Nobody jumped up to comfort her. They just looked down at their excuse for food.
“Um . . . ”
The sound was almost a squeak.
All eyes flashed to the chemist with the bowl haircut.
M’am’s eyes zeroed in on him. “Yes, Rusty?”
Rusty shifted in his seat, suddenly the center of attention. “I . . . might . . . ”
“Go ahead,” M’am pressed.
“I might . . . like to go with them.”
His tiny voice boomed in the silence.
“Well,” M’am said, “I don’t blame you. You’re young. This is no place to spend one’s early youth when you should be at parties and dating young girls. We will all miss you, dar-ling, very much. We will have your excellent work to remember you by. Everyone, we must wish Rusty the very best and be happy for his choice. Today, when I go out with the captain and my son, you’ll go with me for a final walk through our adventure. It will be your swan song. Would you like that?”
In some kind of creepy cult thing, they all started halfheartedly applauding Rusty. He blushed and looked both relieved and . . . something else.
“You see? Life will go on,” my mother continued. “The planet will adapt to the Xenomorphs. They are becoming part of the living biosphere. I’m on the edge of proving that. I need more time. I can prove it, I know I can. I have a sense for them. They have a sense for me.”
She raised her perfectly appointed chin and gazed above all our heads to the dream she saw in her own mind. She stepped back from the table and, unless I was imagining it, struck a pose.
“Someday,” she proclaimed, “I will walk among them.”
* * *
Clark and I, Bonnie, and the Marines sat wide-eyed with the boldness of the statement. Admittedly it was so bold, so wild, as to have a certain poetic shock value. She was an influential woman, the leader of a notable sociopolitical and scientific movement, and she was taken with her own press clippings. Maybe she had a right to be. I don’t know. Her own people, my sister and the other misfits, were transfixed with worship. She had a nice little coven going here.
Or was their silence and awe really disguising another emotion?
I never had the chance to find out.
M’am took four calculated steps to the projector curtain. Her eyes narrowed in a mischievous way as she held her finger to her lips. “Shhh,” she uttered.
She put her hand to a control panel and touch-padded a code.
The projector curtain beside her began to ripple, then to grow transparent once again. There, not more than a few steps away from the spot where my mother stood, and backdropped by the pink glow of the afternoon sun, were two of the monstrous adult aliens. One was back several feet, casually picking at its own tail the way a cat grooms itself.
The nearer alien was only steps from us, gazing upward at the glassy mountain which coifed our hiding place. The underside of its chin was a perfect triangle, fringed with gray-white teeth and a string of drool.
Everyone at the table froze in apprehension. Beside me, MacCormac made a slight shift of his hand toward his sidearm. I pressed my hand to his wrist and stopped him. Like frightened quail in the underbrush, we held perfectly still. Clearly, she was right—we couldn’t leave the blind. Not yet. They were all around us.
My mother gazed in adoration at the creature which didn’t know she was so near, near enough to slaughter with a sweep of its clawed hand, which hung in repose dangerously near the curtain. It saw only a projection of the landscape around it. If it drew any nearer, its breath might ripple the curtain and give us away. Or our mother’s breath could do the same from inside.
She moved her hand very carefully from the control panel toward the curtain. She raised her fingers and moved her palm along the curtain to the level of the alien’s hand. There she stood, in commune with the devil, truly in love with what she saw.
Her eyes glowed and she tilted her head in admiration and love. Her lips moved, and there was only the barest of whispering.
“Some day . . . ”
7
“How does it work?”
“Light refraction, nanochips, electrical pulse, specialty scent masking, microvid units that assimilate the environment and replicate what’s behind you . . . lots of things. They also stop the natural sloughing of skin cells that happens naturally to people when we just walk around.”
Tad, the stealth guy who had somehow returned in one piece from his close encounter with the scorpio-huggeroids, picked and poked the suit I was wearing. I’d never worn blue in my life.
And this wasn’t just “blue.” This was bleeooooo. Electric blue. Las Vegas blue. This one was a superhero costume, all glowy and satiny, as if lit from within. It wasn’t unforgivingly body-hugging, luckily, but had some room to it, but was so weightlessly constructed as to be flexible and not baggy. In the front parts of the thigh sections, the part of the body less like-ly to bump or be fallen on, were the computer components that ran the smart elements of the suit. When I bent my arms or legs, the suit emitted a faint crinkling noise from the millions of emitter smart-fibers in the inner and outer mesh layers and signal-channeling conduction foam sandwiched between them.
“If you stand absolutely still,” Tad said, “the suit masks itself from their senses. There are certain wavelengths that they have trouble sensing. They probably won’t notice you.”
“It’s the ‘probably’ that bothers me,” I mumbled.
“You have to control yourself. It’s hard,” Tad warned. “Every molecule in your body says ‘run,’ but if you run, they’ll see you.”
“Like quail hiding in the brush? You have to hold your nerves?”
“And they’re the devil to outrun, so don’t think you can do that. You can’t just put on a suit and go walk among them. You have to stand still and hope they don’t bump into you.”
I glanced at Clark, who was being fitted into his suit beside me. “Permission to beat ass, sir.”
“Permission denied,” Clark said as the chemist Rusty taught him how to pull the hood over his face. “I went diving a couple of times at Little Africa reef off the Dry Tortugas. This feels like that wet suit, only lighter.”
“The elastomers are basically the same,” Rusty said, “but they’re embedded with sensors and emitters. They draw information and conduct emission from all the other layers. They even have a chemical element so we can make them broadcast certain aromas. I was in on the development of the formula range. Each suit is worth about fourteen million.”
“How did you test the reaction of the Xenomorphs?” I asked.
Tad shrugged. “We hung up a suit and monitored their reaction to different emissions.”
“Lost six suits,” Rusty added.
Tad flashed him a cautionary glance, which I caught. “We’re also working on holographics,” he said quickly, “and anti-Xeno cages that are acid-proof and caked with countermeasures and cloaking chips.”
My mother came in, wearing a blue supersuit that made her look like a space opera diva. She surveyed us with way too much joy. “Are you ready for your tour?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Clark said. “I have to tell you, I’m nervous about this. I don’t like going out without the Marines.”
“Your Marines would create more chances for trouble. The fewer people, the more we can control any chance of mistakes. You have been given your instructions on behavior? You must strictly obey them, or we cannot go.”
“We’ll comply,” I said. I didn’t want her to be watching me the whole time. “What about weapons? Defense?”
“We don’t use them,” she said. “Any energy discharge disrupts the field emitted by the suit. All you have to do is stand perfectly still. Even if you are seen moving, you can stand still and become lost in the panorama. In all likelihood, we’ll not encounter any Xenos at all.”
“How do you know?”
“Because we know where they are. We always scan the landscape on our visuals and heat-see
kers before we leave the blinds. We might see them at a distance, but we observe them this way often.”
“Hope I don’t crap in your fancy suit,” Clark admitted.
I made a face. “Couldn’t mask that odor, could we?”
“All right,” Tad concluded. “You’re all on line. Put your boots on.”
Rusty provided us with surprisingly comfortable and supportive blue boots with calf-high stovepipe uppers. Which was where I hid my plasma pistol.
Yeah, I know.
The four of us—M’am, Rusty, Clark, and I—moved out of the blind under the careful supervision of Tad at the entrance. This was some kind of mixed ceremony, a chance for my mother to show us things that would make her case, and Rusty’s “last walk” before leaving the planet with the Vinza. I watched Rusty and had to admit he seemed comfortable with going out on this walk, despite my nasty hopes that he would be nervous or frightened. I had it in my head that M’am was setting us up, maybe to get rid of us, but the barometer of Rusty didn’t bear that out. He had no hesitation about getting the suits and helping us with the picky donning process. Was it an honor to go out on this kind of “walk”? Did it show something I hadn’t expected about my mother—that she wasn’t holding a grudge?
Or did she just want to keep her enemies close?
Behind us, MacCormac and the other two Marines, Bonnie, and a handful of campers watched us with mixed emotions. Bonnie came to the perimeter at the last moment, and Tad pushed her back. The curtain closed over them, and all we saw after that was a near-perfect image of the canyonscape. The hiding techniques seemed artistic and modern, yet also seemed to be veils, not forts. If the veil were ever accidentally discovered, the aliens would just walk in with nothing to stop them.
Walking through the landscape of planet Rosamond 6 was both dream and nightmare. We followed my mother on unmarked paths which she clearly knew well, through the forest of glass columns and out onto an escarpment of plant growth of the kind only an artist’s imagination or nature’s wild wish list could conjure up. Pink vines draped hundreds of feet, stippled with fleshy cherry-like nodules, each with a tiny black fan sticking out of it.
“What are these?” I asked.
Rusty touched one of the little fans, and it happily fluttered. “That’s its idea of a flower.”
As we walked our trail, a strange sense of calmness came over me. My mother moved with such confidence at the head of the line that her demeanor was reassuring. She walked along without her blue hood, but we all did have gloves on.
I felt like a bad boy, having the plasma pistol hidden in my boot, but if I had to use it, I figured the cover would have already been blown. Can’t break old habits quite this abruptly. Some people carried rabbit feet. Some people had lucky nickels. I had my plaz. Sue me.
The environment had gone from stark prismy red glass and black skulch to a lush gold and blue forest, and just when I started to get alien-planet overload, puffs of green fernlike growth started to line the path and declare that green was not just an Earth color. In fact, it was seriously green, bright green. Green that made Envy jealous.
“You can see,” my mother began, “that there is wonderful growth here and many forms of life. There is algaeic life, microbial life, insect life, flightless birds, all the way up to pre-mammals. We think we may have seen mammals, but we are still researching. You see how beautiful it is here, and we have managed to live in this environment.”
“How many outposts do you have?” I asked.
She looked back at me. “What?”
“Outposts. How many? The blind back there was the main one, right? You have others? Where other researchers are working?”
She continued walking. After what might have been barely too long, she finally said, “Yes, sometimes we have remote outposts. They’re isolated for specific observations.”
“Can we see one?”
“This is as far as we can go today.” M’am motioned us to her sides, and we discovered she was standing on a ridge. “Behold . . . the Blue Valley.”
And it was. Below us flowed a magnificent vista that could only be compared to a god-sized single peacock’s feather, with a dark eye at the bottom and waves radiating outward in shimmering circles of metallic blue and green, separated by rings of platinum and shot with strands of gold. The sun, now thinking about setting, shone through the red glass spires behind us and cast soft shafts of colored light into the Blue Valley.
And there was indeed life. Herds of large grazers with some sort of quills or stiff hair. Flocks of those flightless semi-ostriches with short necks and tall feathery coronets. Clouds of glitter-winged flitters. The pastoral scene was almost quaint. It was certainly hypnotic, the kind of thing that causes people to build hilltop mansions and get Adirondack chairs and tumblers of iced tea.
That might happen here, if Clark’s vision came true.
I looked to my right. He stood on the other side of my mother, gazing over the Blue Valley vista, thinking of the wonders of his simple mission, of how many people would find paradise here while he retired to his wahoo fields. I envied him his easy dreams. They were the kind that came true.
And Jocasta Malvaux gazed too. She was as proud of the Valley as if she had painted it on a canvas and it had come to life. This was her dream too, this planet and its creatures. She knew, and so did I, and Clark and all of us, what efforts were cast by eternity to come up with a planet like this, a living and breathing world finding its way to fruitfulness in a barren galaxy. I turned my gaze to the sky—yes, there it was, the all-important moon, with its green stripes and lazy glow. Now that the sun was leaning its shoulder down, the moon opened its single petal.
“You see?” M’am said. “Here is a living environment, unafraid and adjusting. There is no cowering, no fear. No panic or confusion. They live their lives, and the Xenos are becoming part of the beautiful quilt. They serve their purpose, hunting the weak and the slow, leaving the swift and strong to reproduce and flourish. To interfere is immoral now. They have settled in. They are the splendid dogs of Anubis, handsome adapters who will melt into this environment and become one of nature’s controllers. That they are sharks, that they are cobras, that they are wolves, raptors, and all this is both relevant and irrelevant. If predators reign, we must let them. There are limits. Nature knows the limits. They cannot destroy a planet. When the easy prey for them is gone, you’ll see the Xenos die back to a balance. They will be out-performed by animals that are fleeter of foot, that can fly . . . other strategies which will rein them in. I will remain here with my loyal few, to watch the history of the galaxy unfold, and bring the story home to Humanity. Someday I will walk with them and they will accept me.”
Clark looked at me right over her head—he was tall enough and she was petite enough. I shook my head quickly and lowered my brows. Don’t say anything.
“All I have to do,” M’am went on, almost as though she were talking to herself, “is find out what triggers their higher senses. Whatever is necessary, I will learn to live among them and they will accept me as one of them.”
Clark, on the other side of M’am, and Rusty here beside me, were either hypnotized or just freaked. I was particularly aware of Rusty.
“You cannot terraform a planet,” she went on, “which has potential intelligent life, Captain. Not legally, not morally. Primarily, there are very few of those. If this planet adapts, then you have no right. The Xenos are now indigenous. The Xenomorphs are potentially intelligent, if they are not already intelligent. They are already quick and smart, and they communicate. That overrides terraforming rights. You will not wipe out this excellent, successful species so humans can have this planet. We humans have had enough of that in our history . . . wiping out each other, wiping out whatever is in our way . . . and I will not have my own son becoming the next Stalin.”
I eyed Clark, and he shrugged at me in mute desperation. Did she have a point? Legally?
“To put humans here would ruin this paradise,”
she con-tinued. “Humans are the lice, the wreckers, the egos. If we try to have a war with them, we will lose. You and your poison robots . . . the Xenos will out-think you, out-wait you, out-evolve you. You want to take over the planet in a few months, but they will find ways to wait a century, if they must. You say the Xenos are BioHazard One? The impatience of Humanity is the true plague, Captain. These things take time, much time. Some people in my field of science have actually inherited their work from their parents and grandparents. My daughter will inherit this outpost from me. The only hope for your colony, your settlement, Captain, is to let me continue my work. We can’t live in spite of them. Someday, when my work is done and I have discovered the Xenos’ secrets, humans will be able to live with them.”
Her words brushed by and were carried on a breeze that had a faint scent of perfume. Had I been wrong about her?
I tried to maintain the level of cynicism I had forged about her, but today I had to admit there was a sliver of doubt. I hadn’t spoken to my mother or my sister in about five years. People can change, can’t they? The one thing I’d really been consistently good at in my life was not lying to myself.
So now I asked myself—why was I the only person on two worlds who didn’t respect Jocasta Malvaux? If she was right and I was wrong, or if I bore any doubts—which at this moment I did—then we couldn’t release the PPs. My friendship with Clark and the whole crew would be ruined. Everybody on Earth would be mad at me for denying them this second Earth.
But if she was right and this world could adapt, could flex a muscle and bring the Xenomorphs in thrall to the overarching controls of the environment, who was I to dispute a current and effective law? The Alien Species Act had been argued before Congress by people a lot smarter than I was. My mother could never have pushed such a thing through on her own. Somebody else had to consider the points. We were still on the cusp of its authority, of all this interaction with life not of Earth. The ASA was created in anticipation of alien life, not based on experience with it. It had also helped to boost exploration in space, which otherwise was a pretty hard sell. It caused dreamers to dream. This planet might actually be a researcher’s heaven, on the edge of evolutionary leaps that could be witnessed in action and not just studied in fossil form.
The Complete Aliens Omnibus Page 37
