Infernal Sky

by Dafydd ab Hugh

  “Captain Hidalgo is not on vacation,” I pointed out. There had been a problem with him. The strange entity we called a medbot had told us that Hidalgo’s brain and body were not yet in harmony, but they would be. Whenever we asked the medbot how much time it would take for Hidalgo to be on his feet again, the eye of the robot seemed to wink at us, and the thing produced equations in the air. To be honest, I wasn’t completely certain it was a machine, but Arlene insisted it had to be.

  Arlene understood one statement, which put her kilometers ahead of Yours Truly. She said that in quantum physics there is no such thing as absolute time; there is only time relative to the location and speed of the observer.

  I’d settle for finding out how much longer it would take for Hidalgo to rejoin us. There was no one I could ask about when Albert might come out of his mood.

  Arlene seemed to read my thoughts again. Maybe in this place she really could. “Albert’s not on vacation either.”

  “At least he’s all right.”

  “Physically, yes, but I’ve never seen him in such a strange mood before.”

  “He told me he was meditating.”

  She shook her head. “He told me he was trying to communicate.”

  “That may be the same thing with these critters. We could spend the remainder of our lives attempting to adjust and never get anywhere.”

  I remembered coming back into my body. When we had eyes again, I saw the naked forms of Arlene, Albert, and Hidalgo. We weren’t alone. There were aliens with us, but my reactions were off. I didn’t even worry about whether the aliens had weapons or were menacing us in any manner. I’d undergone a change in perspective unlike anything that happened when I Gate-traveled before. I perceived the naked bodies of my fellow human beings with a completely new objectivity. I figured the difference had more to do with where we were than how we arrived.

  I didn’t feel desire for Arlene. I wasn’t judgmental about the bodies of the two other men. I didn’t feel any locker-room embarrassment or competition. But I wasn’t indifferent. I was curious about the human body, as though I were seeing it for the first time. I felt the same way about the aliens, whose strange forms were suddenly no stranger than the fleshy bipeds called human beings.

  The oddity of the moment was the medbot, who was all the reception committee we rated. It looked like a barber pole with an attitude. When Hidalgo collapsed, none of us rushed to his aid. We were still in that weird frame of mind, which I can describe only as objectivity. For the moment there was no strike team of marines.

  The medbot scooped up Hidalgo’s prostrate form, but it didn’t tell us anything about his condition. The weird thing was that none of us asked. If the room had been crawling with spider-minds, our trigger fingers wouldn’t have twitched; there was nothing to aim anyway.

  Slowly we had found ourselves again. It was like returning to a house you’d left in childhood and exploring each room again as an adult. Only this house was your own body. As we became less alien to ourselves, the real aliens seemed stranger.

  Arlene had the guts to make the first move. Too oad she didn’t accomplish anything.

  “I’ve always said you’re the bravest man I know, Arlene. I was still staring into my navel when you tried to strike up a conversation with the . . . others.”

  “Well, you’ve always been a navel man,” she said. Catching my expression, she added, “Didn’t you hear the e, Fly? You’re too much of a marine to fit into any other service.”

  Yep, we were back to normal. That didn’t seem to be getting us anywhere in this galactic Hilton they called a base. Maybe we shouldn’t be complaining. We were alive. The medbot had seen to that and had answered most of our medical questions. There were some questions it simply couldn’t answer, though, about where and what and who and why. These were outside its field of competence. But I’d find someone to tell us where we were.

  The medbot dodged only one question, when Arlene asked how come it spoke flawless English. “The English of this unit is not without flaw,” it said fussily. When she came right out and asked how come it spoke English of any kind, it said, “Guild secret,” and changed the subject back to our biological questions! We had plenty of those.

  “How do you think this food compares to MREs?” I asked Arlene as she chomped down on one of the little balls that looked like eyes to me but reminded her of a different portion of human anatomy.

  “Heated or cold?”

  “Cold, like we had on the Bova.”

  “Better.”

  “Hot.”

  She shrugged. “Close call. But I’m not criticizing the chef. We can eat this.”

  “The medbot says the provider of the feast wants to meet us. And he’s not really a chef; he’s more a chemist.”

  She took another healthy gulp of water. We’d both become quite fond of water.

  “I’ll meet with anyone,” she said, and I nodded. When she addressed the various creatures surrounding us at our arrival they had turned their backs on us—the ones who had backs—and wandered off. At first I thought we were being snubbed. But that wasn’t it at all. The show was over. They’d seen what they wanted and had better things to do.

  “Do you think the chef is one of the aliens who sent the message?”

  “God, I hope so!” When someone as atheistic as Arlene invoked the name of God, I knew she was speaking from the heart. I felt the same way. What could be more pointless than traveling so far—and one of these damned aliens was going to tell me how far if I had to wrestle it out of him—and find no one on the other end who gave a flip?

  “We know the chef helped the medbot work out the details of our body chemistry, so it’s a safe bet he wants us alive.”

  The first thing we learned from the animated barber pole was that everyone on the base was a carbon-based life-form. For all I knew, there wasn’t any other kind. So far, everyone we’d met was also the same on both sides of the invisible vertical line or, as Arlene would say, bilaterally symmetrical. I was grateful for two things: Earth-normal gravity and reentering the oxygen breathers’ club! But that didn’t mean we might not run into some other problems. Hidalgo sure did.

  So it made sense that they’d kept all of us on ice, in some sort of limbo, until they were sure we’d be all right in the environment of the base. When Arlene and I went through the Phobos Gate to Deimos we were traveling between artificial zones that were terrestrial-friendly. That was good news for us. When you’re naked at the other end, you better hope you can breathe the air and your skin can take it. I was damned glad they could handle human specimens here. I just hoped Captain Hidalgo would pull through.

  “Don’t you like the food?” Arlene asked, noticing that I’d left half my meal unfinished.

  “It’s okay. The truth is, I’m not really hungry. My stomach spent so much time in zero-g aboard the Bova that it’s taking its time returning to normal. Plus I’ll let you in on something.”

  “What?” she asked, leaning forward conspiratorially.

  “Practice makes perfect. They’ll improve at making food for us.”

  She stretched like a cat. “Fine with me,” she said. “Who would have thought the hardest part of keeping us alive would be feeding us?”

  The medbot had sounded proud when it rattled off the information. Their first analyses had told them most of what they needed to know, but not everything. They knew we needed calories, proteins, amino acids, vitamins, but they did not know the proper combinations or amounts! The big problem for our hosts was figuring out how to synthesize the amino acids we eat.

  This was a subject about which I was plenty ignorant. Ever since I started blowing away imps and zombies and ugly demons of all descriptions, my education had been improving. Fighting monsters must be the next best thing to reading your way through the public library. They both beat going to college, if I could judge from the usual butthead who thought he was hot snot because he dragged part of the alphabet behind his name.

  The medbot wa
s a bit technical in its non-flawless English but “Dr. Sanders” helped me pick up the basic points. The alien chef took some of his own food and injected it with human amino acid combinations. The first attempts were served to a high-tech garbage disposal. Arlene rambled a little about random combinations of four amino acids, then reached her climax.

  The ropy things on the barber pole began to throb, and out of the top came a bottle of white pills, a present from the alien gourmet. We’d have to take those pills if we wanted to live.

  The pills were blockers. While experimenting continued in the higher cuisine, the pills would increase the safety margin. Where had we heard that before? They would chemically block anything harmful. Without them we were doomed.

  Naturally I wanted to meet our benefactor as much as Arlene did. We’d exhausted the possibilities of conversation with the medical barber pole. So when the medbot told us we could meet our favorite alien we were eager to tote that barge, lift that bale, swim the highest mountain . . . whatever.

  The medbot’s instructions were clear. “The next time you eat, stay in the place where you eat.” So we did. We didn’t have any important date to break. Arlene had tried to talk Albert into joining us, but his appetite seemed even smaller than mine. He was off meditating again. Seemed like brooding to me. I wouldn’t call it sulking. Hidalgo was still under medical supervision. So Arlene and I were the ones who attended the great meeting between worlds.

  “Look!” said Arlene, stifling a gasp.

  The chef was coming. The chemist was coming. The alien who gave a rat’s ass about us was striding up the silver walkway, and he seemed eager to meet us. We could tell from his very human smiles. Two smiles, exactly the same, because he was a they—identical twins moving in unison. They were more than twins. They were mirror images of each other.

  Arlene started to laugh. I tried to shush her, but it was no good. “I can’t help it,” she said.

  “Arlene, this is important. Put a sock in it.”

  “I can’t help it,” she insisted. “They look . . . they look like Magilla Gorilla!”

  22

  Alone. Silence. He drifted.

  It was different than before; he had not been alone before. Now there were no voices. The last words had been a metallic voice complaining there was a slight problem. Now there was nothing.

  Then there was sound. He heard her plainly. His dead wife was paying him a visit. Rita. She was dead. Sliced and diced by a steam demon back on Earth. She couldn’t be here.

  “Esteban,” she whispered in the dark, as she used to do when she woke up before him shortly before dawn.

  “You’re not here,” he told her. It was the first time he’d heard his own thoughts since he was cut off from the others and placed in this true limbo.

  “You’ve summoned me.”

  “You’re a dream,” he replied morosely. “I don’t want to talk to you. I want to meet the aliens.”

  “But I’m the alien, Esteban. The only alien you’ve ever really confronted.”

  “No, I’ve fought aliens. Red devils. Shot the grinning skulls and been ripped by their razor-sharp teeth.”

  “You felt my teeth first. Felt my lips.”

  “Go away. Leave me alone, you traitor. I must return to my men. To my men and Sanders. They need me. I must complete my mission among the friendly aliens.”

  Rita’s voice was like a song he’d heard one too many times. “I was your friend.”

  “Never that. You were my wife.”

  She was sad. “You didn’t try to be my friend. I thought you didn’t love me. So I didn’t want to have your alien growing inside me.”

  Anger filled his mind, and he was nothing now except his mind. Cold. Hot. The desire to hurt. To fire a chain gun. To wield a chain saw. To fire a rocket that would obliterate all memories of his marriage. The steam demon hadn’t been able to do that.

  “Please leave me alone,” he pleaded. “I must concentrate on the mission. Discipline. Responsibility. Command. Must return to the team. Save the Earth. Destroy the enemy. Save . . . loved ones.”

  “Love,” she repeated. “Part of love is forgiveness.”

  “You killed our—”

  “Love.”

  “You murdered the—”

  “Alien.”

  “You’re—”

  “Dead!” She shouted the last word. “Like our alien, I’m dead. You’ll be dead too, if you don’t open yourself to new experiences. You must know what you’re fighting for. You can’t just fight against, otherwise the blue sphere shouldn’t have bothered saving you.”

  Hidalgo heard himself say, “I was bleeding to death. Why should I be saved and finish the journey only to die at the moment of success?”

  He felt his tongue move in his mouth. He felt his throat swallow. He had a body again. Now if he could only find out what they had done with his eyes so he could open them.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, Fly,” I said, finally regaining control. After encountering so many terrible faces, I was shocked to see something so friendly and funny. I stopped laughing. But the aliens still looked like cartoon characters.

  To describe one was to describe the other. The heads were large, like a gorilla’s, with huge foreheads. The eyes were wide-set. The nose was cute, like a little peanut. Their hair was walnut-brown. They had a kind of permanent five-o’clock shadow, like the caricatures of the first president of the United States to have his name on a moon plaque: Richard M. Nixon. Their complexion was a yellowish green; maybe they had a little copper in their blood.

  Their bodies were massive and looked strong. The arms were a bodybuilder’s delight. They were longer than a human’s; I’d bet they were exactly the right proportions for a gorilla. Then again, I might still be trying to justify my reaction; the forearms bulged too much for the simian comparison. They were exactly like cartoons—I thought of Popeye the Sailor and Alley Oop. I couldn’t figure out how Fly had kept from laughing!

  The big chest seemed even larger compared to the narrow waist. I couldn’t help noticing a detail that Fly would probably miss: the tailoring of their clothes was first-rate. They wore a sort of muted orange flight suit with lots of vest pockets. Except for all the pockets, the suits were surprisingly similar in design to standard-issue combat suits, Homo sapiens model. Some of the aliens didn’t wear clothes at all, or if they did, I couldn’t tell. It was reassuring to find these similarities to ourselves in our new-found friends. They even had cute little Combat boots so I couldn’t check on how far the gorilla comparison actually went.

  There was no doubt about these guys being friends. “Welcome to you,” they said in unison. All that was missing was a reference to the lollipop guild. There was some serious English teaching going on here.

  “Are you brothers?” Fly asked before I could.

  “We are of the Klave,” they said.

  “Can you speak individually?” I asked.

  “Yes,” they said in unison.

  I was good. I didn’t laugh. While I was working to keep a straight face, Fly took command of the situation. He stood up from the relaxichair, which seemed to sigh as he departed, and touched one member of the dynamic duo.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “We are of the Klave.”

  He repeated the procedure with the next one and received the same answer. Then he followed up: “That’s your race? Your, uh, species?”

  Magilla number one looked at Magilla number two. I think they were deciding which one would speak so we wouldn’t suffer through the stereo routine again. One of them answered: “The Klave R Us.”

  “How many?”

  The other took his turn. “Going to a trillion less. Coming from a hundred more.”

  A general would like slightly better information. I joined Fly. He was on one side of them so I took the other, effectively bracketing them. Now we had a ménage à quatre.

  I touched the one nearer to me and asked, “Do you have a name separ
ate from the other?”

  “Separate?” he asked. Apparently there were some problems with the English lessons.

  “This part of we?” asked mine. I nodded.

  They put their heads together. They weren’t doing any sort of telepathy. These guys were whispering the same sentence. Sounded like a tire going flat.

  Then they looked up at the same time. Mine spoke first: “After looking to your special English . . .”

  “Americanian,” Fly’s gorilla picked up the sentence.

  “We are giving ourselves to a name,” mine finished.

  Then we stood there like four idiots waiting for someone to say something. We’d succeeded in getting them to speak separately, but now they played sentence-completion games. What the hell, at least they gave themselves a handle: “We are Sears and Roebuck. We are your friend. We will take the battle to all enemies, and together we fight the Freds.”

  * * *

  Alone. Silence. She drifted down deserted streets.

  In the late afternoon the temperature dropped quickly. Jill put her windbreaker back on, but she was still cold. She didn’t like coffee, but she was glad to have the hot cup in her hand; and she needed the caffeine. Swirling the remains in the Styrofoam cup, she looked thoughtfully at the light brown color that came from two powdered creams. But it still tasted bitter, just like coffee. At least she had managed to find food in the abandoned grocery store.

  The sun was at a late afternoon slant, making objects caught in the light stand out from their surroundings. She was grateful she had sunglasses.

  She was less grateful that she was lost. Something had gone wrong with Ken’s plan. He’d talked the captain of the sub into meeting her, but only if she arrived on schedule. She hadn’t. The sub was long gone by now. Captain Ellison couldn’t be expected to endanger his crew any longer than necessary.

  Left to her own devices, as usual, Jill worked her way back to L.A., where the first sight greeting her was a zombie window washer. The thing saw her with its watery eyes and began shambling in her direction, brandishing a plastic bottle full of dirty water. Jill was fresh out of ammo.