Jim Baen's Universe-Vol 2 Num 3

by Jim Baen's Universe! staff

  "Yeah, I had something to do with that. Did you see the video of the day the ship landed in Washington?"

  "Yes!"

  "You remember the guy who came out of the crowd and entered the ship, who told the Sha'Chá what they wanted to know?"

  She nodded.

  "That was me."

  Now her jaw dropped to match the widened eyes. "You're . . ."

  "Justin Reynolds." I nodded to her. "The one and only."

  "Wow." Her voice was soft. I noticed that she didn't move away from me. That pleased me.

  "I've always wanted to know . . ." Her voice was diffident.

  "Why I did it?" She nodded. "You remember what I said on the Mall, before I went in the ship?" Another nod in response. "That wasn't the first time I'd met Sha'Chá. I was the one who found their kids."

  Sharon's eyes were wide again, and she took a deep breath. "So you were the one who . . ."

  "I made the first contact. Or 'First Contact', as the newsies called it."

  "Wow." She leaned back, put her feet on a higher rung and wrapped her arms around her knees. "So, what was it like?"

  That's how I found myself telling her the whole story; how the radar nets tracked something from outer space in to where it crashed in western Kentucky that night. I worked on an action team for one of the alphabet agencies: FBI, CIA, NSA, and others that you've probably never heard of. It doesn't matter which one. It so happened that my team was the closest to the site. With a fast chopper and exact GPS coordinates, we managed to beat the local law enforcement there. We found a door or hatch sprung open. Gunny Hackett, our team lead, sent me in.

  I was starting to sweat, the recollection of that night was so vivid. My shoulders moved in echo of how I stood when I stepped through that door, night vision goggles in place and turning everything a monochrome green. Even my feet were shuffling under the table, itching to move in the same patterns I stepped down that dark, twisted and half-collapsed corridor. I remember the adrenaline pumping, the hearing so acute it seemed like I could hear a fly's heartbeat. I remembered moving past that final angle of bent hallway wall and finally seeing the occupants . . . passengers . . . saucer people . . . whatever they were.

  There were six of them in the control cabin, but only two were still alive. Two of the most beautiful creatures I'd ever seen. Imagine five foot tall bipedal house cats. No, that's not what they looked like, but that's as close as I can come to describing them. I was so . . . so shocked at what I saw that my gun slipped and clanked against my harness. That was when she looked up and saw me.

  Pf't'ka. Even ten years later that memory gave me a thrill. Green eyes meeting mine, wide set in that silver furred face. The other one looked something like a Burmese cat. Pf't'ka was working with what looked to be a medical kit straight out of Star Trek, trying to save him. I distracted her for a moment, but she kept right on working, until one of her devices just gave a solid tone beep for several seconds. I remember her hands freezing, her gaze slashing to that device. I recognized the slump that came to her shoulders. I also recognized the yowling wail that poured from her the moment after that, the despair it signaled.

  "So there was only the one left alive?" Sharon asked.

  "Yes. Her name was Pf't'ka."

  "I never knew that." Sharon's voice was subdued. "I don't remember that being in the news stories."

  "It wasn't. I found out . . . afterwards."

  Sharon didn't say anything for a minute. That was good. I needed a bit of a break. Old feelings were coming back to me, old memories were surfacing—things I had stored away for a lot of years, things I had worked at suppressing. My head was starting to hurt. But since I had made it this far, I wasn't about to stop now. I walked over to the work bench and leaned against it. She looked over at me.

  "What happened after that?"

  "I remember beckoning her to follow me to the door out of the craft. Gunny had a hooded coat that we threw over her. Joey Delvecchio and I hustled Pf't'ka to the chopper and got her away." Flashes of sitting in the chopper, watching Pf't'ka's face lit by the instrument panel lights. "Only to deliver her to her death."

  "Did you know that then?"

  "No. We just took her to the closest secure facilities and turned her over to the science johnnies. Same difference." I stared at Sharon, but I was seeing her face again—the face that still gave me nightmares.

  The next part came out slowly. It took some effort to talk about the lab complex, because that's where I failed.

  My team got assigned to internal security, since we already knew what was going on. The lab teams were working 24/7. I usually took the night shift. I could see that lights were on and people were busy all over the place, except in the room where the glass isolation chamber was. Welcome to Earth, Pf't'ka.

  They were running her ragged. She wasn't doing well. I overheard more than one conversation between doctors, techs and analysts. They all boiled down to two things. Even after the autopsies of the other bodies, they still didn't know enough to be able to help her. Worse, orders came from the highest levels that no attempts to contact her people were to be made.

  They called her "It." I think it was then that the anger began. They knew her name by then. The least they could have done was have the courtesy to use it. She was a person. She deserved that much dignity.

  I could see her getting weaker and weaker. Nobody could figure out why, if she was injured, or sick, or not able to metabolize the food we gave her. But every night I would spend time at the wall of the isolation chamber, looking in. And sometimes she would come out and look at me. Haggard as she was, she still resembled a silver Persian cat, one of the really elegant ones.

  It didn't take too long for me to arrive at Pf't'ka's final night.

  "One night she walked over to the wall and put her hand up on the glass. After a moment, I matched it with my hand on my side of the wall. I don't know how long we stood there, hand to hand, looking at each other, but I felt close to her. After a time, she dropped her hand, gave a funny little bow, and shuffled back to her bed behind the so-called privacy curtains.

  "The next day they told me that Pf't'ka died in the night. So we packed up and went home." With what seemed to be a void in my spirit, one that my growing anger bid fair to fill.

  "I'm sorry," Sharon said.

  "I was angry—enraged—with the people who allowed her to die and who prevented attempts to signal to the Sha'Chá."

  "And perhaps a little bit with yourself?"

  I froze for a moment. That question lanced straight to the heart of the issue. "Yeah. Somewhere along the line I felt Pf't'ka had a claim on me, one that I failed. And I was probably more angry with myself than anyone."

  "I know what happened next. Landing Day—the Mother Ship came to Washington."

  I could hear the capitals in her voice again, and winced.

  She picked up on it. "What did I say?"

  "That bit of UFO-speak just really grates on me. The ship that landed on the mall was no such thing. They have some big ships, true, but that one wasn't much more than a Coast Guard cutter in their scheme of things. They picked it because it was large enough to have defensive screens and small enough to fit in the space of the Mall."

  "And you were there." Sharon's voice was a lot calmer than I felt.

  "Yes. I was there." I remembered sprinting to a building, riding the elevator to the top, then climbing stairs to access the roof. "We were on oversight, split between two buildings. Joey and I were on one, Gunny and Tarl were on the other. We were there when the ship set down." Watching the crowd through scopes, looking for weapons or bombs. "We were there when the ship opened up and the commander came out." I still remember the sheer impact of seeing what a grown Sha'Chá looked like. The grace, the carriage, the form and beauty. And I remember how my anger flared.

  To this day I can't think of that picture without getting angry. Seeing what Pf't'ka could have grown into. Seeing her picture in the sky, along with the others. Knowing that
someone had been and was still looking for her, still missed her, still wanted her . . . I have never felt more like a weapon than I did that day. A weapon that turned in the hand of those who had loosed it. If I had known the price I would pay . . . I hope I would have had the courage to still do what I did.

  "I knew what our government would try to do, how they would try to hide everything. And I just couldn't let that happen. The face of Pf't'ka, her green eyes shining, her hand on the glass, drove me off that roof, out into the crowd and through them to the barricade." I shrugged. "And we all know what happened after that."

  There was another long moment of silence. "I thought you went with them." Sharon's voice was quiet, but her eyes never left my face.

  "I did for a while. When I left I thought I would never come back. I expected to end my life out among the stars, among the Sha'Chá."

  "Why?"

  I stared at her. "Don't you remember what it was like? The polls showed that 90% of Americans felt I had betrayed the US. Every other day the news channels had stories about how assassins had attempted to kill me." That was just the ones the newsies found out about. There were others that didn't make the records. "And the people who didn't think I was a traitor blamed me for everything else that happened."

  The almost universal condemnation of the US for allowing Pf't'ka to die without attempting to communicate with the Sha'Chá. The most unusual experience for the US of having widespread support among the Islamic countries for seeing to it that the "demons" were dead. The impeachment of the President and Vice-President of the United States. The "cleaning house" of Congress, where fewer than 5% of the incumbents were re-elected.

  The almost unanimous vote of the United Nations to relocate to Australia.

  And, oh, how the dynamic in the Middle East changed. The treaty between Israel and the Sha'Chá, which allowed the Israelis to deploy sensors and force-fields in defensive modes. Weapons and explosives couldn't enter the country. When suicide bombers tried to use stuff that had been put in place before the fields went up, they found that personal sized force-fields existed. The CNN shot of a suicide bomber blowing himself up inside one was disturbing, to say the least—all the force of the blast concentrated on one body inside the force field produced purée of person. And when the Arabic countries and terrorist organizations tried to scream about how the bomber's human rights had been violated, the Israeli defense minister's response had been classic. "We have violated no one's human rights. We did not force this man to do this. If he wants to blow himself up, that's his business. We simply insured that he would not blow anyone else up when he did it." After a few more of those incidents—all captured on video, thanks to the advanced sensors—the suicide bombers stopped . . . in Israel, anyway. And the rabbis ceased their muttering . . . about the treaty, anyway.

  The turmoil in the science crowd was almost as bad. Most of the "Life started from spores from space" crowd merged with most of the evolutionists. At the same time the "Intelligent Design" crowd picked up support. Some of the arguments about the similarities between humans and the Sha'Chá got pretty intense. As far as I was concerned, it just proved that God used the same template more than once.

  Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. The US economy sank like a rock. It was years before it recovered.

  I hadn't planned any of that. I suppose that most or all of it would have happened anyway. But they happened because of something I did. And I remember the bitterness I felt when it seemed that no one—no one—thought that I did the right thing.

  "This was all your fault?" Sharon asked.

  "Say my responsibility, rather. I did what I did."

  "So why did you come back?" For the first time I noticed that Sharon's voice was calm, that she was asking questions like she was interested in the answers. I looked at her, and she looked back at me with a raised eyebrow.

  "I really did mean to never come back. But after a while . . . I just didn't fit. I never felt comfortable among the cats." It was inevitable that the Sha'Chá would get that nickname. "So they brought me back and made arrangements."

  "Wait a minute," Sharon interrupted. "I've seen the video of Landing Day dozens of times. The guy that went into the spaceship had blond hair. Yours is much darker."

  "I said they made some arrangements." I shrugged. "For people who can fly between the stars faster than light, some things aren't so hard. I used to be almost pure Nordic; now I look almost Italian."

  "What else?"

  "Oh. Well, my teeth are perfect, now. No fillings or crowns. My fingerprints are different. And they tweaked my DNA a little, so that it doesn't match what's on record."

  "They . . . tweaked . . . your DNA."

  Another shrug. "What can I say? They feel like they owe me."

  Sharon cleared her throat. "You got Rowf when you came back, didn't you?" She looked up at me.

  "Yes."

  "And he was with you all this time." That wasn't a question. "Your only friend."

  "Yes." My throat was tight.

  "So you basically came back, crawled into a hole and pulled it in after yourself."

  I stood up straight. "Wait a minute! People were trying to kill me. If they knew I was back they'd come after me again."

  "How would they know you?"

  "By . . ." My brain caught up with my voice.

  "You don't look like you did. How would they find you?"

  I didn't say anything. I couldn't. I'd been hiding all these years for nothing.

  Sharon had no pity. "If they'd really tried to find you, they could have. All they had to do was look for strangers. You keep to yourself, make no attempt to blend in, don't talk to anyone. If you wanted to hide, you should have gone to Europe."

  Gunny Hackett would have my ears.

  It took me a minute to find my voice. "So I wasted all this time. Figures."

  "I said you didn't hide very well. I didn't say you wasted the time."

  My turn to lift a sardonic eyebrow.

  Sharon grinned for a moment, then continued with, "John, you had several severe shocks in relatively short order. You were hurt, wounded, damaged. I don't blame you for hiding." She reached out and patted my arm. "And not everything that happened was bad, you know. Even some of us hard-headed Yankees are starting to admit that."

  We sat in silence for another long moment before she spoke again. "So, when did you start doing Reidinger?"

  "Ah, that. That comes under the heading of the three R's."

  "Three R's." It wasn't a question, and Sharon gave me a glare like my third grade teacher. She was good at it.

  "Yep—reconciliation, rehabilitation and redemption. After a few weeks here, just me and Rowf, I was about to go nuts. I've been active all my life; I had to be doing something. I had done some work with metals in college, so I ordered in some welding and cutting equipment and started experimenting. In about a year, I did my first statue. I guess you could say the rest is history."

  "Oh, how ironic." Sharon laughed. "J. Reidinger, the reclusive favorite of all the artsy crowd, is none other than Justin Reynolds, ostracized citizen of the USA."

  It took some effort, but I chuckled along with her. "That thought has occurred to me before. I've drawn more than a little comfort and satisfaction from it."

  She sobered quickly. "Okay, that's the rehabilitation aspect. Redemption?"

  "Even ignoring what I did that day, most of my adult life was spent doing things on the borderline, sometimes well over the line, of right and wrong. My work can't make up for any of that, but maybe, just maybe, it can bring about some understanding, or at least provoke thought."

  "Oh, it does that." Sharon gave a firm nod. "Dervish alone atones for any sins you might have committed. It's beautiful, it's disquieting, and no one who sees it can forget it." I stored that comment away in my heart, where it brought no little warmth to me. "And reconciliation?"

  "That's the hardest one: to reconcile the Sha'Chá and humanity, to reconcile me and humanity." I stopped for a moment
. "To reconcile me with myself." I clasped my hands in front of me. "To that end I offer up my work equally to the world and to the stars."

  "What do you mean?"

  "For every Reidinger you know of, there is another among the Sha'Chá."

  "What? Does anyone else know this?"

  "No, and I'd appreciate it if you don't tell anyone."

  "Why?" Sharon was upset again.

  "Because that's the way I want it. There will come a time when my story will come out, when the Sha'Chá will tell it. Then my work will come together and everyone will see it. But not now."

  Sharon stared at me for a couple of minutes. I looked back at her, feeling shaken but purged and clean for the first time in a long time. I'd made my case, told my story. Now it was up to her.