Alien Nation #8 - Cross of Blood

by K. W. Jeter

  Maybe I should warn her, thought Buck. Prepare her for what she’s going to find out someday, no matter what. He wondered if he had already been trying to do that, stick his grim thoughts inside her skull, put the dark lenses with which he saw this world in front of her eyes. She wasn’t really such a tough little cookie. Nobody was that tough, to be the same afterwards as she was before she had both her hearts broken. That was the problem with these goddamn humans—they wanted to kill you, but first they wanted to kill your dreams.

  And humans like his father’s partner Sikes—Emily’s would-be Uncle Matt—they were the worst of all because they gave you those dreams and fed them. By acting all friendly to the Newcomers, like there would ever be a way that the differences between one species and another could be overcome. More than friendly, even. There had been a time when he’d been able to think about Sikes being together with Cathy, without feeling nauseous about the whole idea. Now his anger was like a little red coal in the pit of his stomach, that the slightest whisper could fan into white heat.

  His sister was watching him with her great big eyes, so he couldn’t say anything at all. You coward, he thought. She would find out soon enough, the same way he had. What was the point in making that day come along any faster than necessary?

  “Hey—” Buck glanced at his watch, then held up his forearm to show the dial to Emily. “I gotta get ready to go to work. I got the swing shift today.”

  She nodded as she gathered up her backpack from the floor. “So . . . anything you want me to tell ’em?”

  “Naw.” He knew she meant their parents. “Well . . . maybe tell Mom that I’m doing all right. Okay?”

  “Sure.” Emily glanced at the motorcycle’s sleek and ominous shape, then at him. “And you be careful.”

  He knew she would be insulted if he told her the same. Or if he walked her out to the corner RTD stop and waited with her for the bus to come. But he watched discreetly from the window of his room, until she was safely aboard and rolling back toward a cleaner part of the city.

  Yeah, she’s tough. Buck had to smile, thinking about his sister’s one-girl expedition all this way just to check up on him. If anyone was going to survive and dig out a place to stay in this hard, ungenerous world, it would be Emily.

  He stopped smiling when he thought again about what her chances—what anyone’s chances—would be.

  Buck took his workshirt from the nail in the wall and pulled it on. The warehouse was walking distance from here, but he’d decided already that he was going to bump the motorcycle down the building’s stairs and climb onto it. Maybe a quick blast of pure acceleration would drive his grim mood to the back of his head where he could ignore it and all the attached bad thoughts for a little while longer.

  They did everything to her.

  She folded her hands across her abdomen, as though to protect the new life forming inside there, and let the medical technicians draw her out of the magnetic resonance imaging device. Just like being born, thought Cathy with grim humor. Lying on her back, she blinked at the overhead fluorescent lights. You’re in a little tiny place and the next thing you know, you’re surrounded by doctors.

  “Ms. Frankel?” A nurse, human and young and pretty, smiled down at her. “You can get dressed now.”

  Cathy sat up, legs dangling over the edge of the MRI platform. She pulled the thin hospital gown closer around herself. “Can I go home?” She felt exhausted from the battery of tests, much more than her own doctor had ever put her through. Most of the procedures had been familiar to her, a few had required hugely expensive-looking equipment that she had never seen before.

  The nurse apologized with another smile and a shake of her head. “Doctor Quinn will want to talk to you.” She took Cathy’s elbow and helped her down. “It won’t be long.”

  A half hour later, she sat in the same mahogany-panelled and book-lined office to which she had first come when she had kept the appointment these people had been so insistent about. On the desk before her was both a plastic-resin cast of a human skull and a multi-colored working model of the Tenctonese dual-cardiac system. Quinn seemed to be covering all the bases at this clinic. Cathy glanced over her shoulder as she heard the door behind her open.

  “Well, it’s good to see you again.” With a thick sheaf of manila file folders in one hand, Doctor Quinn stepped toward the desk. “It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?” He sat down and spread the folders across the desktop. “Except, of course, you weren’t the patient then.”

  “Oh?” Cathy raised an eyebrow. “And am I your patient now?”

  Quinn leaned back in his chair and made a cage of his fingertips pressed together. “It would be best if you thought of yourself that way.”

  “Thank you, but I already have a doctor.”

  “True, and he quite properly notified us of your, shall we say, condition.” Quinn leaned forward again. “Tell me, Cathy, how do you feel right now?”

  “Poked and prodded.” She sighed. “Tired and bored. And quite frankly, I’m ready to go home unless someone starts telling me what the hell’s going on here.”

  “Fair enough.” The doctor scanned the contents of a couple file folders that he had opened on the desktop. “Our tests confirm what your own doctor told you. You are, in fact, pregnant.”

  “Whatever.” Once more, she felt the mental dislocation that came with the single word. It seemed as if she had stepped into a strange land where impossible things could be true, where the knowledge of what she sensed inside herself had no connection with what had happened in the world outside. “Everybody keeps telling me that, so I guess it must be the case.” She reached down for her purse beside the chair. “Can I go now?”

  “Please, Cathy—” Quinn held up a restraining hand. “I’m afraid the situation is a little more complicated than that.”

  She started to laugh, to say something along the lines of the situation being sufficiently complicated already, when a fingertip of ice touched her hearts. Any variation on the word complications was as much an emotional trigger as the word pregnant. “The baby. Is . . . is it all right?”

  Quinn nodded. “The fetus is alive and appears to be at a perfectly normal state of development. Your child isn’t the problem, Cathy. You are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your pregnancy is considerably different from that, um, normally seen in a Tenctonese female.” He turned around one of the open file folders; with the tip of a pen, he began pointing out details in a blurry MRI scan. “It’s all at an early stage, but the indications are that the process is well under way and will continue. What you can see here, Cathy, is that you’ve already begun to develop a human-like womb, as well as the associated physiological elements. The necessary hormones are being produced; even the connective tissues capable of bearing the increasing weight of the uterus and the enclosed fetus have started to form.”

  She had seen MRI scans before; it took only a moment for her to accept the notion that what she was being shown was a map of the world contained inside herself—a territory that now held two lives rather than just one. She lifted her gaze to meet that of the doctor on the other side of the desk. “So what exactly does this mean?”

  “It means . . .” Quinn tilted his head and drew a breath through his teeth. “It means, Cathy, that the chances are very good of this child coming to term entirely inside you. There will be no need to transfer the fetus to its father, as is normally the case in Tenctonese pregnancies. You will have the distinction of being the first Tenctonese female to actually give birth.”

  “Oh.” Dazed, she sat back in her chair. Inside her shock-numbed brain, she could hear part of her mind idly trying to remember the name of the human author who had advised believing several impossible things before breakfast. The name Lewis Carroll came to her after a moment. Was that from Alice in Wonderland? It was what she felt like now. This strange world she had entered seemed to contain one amazing thing after another. “This is . . . something ne
w.”

  “Indeed.” Quinn mused over the MRI scan for a few moments. “It’s absolutely unprecedented, Cathy. Though not entirely unanticipated.” He opened another folder. “There is more you should know, however. It’s part of the reason we had you come in here to the clinic, and we wanted to run so many tests on you. The amniocentesis we performed appears to confirm our initial suspicions. Your child is not Tenctonese. Or at least not completely.”

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “The genetic analysis of the fetus indicates a combination of both Tenctonese and human DNA. The child you’re carrying is a hybrid of our two species.” Quinn looked up from the folder. “Am I making myself clear? In other words, the child’s father is human.”

  She brought her hand to her mouth, as though she could touch the breath that had suddenly stilled inside her. And then, with equal suddenness, she burst into tears.

  “I know it’s frightening, Cathy—” Doctor Quinn had reached across the desk and taken her other hand, trying to comfort her. “But we’ve prepared for this here. You’ll get the finest care possible. Everything will be fine—”

  Blindly, she shook her bead. “No . . . you don’t understand—” How could she tell him? Joy had broken free inside her hearts, as though the sun in that strange land had finally risen over the horizon, flooding everything she saw with golden light. “I’m not scared at all.”

  She pulled her hand free from the doctor’s grasp and stood up.

  “I have to go—” Wiping the tears from her face, Cathy smiled down at the doctor’s wondering expression. “I have to tell Matt!”

  He followed the nurse down the corridors of the clinic.

  “Look, what’s all this about?” Sikes was having a little trouble keeping up with her. He was still out of breath from having sprinted from the car he’d left outside at the curb. The call from the station had made it sound as though some big emergency were going on here, but so far he’d found nothing but calm quiet and the usual faint disinfectant smell of a medical facility. “What’s the big deal?”

  The nurse smiled over her shoulder at him without breaking stride. “You’ll see.”

  He did see. The nurse stopped at the end of the corridor, pushed open a door and said, “Doctor Quinn’s been waiting for you.” As soon as Sikes stepped into the office, he saw the white-coated doctor sitting behind the desk. Two chairs in front, one of them empty . . .

  Cathy sat in the other one. “Hello, Matt.” She smiled up at him.

  The door closed behind him. “Okay—” He stood where he was, keeping a tight lid on his temper. If there was one thing he hated, it was being set up. “Whose bright idea was this?”

  “It was mine, Mr. Sikes.” The doctor folded his hands together on the desktop. “Cathy wanted to go home and tell you, but I thought it would be best for everyone if you came here. There’s a lot that all of us need to talk about. Please—have a seat.” Quinn gestured toward the empty chair.

  “No, that’s where you’re wrong.” Sikes reached back and laid his hand on the doorknob. “I’m already hip to Cathy being knocked up. All right? So if that’s all you brought me in to hear about, let’s just consider it old news. I’m outta here.”

  “Mr. Sikes.” The doctor’s voice turned more commanding. “There’s news you haven’t heard yet. And it’s nothing small, either. So you really should have a seat.”

  The way the doctor spoke stopped Sikes from pulling open the door. He sat down, looking away from Cathy but aware that she was watching him. And smiling.

  Quinn opened one of the folders on the desktop. “Here’s the situation . . .”

  That was when the doctor laid it all on him. And he was glad he was sitting down.

  “Isn’t it wonderful, Matt?” Cathy reached over and laid her hand on his arm. “It’s a miracle.”

  “Yeah . . . I guess it is . . .” He still felt stunned, the doctor’s words repeating on a tape loop inside his head. He had already accepted Cathy’s pregnancy, even her infidelity to him. Shit happened. Cops saw a lot of worse things. But now he had to start all over. He had to rethink everything, working in this new factor—that he was the father of the unborn child. He slowly shook his head. “Jeez . . .”

  Quinn spread out more of the file folders’ contents, the computer printouts spilling off the edge of the desk. “There really is no doubt about this, Mr. Sikes. If you’d care to take a look at the DNA trace analysis—”

  “No, that’s okay.” He held out a hand to ward off the arcane-looking charts and graphs. The scientific stuff inspired a superstitious dread in him. Cathy understood that kind of stuff; he didn’t. “I figure you know what you’re talking about.”

  From where she sat beside him, Cathy squeezed his arm tighter. He couldn’t look at her, meet her gaze, but for reasons different than before. Everything else he had to rethink was falling in a domino line. A hollow feeling, that he recognized from so many times before, opened inside him. It always came with the realization that he had been a complete jerk, breaking the hearts of the woman he loved, and who loved him. Because if I’m the father, he thought, then she . . .

  “It’s okay,” Cathy spoke softly. Just as if she could read his thoughts. She leaned toward him, her shoulder close to his.

  “Well, I’m sure the two of you have a lot to talk about.” Quinn started shuffling his charts and graphs together, stuffing them back into the file folders. “In fact, there’s still a lot we all need to talk about.”

  Sikes nodded. “Yeah, you’re right about that. Like . . . how is this all possible? I mean, I’ll accept that it’s true and stuff, but . . .” He glanced over at Cathy, then back to the doctor. “I thought that this pregnancy wasn’t supposed to be in the cards for human and Newcomer couples. ’Cause of us being like, uh, different species and all.”

  “That’s a good question, Mr. Sikes.” The doctor laid his hands on top of the stack of folders. “And it’s not one to which we have a complete answer yet. But the possibility of a human-Tenctonese hybrid is something that we’ve already been investigating here for some time now. To be honest, this is really more of a research facility than a clinical one. I can’t go into all the details right now; let’s just say that my own studies had begun to indicate certain . . . unsuspected potentialities in a human-Tenctonese relationship such as yours and Cathy’s. I had notified other doctors—specialists in Tenctonese physiology—and asked them to be on the lookout for just such a pregnancy.” He gave a brief nod toward Cathy. “That’s how your condition was referred to me.”

  “I guess it’s a good thing somebody was ready for all this.” Sikes took Cathy’s hand and held it tight. “Look, maybe we can talk about all the rest of it later. I think maybe it’s been a long day for everybody. And . . . there’s some people we gotta talk to. To tell them about it.”

  Quinn’s expression grew somber. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple. This is a situation that calls for a great deal of secrecy. As a matter of fact, the necessary security protocol has already been established with the Bureau of Newcomer Affairs.”

  “Huh?” Sikes gazed blankly at him. “What’re you talking about?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought I’d need to remind you, of all people, about certain less-enlightened elements in our society. Not after what we all went through—not that long ago—with the Purists and the Human Defense League.”

  “Oh.” He sank back in his chair. He had forgotten about the world outside this office.

  “I’m afraid,” continued Quinn, “that this pregnancy has enormous political implications attached to it. The Purists may have suffered some setbacks in their plans, but they haven’t gone away. If anything, they’re more active now. Nothing like a human-Tenctonese hybrid has ever occurred before, so we can’t be sure of how the different Purist organizations and front groups will react to the notion of interbreeding between the two species. But judging from their past record, I think it’s safe to assume that they’
re not going to be happy. And a few of them will undoubtedly try to do something about it.”

  Sikes tightened his grip on Cathy’s hand. He knew that Quinn was right; there were some mean sonsabitches wandering around in the dark. Starting now, his every thought would focus on keeping them from getting close to Cathy and the child growing inside her.

  “Okay.” He nodded. “I’m sure as hell not going to argue with you about this. But there is somebody I specifically want brought in on this. Not just because he’s my friend, but because he knows how to deal with Purists. And that’s George Francisco.”

  The name brought a thin smile to Quinn’s face. “There won’t be any problem with that. He’s at the top of a very short list for someone to coordinate the security arrangements. I’ll make it official with the Bureau.”

  “Doctor—” The office door had opened, with the clinic’s nurse looking in. “You’re needed out here right away.”

  Quinn left the two of them in the office. A few moments of silence ticked away before Sikes could speak. “I, uh . . . really owe you an apology.” As if that were all.

  “About what?”

  “Come on, sweetheart, I feel bad enough already. I’m talking about what I said before. When you . . . first told me, and all. I really screwed that one up.”

  Cathy leaned across the arms of the chairs and kissed him on the side of his face. “Hey . . .” Her voice was soft at his ear. “You know . . . we wouldn’t be here at all—in a doctor’s office, talking about me being pregnant—if I didn’t love you.”

  He had to suppose that was true. Schmuck, he told himself, she’s letting you off the hook. Cathy must have her reasons, though at the moment he couldn’t imagine what they were; he felt both blessed and bemused, a recipient of unmerited grace.