Alien Crimes

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  McKenna was getting in over his head. He felt light-headed, taking shallow breaths, clenching his hands. “You don’t regret that those men died?”

  «Our emotions do not fit in your categories, either. We sorrow, yes. While also knowing that the loss is only a transition, as when our young come to shore. One gives up one form for another. Beyond the dark heaven perhaps there is something more but we do not know. Probably that is a question beyond our categories. We have limits just as do you, though not so great. You are young. There is time.»

  “Around here murder is a crime.”

  «We are not from here.»

  “Look, even if spirits or whatever go someplace else, that doesn’t excuse murder.”

  «Our young do not murder. They hunt and eat and grow.

  Again, a category difference between our kinds.»

  “Being dead matters to us.”

  «Our young that you attacked. By your own terms you murdered them.»

  The Centauri blinked slowly at McKenna with its clamshell opening in the leathery, round eyes. Then it stooped to get its sprayer. From its wheezing spout moisture swirled around all of them.

  The giddy swirl of this was getting to him. “I, I don’t know where to go with this. Your young have committed a crime.”

  «The coming together between stars of intelligence has a cost.

  We all pay it.»

  McKenna stood up. The damp scent of the alien swarmed around him. “Some more than others.”

  He barely made it to LeBouc’s funeral. It was a real one, with a burial plot. At the church he murmured soft words to the widow, who clung to him, sobbing. He knew that she would later ask how her husband had died. It was in her pleading eyes. He would not know what to say. Or what he would be allowed to say. So he sat in the back of the whitewashed Baptist church and tried to pay attention to the service. As LeBouc’s partner he had to say something in the eulogies. A moment after he sat down again he had no idea what he had said. People looked oddly at him. In the graveyard, as protocol demanded he stood beside the phalanx of uniforms, who fired a popping salute.

  At least LeBouc got buried. He had washed up on a beach while McKenna was in the hospital. McKenna had never liked the other ways, especially after his wife went away into cremation. One dealt with death, he felt, by dealing with the dead. Now bodies did not go into the earth but rather the air through cremation or then the ashes into the sea. People were less grounded, more scattered. With the body seldom present, the wheel working the churn between the living and dead could not truly spin.

  God had gone out of it, too. LeBouc’s fishing friends got up and talked about that. For years McKenna had noticed how his friends in their last profile became not dead Muslims or Methodists but dead bikers, golfers, surfers. That said, a minister inserted talk about the afterlife at the grave site and then the party, a respectable several hundred, went to the reception. There the tone shifted pretty abruptly. McKenna heard some guy in a seersucker suit declare “closure” just before the Chardon-nay ran out.

  On his sunset drive back down by the bay he rolled down the windows to catch the sea breeze tang. He tried to think about the alien.

  It had said they wanted privacy in their reproductive cycle. But was that it? Privacy was a human concept. The Centauris knew that because they had been translating human radio and TV dramas for a century. Privacy might not be a Centauri category at all, though. Maybe they were using humans’ own preconceptions to get some maneuvering room?

  He needed to rest and think. There would for sure come a ton of questions about what happened out there in the dark gulf. He did not know what he would or could say to LeBouc’s widow. Or what negotiations would come between Mobile PD and the feds. Nothing was simple, except maybe his slow-witted self.

  What he needed was some Zinfandel and an hour on his wharf.

  A black Ford sedan was parked on the highway a hundred yards from his driveway. It looked somehow official, deliberately anonymous. Nobody around here drove such a dull car, one without blemish or rust. Such details probably meant nothing, but he had learned what one of the desk sergeants called “street sense” and he never ignored it.

  He swung onto the oyster drive, headed toward home, and then braked. He cut his lights and engine, shifting into neutral, and eased the car down the sloping driveway, gliding along behind a grove of pines.

  In the damp night air rushing by he heard the crunching of the tires and wondered if anybody up ahead heard them too. Around the bend before the house he stopped and let the motor tick, cooling, while he just listened. Breeze whispered through the pines and he was upwind from the house. He eased open the car door and pulled his 9 mm from the glove compartment, not closing it, letting the silence settle.

  No bird calls, none of the rustle and scurry of early night.

  He slid out of the car, keeping low under the window of the door. No moon yet. Clouds scudded off the gulf, masking the stars.

  He circled around behind the house. On the gulf side a man stood in shadows just around the corner from the porch. He wore jeans and a dark shirt and cradled a rifle. McKenna eased up on him, trying to ID the profile from the dim porch light. At the edge of the pines he surveyed the rest of his yard and saw no one.

  Nobody carries a rifle to make an arrest. The smart way to kill an approaching target was to bracket him, so if there was a second guy he would be on the other side of the house, under the oak tree.

  McKenna faded back into the pines and circled left to see the other side of his house. He was halfway around when he saw the head of another man stick around the corner. There was something odd about the head as it turned to survey the backyard but in the dim light he could not make it out.

  McKenna decided to walk out to the road and call for backup. He stepped away. This caught the man’s attention and brought up another rifle and aimed straight at him. McKenna brought his pistol up.

  The recoil rocked his hand back and high as the 9 mm snapped away, two shots. Brass casings curled back past his vision, time in slow-mo. The man went down and McKenna saw he was wearing IR goggles.

  McKenna turned to his right in time to see the other man moving. McKenna threw himself to the side and down and a loud report barked from the darkness. McKenna rolled into a low bush and lay there looking out through the pines. The man was gone. McKenna used both hands to steady his pistol, elbows on the sandy ground, knowing that with a rifle the other man had the advantage at this distance, maybe twenty yards.

  He caught a flicker of movement at his right. The second man was well away from the wall now, range maybe thirty yards, bracing his rifle against the old cypress trunk. McKenna fired fast, knowing the first shot was off but following it with four more. He could tell he was close but the hammering rounds threw off his judgment. He stopped, the breech locking open on the last one. He popped the clip and slid in another^ a stinging smell in his widened nostrils.

  The flashes had made him night-blind. He lay still, listening, but his ears hummed from the shooting. This was the hardest moment, when he did not know what had happened. Carefully he rolled to his left and behind a thick pine tree. No sounds, as near as he could tell.

  He wondered if the neighbors had heard this, called some uniforms.

  He should do the same, he realized. Quietly he moved further left.

  The clouds had cleared and he could see better. He looked toward the second guy’s area and saw a shape lying to the left of the tree. Now he could make out both the guys, down.

  He called the area dispatcher on his cell phone, whispering.

  Gingerly he worked around to the bodies. One was Dark Glasses, the other Mr. Marine. They were long gone.

  They both carried M-1A rifles, the semi-auto version for civilians of the old M-14. Silenced and scoped, fast and sure, the twenty-round magazines were packed firm with snub-nosed .308s. A perfectly deniable, nonfederal weapon.

  So the feds wanted knowledge of the aliens tightly contained. And Dark Gl
asses had a grudge, no doubt. The man had been a stack of anxieties walking around in a suit.

  He walked out onto the wharf, nerves jumping in the salty aii; and looked up at the glimmering stars. So beautiful.

  Did some dark heaven lurk out there? As nearly as he could tell, the alien meant that it filled the universe. If it carried some strange wave packets that minds emitted, did that matter?

  That Centauri had seemed to say that murder didn’t matter so much because it was just a transition, not an ending.

  So was his long-lost wife still in this universe, somehow? Were all the minds that had ever lived?

  Minds that had lived beneath distant suns? Mingled somehow with Dark Glasses and Mr. Marine?

  This might be the greatest of all possible revelations. A final confirmation of the essence of religion, of the deepest human hopes.

  Or it might be just an alien theology, expressed in an alien way.

  A heron flapped overhead and the night air sang with the chirps and scurries of the woods. Nature was getting back to business, after all the noise and death.

  Business as usual.

  But he knew that this night sky would never look the same again.

  WOMB OF EVERY WORLD by Walter Jon Williams

  With long strides the swordsman walked across the desert. Gravel crunched beneath his feet. His eyes were dark, his nose a blade. He wore sturdy leather boots, very dusty, dark robes, and a flowing headdress, all suitable for the high stony land on which he walked. On his back he carried a pack with dried food, a skin shelter and a rolled-up carpet to lie on. Though the sun in the sky was small and pale, its heat still quavered on the horizon.

  The land rolled in gentle hills, endless as the ocean. The soil was gray and covered with stones of the same shade of gray. The air smelled of dust. There was little vegetation. The sky was cloudless and twilit, and the sun never moved.

  The swordsman’s blade was carried in a plain wooden scabbard covered with cracked leather. The broadsword was heavy, single-edged, broader in the foible than the forte. Its name was Tecmessa.

  The man walked beside a wagon road, two dusty ruts that carried in a straight line from one horizon to the next. The iron-shod wheels of numerous wagons had thrown all the stones out of the ruts, or ground them to powder, but the swordsman found the ruts too dusty and chose instead to walk on the stones near the road. The thick soles of his boots made this less trying than it might otherwise have been.

  While the man made only an occasional detour from the road, the slim form of his companion roamed left and right of the track, as if on a series of small errands. She returned from such a side trip and spoke.

  “A spider, common and brown. And ants, common and black. The former is happy to feed on the latter.”

  “Anything uncommon?”

  “Alas, no.”

  The man coughed briefly, the sound smothered by the strip of turban he had drawn over his mouth and nose to keep out the dust.

  “Our trek threatens to become tedious,” he remarked.

  “Threatens?”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “Sarcasm,” said the man, “is a poor companion on a long journey.”

  “So,” said his companion, “are spiders and ants.”

  They came to the mild crest of a rolling hill and looked into the valley beneath. Shrubs cast a dark shadow on part of the valley floor, and the two left the trail to investigate. As they approached there was a startling clap of wings, and a flock of birds thundered into the sky.

  “Quail,” said the swordsman.

  She turned her green eyes to him. “That implies there is enough here for quail to eat.”

  The swordsman raised a gloved hand to a drooping branch with long, dark green leaves. “Why don’t you investigate?”

  His companion darted beneath the shrubs while the swordsman looked at the branch with interest. He turned his eyes toward the ground and saw broken branches, debris, and a scattering of long brown seedpods. He squatted on his heels and picked up one of the pods. It crumbled in his hand and he extracted a pair of seeds, which he put in a pouch on his belt.

  His companion returned.

  “Ants and spiders,” she said.

  “Anything else?”

  “An elderly tortoise, and a snake anticipating the birth of many baby quail.”

  “What kind of snake?”

  “Bullsnake. Long as your arm.”

  The swordsman opened his hand and let fall the remains of the seedpod.

  “This appears to be some kind of dwarf mimosa,” he said. “Mimosa can tolerate drought, but they’re hardly desert plants. Yet here they are.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Thriving.”

  The man looked at her. “What did I say about sarcasm?”

  The pair returned to the road. No earth-shaking discoveries were made. Gray lizards the color of the desert scurried out of their way. Wind swirled dust over and around them. They paused for refreshment at a well, where they sat in the shade of a ruined caravanserai and ate a meal of dried meat, dried apricots, and stale hard tack.

  An hour later, traversing the bottom of another valley, they were ambushed by a troop of cavalry.

  Riders came rolling over the hill just ahead, spreading out in a crescent as gray dust rose in a pall. They didn’t charge, but advanced at a controlled trot. The swordsman paused and considered.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “Seventeen. Eleven with lances, two with swords, four with bows. And their beasts of course, some of which seem ill-natured and prone to violence.”

  The man frowned beneath the cloth that covered his mouth. He took a step back with his left foot and loosened Tecmessa in its sheath.

  The riders came forward and drew rein about ten paces from the man. The leader was a massive figure, broad as a wall, with pallid skin touched with the gray dust of the desert. His eyes were an eerie gold. A few links of mail, large and crudely forged, hung from beneath his robes. He carried a long lance and rode astride a bipedal lizard with long, sturdy legs, an occipital crest, and sharp teeth.

  “A troll,” murmured the swordsman’s companion. “What joy.”

  There were other trolls among the riders. Others were humans of varied hues and genders. One woman had four arms and carried two bows, both with arrows nocked.

  “Hail, traveler,” the troll said, in a voice like boulders gargling.

  “Hail,” said the swordsman.

  The gold eyes regarded him. “Have you lost your mount?”

  “I come on foot.”

  “You have chosen a long road to walk. Where are you bound?”

  “Gundapur.”

  “And your business there?”

  “I have no business there, or indeed anywhere. I travel for my soul’s sake, not for profit.”

  The troll narrowed his gold eyes. His mount hissed and bared carat-shaped teeth.

  “You will find the journey dangerous,” the troll said.

  “I am not indifferent to danger,” said the swordsman, “but I will walk the path in any case.”

  “Your name?”

  The swordsman took a long breath, then spoke. “I believe it is customary, before asking the name of a stranger, to introduce oneself, and in such a case as this to state clearly the right by which one asks.”

  A puzzled look creased the troll’s face.

  “I perceive you are unused to the impersonal pronoun,” the swordsman said. “Allow me to rephrase in the second person plural. Who the hell are you people, and why are you barring my way?”

  For a moment the troll could not decide between anger and laughter. He chose the latter. A grin split his huge gray face, revealing craggy yellow teeth.

  “Stranger, you have courage!”

  The swordsman shrugged. “I claim no more than the normal share,” he replied.

  Laughter gurgled from the troll. “I am Captain Grax,” he said. “These”—gesturing—“are my Free Companions. We’re employed as
caravan guards on the route from Lake Toi to Gundapur.”

  The swordsman drew his feet together and offered a modest bow.

  “My name is Aristide,” he said. “My companion is Bitsy.” He looked at the Free Companions. “You seem to have misplaced your caravan,” he said.

  “It’s ahead, at the Ulwethi Caravanserai. We’re patrolling, looking for bandits who are infesting the district.” The gold eyes narrowed. “You could be a bandit scout.”

  “If so,” said Aristide, “I’m a poor one. I’m without a mount, and I walked directly into your ambush.”

  “True,” Captain Grax considered, his cone-shaped ears flickering. “You have seen no one on the road?”

  “Nothing but ants, spiders, and the occasional tortoise.”

  “We’ll continue on for a while, then, in case you’re lying. If you are, we’ll come back and kill you after we’ve disposed of your allies.”

  “Good hunting to you,” said Aristide, and bowed again.

  Grax and his companions parted and rode around Aristide, on his trail. Aristide adjusted his turban and continued on his way, conversing the while with his companion.

  In less than four turns of the glass he came upon the caravanserai, a blocky stone fort crouched over an oasis. Animals and people swarmed about the place, more than could be contained within its walls. A pen for extra animals had been built out of dry stone, while many brightly colored tents were pitched near the oasis. On the far side of the muddy pool, Aristide could see what appeared to be a market.

  Far from moving on, the travelers seemed to have settled into this remote outpost for a long stay.

  Bitsy gave the swordsman a green-eyed look over her shoulder, then slipped away to conduct an investigation.

  The swordsman walked past the stone corral and a row of tents to the elaborate arched door of the caravanserai, and asked the guard where he could find the seneschal.