by David Boyle
Tony showed his palms when he finished, then reached purposefully to his throat. “It’s okay,” he said, repeating the gesture. The alien stared back. “Think he understands?”
The alien looked to Ron, then reached slowly and manipulated the lump on its left collar. The creature croaked at its captors, and seeing no response made a further adjustment. “Ck ntd e?” The change in voice was dramatic.
Mark’s jaw dropped. “That’s not just gibberish. He’s trying to talk!”
Tony rolled his hands one over the other. “Right direction, but you need to keep going.”
Another adjustment. “Cun ungerstand e?”
“Good call, Bennett,” Hayden said, now a believer. “And Tony, you need to slow down. He’s not just listening, he’s watching your lips.”
“Right… right. Sure, that makes sense.”
Tony looked to the alien. “I’m sorry if this is confusing, but language is not my forte.” He pulled his fingers apart as if drawing taffy. “I know there’s a better way of doing this, but so long as you get the idea….”
The alien tabbed its collar. “Beeeter?”
Tony blinked. “Oh my goodness. Yes, absolutely. But you need to shorten it a little.” He closed his fingers, careful to focus on his pronunciation: “Better.”
A further adjustment. “Beeter.”
Tony smiled back, ecstatic. “Almost,” he said, shrinking the gap between his fingers. “A time or two more and you’ll be there.”
The alien fingered its collar.
“We can go there later, Delgado. Good job and all that.” Ron stepped forward and stared down at the alien. “And now that you can understand me, get those hands down where I can keep an eye on them.”
“Ash you wish.”
“Would you stop already? You don’t have to—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Prentler, from you, or anybody else. What I want now are answers. Like where the hell are we?”
“I cannot answr your qestion. Tho if would return brizva, I can, peraps, determin our location.”
Ron snorted. “And blink the fuck out of here and leave us stranded? Not on my watch.”
The alien raised its head. “From change in topogphy, I beliv tht is no longr possible.”
Charlie had so far been content to listen. No longer. “Whatdya mean not possible? That’s bull, and you know it!”
“Can return brizva?”
Tony plucked the cylinder they’d been struggling over from alongside one of the dry bags. The alien nodded.
“No reason to stop now. Might as well give it to him.”
“We don’t have a clue what that thing can do, and you’re ready to just hand it over. I thought you were smarter than that, Prentler. I bet your folks left the doors unlocked too.”
“Matter of fact, they did. And I know how you feel, McClure. But—”
“You want to know how I feel? Taken, that’s how. I listened to you guys. Brought this fucker along. And look what it got us! Tracks an elephant couldn’t make. Birds or whatever you call them the size of airplanes. And who knows what else behind this walled up pile of cane. So don’t go trying to tell me you know how I feel.”
The buzzards were circling, a few settling once again behind the canes.
“True enough. But we’re also out of options,” Mark said, knuckling sweat from his eye. “Whether you trust him or not, this brizva thing sounds like our only way out of here. And the only one who knows how to work it, is him.”
“Ron, please,” said Tony. “What other choice do we have?”
Ron was ready to explode, back in the same corner he was earlier. “This whole thing stinks,” he snarled; then turning to the alien. “You may be holding all the cards, but I’m warning you. I hear one peep out of that thing and, by God, I’ll blow your brains out.”
Tony waited until he got the nod, then handed the device to the alien. The brizva was close to eight inches long by three wide, and was oval in cross section with molded-in side panels. The upper end was a glassy smooth hemisphere. The alien entered a series of commands, arcane symbols appearing immediately on its face. He motioned cautiously at his collar, and after getting Tony’s okay made an adjustment to his communicator.
“Our coordinates,” he said, in more recognizable English, “are unchanged.”
“You mean we’re in the same place where we started,” Mark said.
“Precisely.”
“That’s exactly what I’m talking about.” Ron waved at the palms. “So what the hell are these? My imagination?”
“If you would permit me?” The alien entered a new series of commands. Seemingly unsettled by the figures displayed, the entry was cleared and reentered. Tony confirmed that the instructions had been identical, and saw that the symbols displayed were the same as before. “While I cannot translate into your time equivalent terms, we have been teleported approximately 15.357 kilarands into your planet’s past.”
Tony sighed. “Sounds like you were right.”
“Unfortunately,” said Mark, tracking a flight of crescent-winged pterosaurs cruising the distant ridge. “I’m thinking we’re somewhere in the Cretaceous. Hopefully the middle, but I don’t think so.”
“That tells me about as much as shithead here,” Ron said with a frown. “Not that it makes a difference.” The alien drew his frustrated attention when he entered a new series of commands.
“You may dispense with further displays of your very formidable weaponry,” the alien said, holding the device for all to see. “I am qite unable to leave.” Symbols were displayed, along with a crosshatched panel resembling a thermometer. Intended to register the length of the device, only a glimmer showed at the bottom. “Transport power has been exhausted.”
Charlie let out a strangled gasp. “You’re lyin’. The lights are on, ain’t they?”
“Display functions are operative,” the alien confirmed. “Teleport functionality is not.”
“What about if we leave the boats?” Ron asked. “Hell, we’ll leave everything. Just get us back!” The alien tried again to explain, but Ron was persistent.
“Badgering him isn’t going to change a thing,” Tony said. “You saw the gauge. The thing’s empty, and he’s got nothing to gain by lying. He’s in this just as deep as we are.” They stood beside the canoe, each of them struggling with the impossibility of their situation. Mark kicked the side of the boat, and promptly started yowling.
“We’re gonna die here, aren’t we?”
Ron snatched the device from the alien’s hand. “We do, it’s because of you, Van Dyke. Without you and that damn rock we wouldn’t be in this cock sucking situation.”
“Lay off already,” Hayden said. “Charlie got the ball rolling, but we had our chance to back out.” He gazed absently about the grounded canoes, the map still pinned under the Discovery’s thwart. “Almost pulled it off too. Another five or ten miles and we’d have made it to the truck.” Hayden waited, and with no comments forthcoming, turned to the alien. “Seeing as we’re stuck here, I guess we might as well introduce ourselves: My name is Hayden Prentler, the guy with the busted foot is Mark Bennett, Tony Delgado, Charlie Van Dyke over there. And the fella with the wonderful disposition…”
“Fuck you, Prentler.”
“…is Ron McClure.”
“I am Wheajo of Plychee,” the alien said, nodding formally though still bound at the ankles. “My people are called Grotky. And you are?”
Mark was massaging his foot. “Now there’s a question you don’t get asked very often,” he noted dryly. “We’re what you call humans.” The alien’s eyes flickered as if searching an internal database.
“So why did you bring us here?” Hayden asked. “I mean, what’s the point?”
“Our transport here was purely accidental, my objective being to return to my ship.” The alien looked to Tony. “Your efforts to acquire the brizva altered its coordinates, and its subsequent activation transported us here.”
Ton
y cringed when he caught his friends staring.
“Nice going, Delgado.”
“It’s not my fault, McClure. You made me, remember?”
“Yeah. Guess I should have just beat him with my paddle and not worried about the boat turning over.” Ron noted the bulge on the alien’s thigh. “Another toy, I see.” He waved the revolver. “Out with it. And be careful, or I’ll—”
“Blow my brains out?”
“Good, a quick learner. Keep that up and we’ll get along just fine.”
The alien touched his thigh and a slit opened in his uniform. The device he removed was thicker and slightly larger than a pack of three-by-five cards, all black, and with a crease not quite along the middle. Wheajo fingered an indent, and the crease became an opening that effectively lengthened the thing by almost two inches.
“That was slick,” Ron admitted. “Bennett, see if you can figure out what it does. Charlie, what did you do with that thing he had at the pond?”
“I stuck it in my dump bag.”
“Get it.”
As with his uniform, the alien’s latest device had no obvious seams. On top was a tubular arrangement, with the gap below it dividing the thing roughly in thirds. The forward section was the wider of the two, the rear with a molded-in grip designed specifically to conform to the alien’s dual-thumbed hand. Mark found it awkward, and was able to fit his hand only by letting his little finger poke alongside.
Mark extended his arm. “Ah, so that’s it,” he said, panning the river, the scene projected on the frosted rear lens. “It’s a fold-up telescope.
“Got a name for this?”
“It’s designation is dawzon,” the alien replied.
“File the ridges off and it’d be easier to hold. Is kind of neat though. Take a look, Tony.”
Nearby, Ron turned the last of the alien devices over in his hands. Thin in cross section and curved on one side, the device the alien had been using when captured reminded him of a TV remote, this one complete with a tiny display screen. “What’s this one do?”
“Computation and radiometric analysis,” the alien answered. The yaltok, as he termed it, compared the spectrographic signatures of unknown materials against a resident database. “The emissions analyzed being either reflected ambient, thermal, fission byproducts, or externally stimulated emissions that….”
Ron let him talk. The thing was a computer, and that’s all he needed to know.
“Here,” Charlie said, minutes later. “You can put this away.”
“Not yet,” Ron said, wriggling a finger. “Give it here.”
The dawzon was lighter than he expected—a pound at most—and had a feel he just couldn’t place. Even out in the sun the thing wasn’t hot, so it couldn’t be metal. Plastic? No, not that either. More something in between, though he couldn’t imagine a blend of metal and plastic. Ron scanned the far shoreline, and noticed then how absolutely non-reflective the thing’s surface was. A flag went up: meant to conceal? The grip was suspicious too, the layout amounting to what resembled a trigger guard. He looked closer and saw dimples positioned along the thumb lines, both above and below. “Controls on a telescope?” he asked. “What are they for?”
“Focus and magnification,” Wheajo said, the barest trace of uneasiness in his voice.
“Show me.” Ron held the dawzon while the alien fingered a control. He looked again and, yes, the magnification was greater. He hadn’t noticed earlier, but centered in the field of view was a tiny red dot. He bit down. “Thing’s got a range finder doesn’t it?”
“My apologies. You had asked about controls.”
“Don’t give me that. And I’m in no mood to fuck with twenty questions. Next time I want it all, understand?”
The alien nodded. “Fully.”
“I don’t trust you, and until you show me some reason to feel otherwise, these are ours.” Ron looked to Charlie. “Stick that thing in your pack. Tony, take the other one. This here telescope, if that’s what it really is, stays with me.
“Think it’s settled enough?”
Mark checked the canoes. “Yeah, looks okay. Probably about as clear as it’s gonna get.”
“Okay then. Dig out the water jugs and top off the ones that need it. Tony, get him the hell out of there so we can dump the boat. You can leave his hands free, but for now I want him hobbled.”
“Is that really necessary?”
“I said it before. I’m done making mistakes. Give him enough slack to walk, if that makes you happy, but not enough to where he can run.”
They filled up on water, and once the canoes were empty found places to stash their whitewater gear. “Okay, so what’s our next move?” Hayden asked, tugging a T-shirt on over his head.
“Personally, I think we should take some time to look around,” Tony said. “Some of us go up river, others down. We do this systematically, we might find that we’re not in as bad a situation as it looks.”
“There is merit to your suggestion,” Wheajo said. “One must understand the problem before formulating a solution.”
Hayden was intrigued. “How about it, McClure? Let’s check on the neighbors and see what they’re so pumped about.”
The shortening shadows said the sun was climbing, so daylight wasn’t an issue. “Probably not a bad idea.” Ron glanced at the alien, then handed Charlie the handgun. “Stick tight with fuck head. And don’t go getting buddy-buddy with him, no matter what he tells you.”
Charlie holstered the revolver. “With a guy with two thumbs? I don’t think so.”
Ron wrenched the case loose and got his rifle. A few of the birds were still circling, the rest squabbling a short distance inland. “Okay, Prentler, let’s see what all the fuss is about.” He swiped at horsetails where barely an hour before there had been only rocks, sweat trickling down the sides of his face.
“This is nuts.”
They could have taken either direction, the shoreline the same upstream or down, its width depending on how well the canes survived the apparently frequent inundations. There were willows growing on their side of the river, along with a scattering of palms, the canes leaning as if after a tornado, branches and torn fronds braided in and amongst the stalks.
Vultures excluded, not a thing was moving, the shoreline in places rife with tracks where the sun hadn’t yet baked the sand to powder. Most were small, probably birds, though there were others that were far and away larger.
“Maybe this wasn’t such a swell idea after all,” Tony said, spying the remnants of a nearly yard long track.
“I’m beginnin’ to think that too.”
“Ah come on… Just a little farther,” Mark said. “We get to the palms and we can take a break from the sun and check upriver at the same time.” The bend in the river wasn’t far. “What could possibly be moving in this heat?”
“I guess,” Charlie said. “But to the trees. No farther.”
Fifty yards on and the river began a slow curve north, the shorelines extending into the distance with little to distinguish one section from another. Sweaty and uncomfortable, with one notable exception, they were ready to take a breather beneath the sleepy set of palms.
They stood there, listening, the sun an unblinking eye in the sky. If anything was out there, it was likely either dead or asleep.
“Quiet, ain’t it?” Charlie said, settling in beneath the palms, his fingers tapping the holster.
“I guess.” Mark stared off, the implications of where they were still sinking in.
Tony took a drag from his cigarette and, pocketing his lighter, considered the alien and the seamless uniform he wore. Finely beaded, tough and obviously resilient, the alien’s clothing conformed to every curve and kink of his body. “That’s quite the outfit, Wheajo. That have anything to do with why you’re not affected by the heat like we are?”
“Our mission was to perform a biologic survey of the planets in this sector. Yours was the third on our itinerary. My uniform is a symbiotic organism d
esigned specifically to aid in that effort. Its functions include thermal regulation and protection against endemic microbes. Except for planets where the atmosphere is unbreathable, we require—”
“Lemme get this straight. You mean… you mean it’s alive?”
“From a self-repair, self-replication perspective, the parshock could be considered alive. It is, however, purely artificial, and not the result of genetic mutilation of a pre-existing life form.”
“A bioengineered organism,” Tony said, awed by the technology. “That’s amazing. I mean really amazing. And so far beyond our capabilities—”
“You said self-replicating,” Mark said, his stare directed at Tony.
“Yes.”
“When you were unconscious I had a chance to, well… examine you. I didn’t see a mouth. And if what you’re saying is true, this… this uniform of yours has to be fed. I don’t mean to sound crude, but it’s parasitic, isn’t it?”
Charlie gasped. “You mean like a leach?”
“Not at all. Parasites are by definition detrimental to the host, while symbionts are complimentary. My body provides the parshock nutrients, and in return I am provided biologic and environmental protection.”
“Sounds more like a second skin than a uniform. Been places where I definitely could have used one of those.”
“You gotta be kiddin’, Bennett. Thing sounds frickin’ gross to me.” Charlie scrunched his face and shivered. “Yuk. Me, I’ll stick to wearin’ clothes.”
The eyes were alien; the look Tony saw clearly one of distain. “I gather you’ve heard similar comments before.”
“Personally no, though I am aware of records regarding contacts with species similar to yours.”
“Don’t bother tip-toeing around the tulips there, Wheajo. Just say it, okay? You mean contacts with inferior species like ours.”
“If you insist. Yes. Due to the potential for cultural contamination, contact with technologically undeveloped species like yours has long been prohibited.”
