be recognized as an independent species worthy of respect.”
“But it seems humans aren’t the only species that likes to push down a minority,” Gena said.
Quiti thought of the Gypsies and the Jews and other minorities. “So how can it be different here?”
“That’s what I’m working on,” Gena said. “Suppose we addressed prisoner reform?”
Quiti was startled. “What could that have to do with this? We don’t want the Ghobots to be prisoners.”
“Prisoners don’t have much freedom. They have to take what they can get. Suppose they could get an hour with a homely courtesan and a covert Sex Bomb if they behaved?”
“They’d behave for a day or so,” Quiti agreed. “She wouldn't seem homely when the Bomb went off.”
“It could be a daily routine. A special conducive chamber.”
“You would soon have a model prisoner.”
“They have done that elsewhere,” Orchid said. “Soon the guards would cheat the prisoners out of their hours, so the guards could experience the chamber. There were riots.”
Quiti nodded. “For which the Ghobots got blamed, of course.”
“So the viability of prison reform is limited,” Gena said. “Because of the inherent corruptibility of sapient species.”
“But you have something in mind.”
“This may be a stretch, but I’m considering mass killers.”
Quiti shook her head. “I think you’re losing me.”
“I am thinking of using the Ghobot precognition to anticipate such crimes, perhaps by reading the future headlines, and then to go to prevent them happening.”
“Isn’t that paradox? Once it happens, it happens.”
“I think there is no paradox if it’s a future crime. This is merely a better way to anticipate it and stop it.”
“Like that movie, Minority Report? I think they had problems anyway.”
“Carefully and anonymously done, problems might be bypassed.”
“I’m not sure,” Quiti said. “We’re messing with reality. One mistake and it might be impossible to recover.”
“That’s why I think we should rehearse it first. Before saying anything about it to anyone else.”
“That’s why you banished the children! Because they’d be bound to blab.”
“Better to let then think we are talking about sex,” Gena agreed.
“So how do we rehearse it?”
“First I believe we should form a team of three: you, me, and Orchid. We need to get to know and trust each other so we can be fully coordinated. Then we can integrate our relevant talents: clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition. We can identify some local crime—it doesn’t have to be a mass killing, just something that needs to be prevented—and arrange to prevent it. If we fail, it’s minor anyway. If we succeed, we can go on to something larger. In an easy stage.”
Quiti remained wary, but it did seem to make sense. Preventing mass killings was certainly worthy, and if the Ghobots made it possible, their welcome on Earth seemed guaranteed.
The two human women spread their telepathy, taking Orchid in. More rapidly than could ever be feasible with spoken or written dialogue, they got to know each other well. It was considerably more intimate than sex, because the truest privacy was being yielded: that of the mind. Gena was right: Orchid was a very fine woman, one Quiti would like to have for a lifelong friend. She had solid experience in romance, having met and married her husband and borne (not birthed) their child. She had a number of skills, such as playing the magnetic harp, a musical instrument that did not exist on Earth, and doing the equivalent of card tricks. In fact she could spot a card cheat almost before he started. She could dance, Ghobot style, which might not mean much to a human audience but was phenomenally sexy to a Ghobot.
And she could precog. This was most accurate close up, such as telling whether a
n about to be flipped coin would land heads or tails. Quiti flipped a coin numerous times, in and out of Orchid’s sight, and the woman never missed. In fact she even knew when Quiti was about to try a ruse, such as balking at the last moment. But each minute ahead made it more chancy, as it were. At five minutes the odds were still two to one, but beyond that there was little point.
But coin flips were minor. The woman could tell them when their Embassy phone was about to ring, and listed four calls in the next fifteen minutes, all of which came to pass. She could call out what the Food of the Day would be at the Embassy. And she spotted the appearance of a crazed man one day hence who would seek to sneak into the embassy so he could try to rape Quiti.
“Now there’s a good test case,” Gena said, smiling. “That kook doesn’t have a chance, of course: Quiti would spot him telepathically long before he got close. The embassy security guard would arrest him before he ever got in. If he actually caught her, she would overpower him bare handed because of her Hair Power strength. Or she could even let him penetrate her, and clamp off his member and pull it right out of his body by its root. Raping a Hair or Chip is an idiotic dream. But let’s see if we can defuse this with no incident at all. How should we do it?”
“Give the guard the afternoon off,” Quiti said. “And give me a Fear Bomb.”
“Why not. That would test the case readily enough.” Gena smiled. “But now let’s see if there’s anything more serious we can tackle.”
They showed Orchid a typical newspaper page on the screen. “This shows what has happened recently,” Quiti explained. “Mostly incidental and routine. Can you see tomorrow’s edition, or even the modified evening edition?” She made the basic nature of the paper clear mentally, as it was foreign to the Ghobot’s experience.
Orchid focused, and in a moment saw the afternoon edition. They read it in her mind. There were three new headlines, and some deleted stories. Quiti made careful note of the contents. Then Orchid moved on to the midnight edition. One item was fuzzy, evidently subject to change, but the others were firm. Quiti noted these too. Finally they tried for the tomorrow morning edition—and scored.
There was a mass shooting. It was a small one, only three dead and six injured, and it was a thousand miles away, but it was what they sought. It was tomorrow’s paper, but the incident was tonight, two hours away.
“Damn!” Quiti said. “I’d like to try for this one, not waiting for the rapist.”
They discussed it and decided to try. Gena sent her daughter a mental message to return to the Embassy and babysit it with Flower. Then the three of them oriented on a local wormhole crevice, with Quiti exploring it mentally and tracing the several bypaths, selecting the route they wanted. Quiti and Gena lay back in their easy chairs, while Orchid oriented on Gena’s mind so she could follow her physically.
They plunged into the crevice, and instantly were in the other city, a back alley where the crevice happened to emerge. They walked toward the site of the coming massacre. Gena extended her clairvoyance and Quiti her telepathy, and surveyed the area.
And found the mind of the killer. He was collecting his weapons hardly a block away, intending to walk to an overpass and blast away at anyone in the vicinity. At exactly ten PM he would do it. It was important that the time be just right. Quiti wasn’t sure exactly why, but didn’t care; she just wanted to see if they could foil the crime.
“Uh-oh,” Gena said. “We can’t get there from here. There’s a foot patrolman who will intercept us, not the killer.” Orchid’s precog verified that: it was destined to happen, if they let it.
Quiti looked at her watch. “We have fifteen minutes.”
They considered, then hurried around the block, avoiding the patrolman. While they walked, Quiti explored further, seeking the motive. It turned out that he was furious because his girlfriend had walked out on him, just because he stole some of her money. He couldn’t hurt her because he loved her, but he had to hurt someone. So he would kill anyone who walked past her house at ten, when she was changing for bed and might be glimpsed through the not quite shuttered window, and that would expiate it. Quiti did not quite follow the logic, but realized that he was not completely rational. His reasoning was good enough for him, and that was what counted.
“So what do we do with him?” Gena inquired. “We don’t want to get into killing anyone; the point is to stop that kind of thing. But if we don’t deal with him, he will kill someone else, now or another time.”
Quiti had an idea. “Orchid, can you make an Amnesia Bomb? I know that’s not exactly an emotion.”
“Yes. It is the absence of emotion, and can be done.”
“Good. Make me one to use on the killer. I want him to forget what made him mad, and to forget what he was planning to do about it. Maybe even forget that he had had a girlfriend. That way nobody gets hurt.”
Orchid made the Bomb. Quiti took it and set it in a pocket. It was nothing but a small magnetic flux, giving no hint of its real nature.
They got there at seven minutes to ten—but under the overpass, not on it. Damn!
“He is on his way,” Gena said.
Quiti searched desperately. There was no convenient entry to the overpass right here. It would take too long to go to the nearest access, and the killer would be sure to see them.
“Orchid, do you foresee a way?” Quiti asked desperately.
“It is complicated. There are many options, but they are unfamiliar to me. I need time to sort them.”
Just so. Meanwhile the man was arriving on the overpass. He was right on time, of course walking to it at five minutes before ten. “He is lifting his rifle off his shoulder,” Gena reported.
Quiti acted without thinking. “Take that!” she said, and hurled the Bomb up at him. She might not be a great baseball player, but she did know how to throw things.
There was a soundless flash as it struck.
“Time to get out of here,” Gena said urgently. “That patrolman is coming.”
They took a worm crevice back home.
“Now the news,” Quiti told Orchid. “Can you find that same edition?”
In a moment the Ghobot had it. There was no headline of a killing; that news had disappeared.
“I think we did it,” Gena said. “Despite complications. But there is certainly food for thought. We need to plan the next mission better.”
“Scouting for overpasses and patrolmen,” Quiti agreed.
But overall they were well satisfied. They told the children what they had done, and the complications. “Piss happens,” Idola said. They found a private nook for Orchid and Flower and turned in.
In the morning, Quiti checked the regular edition of the newspaper, not the foretold one. It was the same as what they had seen, without that headline, but now she had time to check the back pages, looking for anything relating to that particular city at that time.
“I found something,” she said.
Gena was on it. “Oh?”
“They found this man wandering around, confused. He was of interest because of his guns. He seemed to have partial amnesia. He said he had this vague notion there was to be a killing there. He concluded that maybe he had gone there to foil a killing, and might have scared away the killer. It seems he is a minor hero, at least for the moment.”
Gena laughed. “Piss happens,” she said, echoing her daughter. “But now it’s definite: we need to plan more carefully. I think we’d better get some more experience before we start training crews.”
“Crews?”
“One Hair, one Chip, one Ghobot. Invaluable for preventing crimes.”
“So you have concluded that the Ghobots can come here?”
“Why not. With one trifling little detail: how do we keep the corruption out?”
“I will work on that,” Quiti said.
“We all will work on that,” Gena said. “I have an intuition that this is important. Very important.”
“I do too,” Quiti said. “Logicall
y, yes, of course it is important. It could save innumerable lives. But there is something else.”
“I do, also,” Orchid said. ‘I have looked into the near future many times, for incidental things like avoiding unpleasant encounters or seeking pleasant ones. But this is so much more than that. When I connect with the two of you, becoming part of the Trio, I feel a rare empathy and power I have not experienced before. You are good people, I am sure, but that is not the point of this. I sense that we are on the verge of a truly remarkable discovery.”
“Something vastly more important than stopping future mass killings,” Quiti said. “Yet that makes me wonder, because what could such a thing possibly be?”
“I wonder too,” Gena said. “Yet I feel that it is so.”
The three women gazed at each other, physically and mentally, marveling.
“Let’s take a break to powder our noses or whatever,” Gena said. “Then return to tackle this whatever it is. Because my intuition suggests that it is not only big, but urgent.”
“Like anticipating motherhood,” Quiti said. “Are we on the verge of changing our lives more significantly than we can comprehend at this moment?”
“It is frightening, yet wonderful,” Orchid agreed.
They took their break, knowing that their lives might never again be this incidental.
Chapter 9: Wonder Worm
“You’re in charge, Idola,” Gena said. “You and Flower do whatever you want to, but stay out of mischief, and cover for us. We don’t know how long we’ll be out. With luck, under an hour.”
Idola nodded, understanding. She was a perky, sassy, independent girl, but she had caught on that something serious was forming, and knew better than to interfere. The three would be right there in the room with her, physically, but absent mentally. They weren’t even going into the wormholes this time, just into the Trio.
Quiti and Gena moved their chairs to be side by side, and settled into them, holding hands for closest interaction. Orchid curled around those linked hands, her magnetism infusing them. They were as close as they could be to one, physically. The three of them merged, mentally.
A scene formed around them, a pleasant glade within a forest, with the hint of rabbits and sparrows in the background.
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