“The truth about what you’re doing with the Cetians.”
“Staying ahead of the competition.”
“How?”
“I’m working on that.”
“Why are they here in your basement?”
“Because I hear they can do things we can’t do.”
She shook her head. “They don’t have magical powers.”
“Maybe not magical, but they’ve got powers.”
“If you expect me to coax a miracle out of them, you can keep your money.”
“I don’t expect anything, Uxanna,” Hob said. “I just want you to get them accustomed to the way things are, make them feel at home.”
“Why?”
“Because I want them on my team.”
“Your team?” She would have raised her eyebrows, if she’d had any.
“Willing to work with me.”
“Or for you?”
“Semantics.”
“What makes you think I can bring them around to your way of doing things?”
“You’ve known Cetians, Uxanna,” Hob said. “You can make them understand.”
“Understand what?”
“Well, to start with, where they are.”
“They know where they are.”
“How can you tell?”
“Hob, do you think the Cetians are geniuses, or do you think they’re simple animals?”
“I’m not talking about what world they’re on, I’m talking about their unfamiliarity with this one.”
“Well, they certainly know how they got here.”
“You’re saying they understand something as complex as tachyon transmission?”
“They probably understand it better than you and me put together.”
“Really?”
“Really. They have a remarkable way with math.”
For once, Hob had nothing to say. Uxanna wondered if he’d ever considered the possibility that his captives might be smarter than him.
“If you want to get anywhere with the Cetians, you’ll have to be realistic about them,” she said.
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t just try,” Uxanna said. “Do it.”
Hob shook his head. “They’re so different from us.”
“Did you think they’d just be gawking tourists?”
“Maybe I didn’t consider all the possibilities,” he admitted.
“Did it occur to you there are reasons why the Tachtrans Authority brought them to Earth?”
“Sure, and I know what those reasons are.”
“What, pray tell?”
“Money and power.”
“And there couldn’t be any other reason?”
“Such as?”
“Study, communication, advancement of science.”
“Look, Uxanna, I didn’t hire you to lecture me.”
“Maybe you need a lecture,” she said. “Do you realize what will happen if we’re caught?”
“We won’t,” Hob said. “My building is secure and I’m protected from snooping by the law.”
“The law can turn on you.”
“Let me worry about that, okay?”
She knew from experience that she would get nothing more out of him today. “I must be insane, but okay.”
“I’ll have the money for you tomorrow.”
She could tell by his scowl that he was going to part with more money than he wanted to, but she doubted it would be as much as she was demanding. Hob had a way of evading full payment, no matter how airtight the deal seemed. He prided himself on being a savvy businessman. Since this operation was illegal, she had no recourse but to take what he gave her. That was why she had demanded such a large sum.
“While we’re being so honest with each other, there’s something I should ask you,” she said.
“What is it?”
“If this doesn’t work out, what are you going to do with the Cetians?”
He looked away. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just talk to them and everything will be fine.”
* * * *
Uxanna thought about her new job while she rode a crowded zip to her building and breathed through her nitroxytube. She wanted to win the Cetians’ trust, but she wasn’t working with them for any honest reason that she could see, and that made her feel pretty sleazy.
When she reached her stop, she muscled her way through the crowd, thinking about how they used to believe tachyon transmission would change everything. In some ways it had, but it turned out that it only worked over vast distances, due to quantum entanglement, so people still got around the old-fashioned way for the most part.
Uxanna took an elevator from underground to her tiny room on the seventy-third floor of her building, annoying the other passengers with the lingering scent of the pit. At her door she blinked for admittance and went inside. She drank a little beer and ate a few desultory bites of an algae cake, putting the remaining food in the staser. None of the usual entertainments enticed her tonight. She decided to sleep, in the hope that her gloom was the result of fatigue rather than guilt.
She stripped, took a disinfectant shower, and lay down, but she didn’t doze off right away. When she finally did, her dreams were murky and smelled foul. Burrowing through the bed, she passed through the floors of the apartment building down to its basement. She emerged in a beautiful but dwindling swamp, its shrinkage the work of strange creatures from somewhere far away infesting the home swamps by the thousands.
Her people had tried to be reasonable, but the aliens’ demands were insatiable, relentless. No one knew what they wanted, least of all the strangers themselves. She knew only that they were destroying her sweet world without remorse. There was no way to slow them.
And yet they had to be stopped.
She awakened in a sweat, thinking for a moment that she was still burrowing in the mud. Her breathing was labored, and it took a couple of minutes to return to normal. Even then, she felt disturbed, edgy.
Maybe a drink would help.
The staser was within arm’s reach, like everything else in her room, so she rolled over and got herself a licker. She sat on the bed’s edge and nursed it while the dream faded into dim memory.
It had taken a lot of strength to survive on Cet Four. She’d been a robust girl who’d grown into a big woman, and she was fairly bright, so the TA accepted her application. She had the physical development not to be crushed by the heavy gravity on the new world. A lot of colonists didn’t last long. But if you could make it, your muscle density increased over time.
Upon her return to Earth she felt buoyant walking around in the light gravity, even if some people were intimidated by her size.
She didn’t mind the stares. Going to Cet Four had made her healthier. When a body was disassembled, minor imperfections were noted so that the reconstruction was a marked improvement on the original. It was creepy realizing that you were dead, but you would never know it from the way you felt after you climbed out of an assimulation booth. When she returned to Earth after sixteen years on Cet Four, her health was improved yet again. She now inhabited her third body.
But her memory was intact. What did she care what religious fanatics said about assimulants losing their souls? She was still the same person she’d always been. It didn’t matter that she’d been reassembled twice, or that several generations had gone by, or that so much had changed. She was Uxanna, and she always would be.
Her sense of self hadn’t been a problem when she came back, but despite her confidence and strength it was still hard for her to make a living on Earth after the meager TA assistance expired.
In dire need of income, she’d had to find a way. No matter how hard she tried, she could get no work. That had changed after she tracked down Hob; he always had something for her to do. Some of
the jobs were puzzling, almost pointless, even; but she did them without complaint and his payments kept her going, even if he did shortchange her every time. Pick up something, drop off something else, deliver a verbal message to someone…that sort of thing. She was pretty sure it was shady work, but nothing all that taxing.
That’s why she had been shocked to walk into Hob’s basement yesterday and see three Cetians in a pit.
She’d been promised fifteen mets for convincing the Cetians to play along with Hob, but she knew was going to be cheated again, and if she was caught it would lead to real trouble with the law. She’d probably get sent back to Cet Four if she didn’t go to prison.
She ought to walk away before it was too late. But what about the Cetians? What would become of them if she didn’t stick around?
She rose, showered, dressed in a waterproof skinsuit, pulled on a pair of thigh-length boots, and fixed herself something to eat. In half an hour she was out the door and on her way to Hob’s ramshackle building in one of the city’s oldest slums.
He wasn’t there when she arrived. Cruvayn, his flunky, led her into the basement after admitting her and making sure the screens were up. Hob’s run-down building had more security than the TA headquarters downtown, and the only one Hob trusted at the door was Cruvayn. Not even utility robots were allowed to let people in.
“Where’s Hob?” she asked.
“Out,” said the stooped, thin Cruvayn.
“I didn’t think he ever left.”
“Every now and then,” Cruvayn said in his hoarse voice.
“He’s really excited about this plan he has with the Cetians, isn’t he?”
Cruvayn shrugged.
“What’s he going to do with them?”
“Who knows?”
“He really ought to hire exobiologists for this job,” she said.
“Why tell me?” Cruvayn asked.
“Because you’ve been with him a long time, and you can talk to him.”
“He doesn’t care what I think.”
“I guess it wouldn’t matter if he did,” she said. “Even if you told him to hire qualified people, he couldn’t do it. They’d turn him in.”
Cruvayn shrugged again. “As long as Mr. Dancer pays me, I do what he wants.”
“Even if it lands you in prison?”
“He’ll get me a lawyer.”
“Of course he will.” By now they were at the edge of the pit.
“Need anything?” Cruvayn asked as Uxanna climbed onto the lift.
“No, just some time with our friends.”
Cruvayn took that as his cue to leave her alone. Uxanna grunted a command and was lowered into the pit.
“Hello,” she said, bending at the knees as she plopped into the muck.
The Cetians were almost invisible as she approached them, but she could make out their outlines as they detected her presence and began to crawl toward her.
“Do you like my wardrobe?” She lifted her thick arms. “It’s not fashionable, but it should withstand the rigors of muck wading.”
They couldn’t understand her, of course, but dripping limbs began popping out of segmented white bellies and stretching from the slime toward Uxanna. This was a much more enthusiastic greeting than she’d expected. They’d doubtless discussed her while she was gone, and decided to welcome her back.
“It’s going to be all right,” she said, feeling a little foolish speaking to them as if they were children. As far as their knowledge of this world went, they might as well have been. Come to think of it, she could say the same thing about herself, considering how long she had been absent from her home world. “You’ll see. It’ll be fine.”
She kept talking as their splitting digits crept into her hands like probing snakes. One of them massaged her spine and the base of her skull. There was no hesitation on this second meeting with them. They had decided that she could be trusted. But could she? She was working for Hob Dancer, not for these poor exiles.
She wanted to help them, but what could she really do?
“Getting along pretty well, are we?” a thin voice asked from above.
She looked up to see Hob peering over the pit’s edge.
“Better than yesterday.”
“We’re all fresher this morning.”
“I was surprised you weren’t here when I came in,” Uxanna said. “I thought you lived here.”
“I have a private life, believe it or not.”
She felt the throbbing turn irregular and understood that Hob’s presence disturbed the Cetians.
“You should leave me alone with them,” she said.
“All right,” Hob replied. “I’ll be in the office.”
She listened to his echoing footsteps diminish. When she was sure he was gone, she lay down in the muck with the three Cetians. She had to open her mind to them, allowing the fields of their cerebral formations to interact with hers. That was something she had only partially succeeded at, even during her best days on Cet Four. Nevertheless, she was as good at it as anyone in the colony.
“I won’t hold back,” she said. “I’ll tell you all I know.”
The Cetians appreciated that. They were lonely, isolated, and frightened. They despaired of ever returning to their home, and this was evident in their tentative touch, a deadening depression that she identified with, bringing her together with the Cetians in a way that had never happened on Cet Four.
“You realize that you’re expected to cooperate with this man Hob?”
They understood.
“So will you do what he wants?”
She felt only uncertainty, both theirs and hers. That was the main problem in communicating with Cetians. It was all pretty vague, at least in terms of human perception. She had always believed that they grasped more than anyone realized, although she had no evidence of that. It was just a feeling.
She made a habit of ignoring feelings. She had learned long ago to go by reason. It was because of emotion, a sense of helplessness, that she had fled Earth after giving up her daughter Kajuri for adoption. That was only sixteen years ago to her, but generations had passed here on Earth. Upon her recent return, almost everything was different. Traveling twelve light-years and back on tachyon jets really messed with you…let alone discarding your body and having it reconstructed, not once but twice.
At least she had done it voluntarily. The three Cetians must have been abducted from Cet Four. She radiated sympathy, hoping they would absorb it.
A shock stiffened her and made her muscles spasm, as if she were the ground in a surge of electrons. Three minds touched hers. Uxanna had never felt such a forceful bond with Cetians before, not even close, and it was grueling. She tried to disregard the almost nauseating sensation that caused her to grind her molars. It was what they were saying that was important, not the physical sensations accompanying the message.
It wasn’t so, they were telling her. They hadn’t been abducted. They had come to Earth voluntarily.
“What?” She thought she must have misunderstood.
The Cetians confirmed it. They had been selected by their people to come to Earth to find someone who could help them put a stop to the destruction. The Cetians didn’t understand why rational beings would not see their viewpoint on this crucial matter. They thought the rapacious humans on their world must have been acting willfully and independently. No civilized race would allow such an atrocity. They had believed that someone on Earth would empathize, if only that someone could be found. With the aid of a tiny sympathetic minority on Cet Four, they had been transmitted to Earth.
“You came on a mission,” Uxanna said with dismay, “and somehow you ended up in Hob’s pit?”
The intensity of the Cetians’ emotions, their sense of urgency, pressed on her like a weight insupportable even on her powerful shoulders.
“Please, let me go,” she said. “It’s hurting me.”
The pressure was abruptly cut off as limbs withdrew. She lay in the mud, exhausted, her breathing ragged.
She was right in the middle of something very dangerous. If Hob got caught, Uxanna would be in just as much trouble as him, maybe more. The difference was that he had the resources to buy his way out of it. She’d be up against the power of the TA. The law would not treat her kindly. Maybe Hob would help her, maybe not. She wasn’t as sanguine about that as Cruvayn.
Uxanna had made Hob promise to be honest with her, so it was up to her to show him how it was done. She hadn’t intended to reveal everything, but maybe that’s what it would take to help the Cetians. She wasn’t who the Cetians were looking for, because she had no influence, but somehow she had to lead them to someone who did. This realization hadn’t come to her all at once, even with the shock of this new bond.
It had been gnawing at her since she first saw the Cetians the previous day.
As she climbed onto the lift, she was exhausted, but at the same time she felt exhilarated. She’d made her decision, and she would stick to it. And if Hob didn’t like it? He might not pay her? So what? She would find a way to help the unfortunate creatures in his pit with or without Hob’s money.
The worst that could happen was that she would be sent back to Cet Four, or serve a prison term here on Earth. Those weren’t happy alternatives, but she saw no others.
After she hosed herself down, she walked purposefully to Hob’s office. She was putting together a plan. As soon as it became clear she wasn’t getting the full amount they’d agreed on, she’d have a reason not to cooperate with Hob even his mercenary mind would understand. That would give her some leverage.
He looked up at her as she walked into his office and planted herself in the chair facing his desk, unmindful of the rivulets still running from her waterproof clothing.
“The money has been ka-chinged to your account,” he said with a rueful expression on his broad face. “Untraceably, of course.”
She realized after a moment that she was gaping and closed her mouth.
“Don’t worry, it’s all there,” Hob said.
“Really?”
The Alien MEGAPACK® Page 3
