Alien Child

by Pamela Sargent

  She waited, trying to calm herself. “Listen to me. I know you can understand. I won’t come in if you don’t want me to. Just open the door and put Dusky back outside, please.” Her anger rose; Dusky was her cat, not Llare’s. “Open this door!” she cried. “Give her back right now, or you’ll be sorry!”

  She steadied herself. Screaming at Llare would do no good. She spun around and ran back to the east wing. A small screen was just inside the door; she approached it anxiously. “I have to speak to Llare,” she said. “Signal her for me—I have to ask her something.”

  “You are not authorized,” the mind’s toneless voice replied. “Llare cannot be disturbed without authorization.”

  “I don’t care. This is important. My cat’s in the west wing—I only want her back. Please let me talk to Llare.”

  “You have no authorization.”

  Nita shook her fist. The screen flickered. A face was staring out at her now, one she had never seen before. “I didn’t ask for an image,” she said.

  “May I talk to you?” This face did not sound as calm as the other images. It had wide cheekbones, a strong chin, pale-blue eyes, and thick, disorderly light-brown hair. She could see the breadth of its shoulders under a blue coverall, and assumed that the image represented a male, although its voice was not as low as most of the men’s voices were. A thin chain from which an authorization dangled was around its neck.

  “Get off the screen,” Nita muttered. “I have to talk to Llare.”

  “Llare’s sleeping. Can’t you talk to me?”

  “But Llare can’t be asleep. My cat’s in the west wing. Llare must have opened the door.” Why would the mind lie to her about that? She wondered if it was beginning to fail again. “What are you called, anyway?”

  “My name’s Sven. You’re called Nita, aren’t you?”

  “Well, you ought to know. All the images do.” Nita moved closer to the screen; the image called Sven seemed to shrink back.

  “Your cat’s all right,” Sven said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I didn’t mean—”

  His voice, she noticed, trembled a little. None of the faces had ever spoken to her in this manner; Sven did not sound like the mind. “I didn’t ask for your image,” she said. “Will you get off the screen?”

  “But I’m not an image. I’m like you, except that I’m a boy. I’m real, Nita—I live here. Will you talk to me?”

  She clasped her hands together, frightened, unable to believe this. “What do you mean?” she managed to say. “There’s no one here except Llipel and Llare and me.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m here, too. They just didn’t want you to know, it wasn’t time to know. I didn’t know about you, either, until a little while ago.”

  Llipel had lied. No, that wasn’t quite accurate. She had kept this secret and had allowed Nita to believe that she was alone. She had said no one would come here; she had not mentioned that one of Nita’s kind already dwelled in the Institute. Nita felt betrayed.

  “Now you know,” Sven continued. “I’ve been waiting for a chance to talk to you without Llare finding out.” His blue eyes gazed at her intently. “I thought you’d be happy to know about me. I was excited when I found out about you.”

  She could not accept it. She had longed for a friend, but if Sven was real, it meant that the guardian she had always trusted had deceived her. “You can’t be real,” she burst out. “You’re just something the mind called up. Llipel would have told me about you.”

  “But I can prove I’m real.” His face dropped off the screen for a moment, then reappeared. He lifted his arms. Her gray cat squirmed in his grip and meowed; he drew Dusky to his chest and patted her gently.

  “Dusky!” she cried.

  “I would have put her back in the garden right away, but you sounded so angry—I didn’t know what you might do. I’ll show you I’m real. You can come and meet me, in the tower. We can talk in the lobby—I’ve never seen that room before. Will you come?”

  “But I can’t. I’m not authorized to go there.”

  “I’m authorized. I can ask the doors to open for you.”

  She hesitated. The boy might be real, unbelievable as that seemed, but she didn’t know anything about him. He might not let her leave the tower again. He was authorized, while she wasn’t.

  “I’ll come there,” she said at last, “but I’ll find another way to get to the tower.” An idea occurred to her. “Llipel’s asleep. I might be able to take her authorization.”

  Sven nodded. “I’ll wait for you, then. I’ll bring your cat there, too.”

  The screen went blank.

  5

  Llipel and she always slept in the room marked ADMINISTRATOR, DEPARTMENT OF EMBRYOLOGY, Nita on the couch, Llipel curled up on the desk. “Keep the light dim,” Nita whispered to the screen near the door, although even bright light was unlikely to wake her guardian. She hesitated in front of the door, then pressed her hand against it.

  The door opened; she stepped inside. For a moment, she thought of waking her guardian and asking her what to do. Llipel might have had reasons for concealing Sven’s existence from her. But Sven would be expecting her to come to the tower alone.

  Llipel was still deeply asleep; her thin arms were wrapped around her long legs. Nita crept across the pale carpet and stopped in front of the desk.

  She was still numb with the shock of finding out about Sven; now she was planning to steal from her guardian. Llipel’s unlidded eyes were covered by their pearly membranes; when she slept, little could rouse her. She tiptoed around the desk until she was behind Llipel, who was lying on her side.

  The chain was barely visible under her neck fur. Nita would have to ease it over her head somehow. She reached toward the chain, then noticed that a thin, flat piece of metal joined the links in the back. She touched that part of the chain and tugged a little as her fingers gripped it tightly. The two ends suddenly separated; the authorization slid down and clinked as the thin rectangle struck the top of the desk.

  She froze. Llipel whistled softly, but did not move. Nita crept around the desk. The authorization was lying near Llipel’s left shoulder; she picked it up.

  Her heart pounded; her throat was dry as she fled from the room. She was several paces down the hall before she halted to study the chain. The thin piece of metal, it seemed, was a clasp; she put the ends of the chain together and hung it around her neck.

  Pangs of guilt pricked her for only a second. If Llipel had told her the truth earlier, she would not have had to take the chain. A time for togetherness with one of her own people had finally come.

  Inside a closet, in a room called INSTITUTE PERSONNEL ONLY, she found a pair of coveralls that would fit her if she rolled up the arms and legs. She almost never wore clothes and might be concealing little that Sven had not already seen. But the images on the screen had always been clothed, and Beate had told her that her people removed their garments when they wanted to share love. She did not want Sven to think she wanted that much togetherness.

  At the end of the hall, perpendicular to the south exit, stood the wide door marked GENETICS DEPARTMENT. She stepped forward, fearing that the door might not open after all. But she had authorization now; the scanner would have to let her pass. Her hand touched the door; it slid open.

  She had seen diagrams of the Institute and knew that a hallway leading to the tower lay beyond the door. The ceiling’s light panels flowed on, one after another, until a band of illumination stretched to the far end of the hall. Her bare feet padded along the smooth gray floor, carrying her past pale walls and closed doors. When she reached the end of the corridor, she hesitated for a moment, took a breath, then touched the door.

  She stepped forward as the door slid past her. The tower’s lobby was larger than any room she had ever seen, its ceiling so high overhead that she felt disoriented. A glass booth stood at her right; panels marked with bright splashes of color were on the far wall, above a long, cushioned platform that res
embled a couch.

  Sven was sitting on a square platform near the front doors. She walked toward him slowly, almost expecting him to disappear as the images did when she was through talking to them. His lips curved up as she came nearer, but his smile seemed more uncertain than those of the screen images.

  “Hello,” she said, unable to think of anything else to say.

  “Greetings,” he replied.

  She studied the boy. The sleeves of his blue coverall were rolled up to his elbows. His arms were thicker and more muscular than hers, and although he was seated, she was sure he was taller as well. His blue eyes were large; his skin seemed paler than it had on the screen and was much lighter than her own dark-brown skin.

  She reached out and touched his arm; he started. “You are real,” she said.

  He nodded. His unevenly trimmed hair was much shorter than her own. “I’m glad you got here. I didn’t know if you would.” His throat moved as he swallowed. “I thought you might be afraid to come.”

  “I was.”

  The boy was staring at her. When she met his eyes, he looked away hastily. “Uh, I brought your cat,” he said. “You can see for yourself.” He pointed behind himself with one arm.

  She walked around the platform. Dusky was curled up on the floor, asleep, but another animal was near her, a large cat with thick orange fur. She looked up at Sven. “You have a cat, too?”

  “His name’s Tanj. It’s short for Tangerine—his fur has the same kind of color. Llare got him from the cryonic facility for me.”

  “My cat came from the cold place, too.” She leaned against the platform. In all her imaginings about a possible encounter with someone like herself, she had never expected to feel so uneasy. There was so much that she wanted to say, yet she could not bring herself to speak the words.

  “I had to take Llipel’s authorization while she was sleeping,” she said at last, although he already knew what she had planned to do. “How did you get authorized?”

  “The same way—I took this when Llare was asleep.” He gestured at his authorization. “I’ve taken it a few times. That’s how I found out about you. I wanted to talk to you as soon as I knew, and then I wondered if you’d want to talk to me.”

  “But why would you think I wouldn’t want to see you?” she asked as she leaned toward him. “I always hoped I’d see someone like me, that our people might come back here, that I’d have a friend.” She held out her hand; he shrank away. She wondered if she had said something wrong. “You wanted me to come here, Sven, but now you don’t seem that happy to see me.”

  He shook his head. “I am. It’s just—” He paused. “Llipel probably didn’t let you find out certain things, but I had the library. Most of what’s there is about the Institute, but I found books and tapes that showed other things. Our kind—they were cruel in a lot of ways. You probably don’t know how cruel. Sometimes I wish I’d never found out.”

  “Llare let you use the library?” She felt a stab of envy.

  “He didn’t for a long time, but I kept after him about it. Maybe he just got tired of hearing me complain. Finally, he said that maybe the time had come for me to learn more about my kind, but he didn’t seem happy about it.”

  “He?”

  Sven shrugged. “Llare said words like ‘he’ or ‘she’ don’t really apply to him or Llipel. It’s just easier to think of them as one thing or the other. It makes them seem more like us, I suppose.” He ran a hand through his thick light-brown hair. “They’re not like our kind, though. For one thing, they’re gentler.”

  Sven was right about that; Nita thought of her own outbursts and displays of temper. She could understand Sven’s feelings. He had undoubtedly compared himself to his guardian and worried about why he could not maintain such calm himself. But why would he say that their people were cruel?

  “Once I was happy about what I was,” he continued. “Not about everything, but I thought I’d change when I was older. I knew my people built this place not just to store embryos and animals but to find ways to prolong life and postpone death for their kind. Llare doesn’t think about death—maybe his kind lives longer than ours—but our people feared it.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I learned a few things from the screens.” Her people weakened as they aged and sometimes succumbed to various illnesses. She could not recall ever being ill and almost could not imagine it.

  “This Institute was built to help people,” Sven said. “I told myself that people like that wouldn’t have forgotten us, that they might come back someday. They did other things, too—they studied the planets and stars, they created intelligences like the mind—they did so much. I used to think of how happy they must have been, to have other people to live with and learn from and help. But when I found out what they were really like, I began to think it’d be better if I left this place and never came back.”

  “You mustn’t say that.” She was about to stretch her hand out to him once more, but drew back. “Anyway, if you left, our guardians would probably go after you in their ship. You don’t know what’s out there, and they’d be afraid for you.” Another thought came to her. “Llipel and Llare aren’t authorized now,” she said. “They’ll be wondering about us when they wake up.”

  “It’s all right. I told the mind to let them know where we are and to let them use the screens to talk to each other. We can go back before they get too worried.”

  She looked down. “Llipel’s going to be concerned, anyway,” she said. “When I go back, she may not let me see you again.” She longed to ask him more about what he had read that disturbed him so much, but talking about it only seemed to make him more unhappy. He seemed to want a friend, but shied away from her at the same time. Had he changed his mind? Did he regret having asked her to come here?

  He slipped down from the platform, then beckoned to her. “There’s something you should see. I found it while I was waiting for you. I guess I should show you now.”

  He led her toward the glass booth, which was near the back of the lobby, not far from where she had entered. Behind the booth stood doors with rows of numbers above each; those had to be the lifts that could carry one to the upper floors of the tower. A small hallway between two of the lift doors led to an exit. She called up her memory of the diagrams she had seen; that door would lead into the garden.

  Three desks and four chairs were inside the booth, which was open on one side. Sven went to one of the desks and pulled out a drawer. “Look.”

  She peered into the drawer and saw several flat rectangles and circular disks that were attached to chains. “More authorizations!” she cried out.

  “Now you know why they never let us in here.” He removed two authorizations, then closed the drawer. “They could have given them to us before. Now we can have our own.” He handed one of the chains to her, then thrust the other into his side pocket.

  She hung the second authorization around her neck, then followed him out of the booth. She was authorized now, and she would have a friend; everything would be different. Whatever Sven’s darker thoughts were, he would surely be cheered by that fact. She wanted to reach out to him then and see her happiness reflected in his eyes.

  “I wish I’d known about you before,” she said as she moved closer to him; he took a step back. “I know we’ll be friends. We will, won’t we? I wanted a friend for so long, and now you’re here. I knew my time for separateness was passing, and you must have felt it, too. Maybe our people aren’t here because it wasn’t our time for togetherness, and maybe they’ll return now that it is.”

  He shook his head. “They’ll never return.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know more about them than you do.”

  “If you tell me what you found out, maybe it won’t seem so bad, whatever it is. I’m not like Llare or Llipel—I’m like you. I’d understand. You should tell me what you know. Aren’t friends supposed to talk to each other?”

  “You might not want to fi
nd out what I know,” he replied.

  “What’s the matter? You wanted to talk to me, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

  A sadder look had come into his face. She was suddenly annoyed with him and hurt by the way he seemed to be withdrawing from her already. “I’m authorized now,” she said. “I can find out anything you know. Why did you even talk to me over the screen if you were going to act like this? You said you were excited when you found out about me, but you don’t seem very happy now. You asked me to come here. Maybe you shouldn’t have bothered if it’s going to be like this.”

  He lifted his chin. “Maybe not.”

  “I wish you hadn’t now!” Her voice was rising. “But you’re the only one like me here, so I guess I’m stuck with you!”

  “Nita—” He spun around then and strode toward one of the lifts. Before she could call out an apology, the door had closed behind him.

  6

  The numerals above the lift door lit up one by one until the last winked out. Sven had gone to the fifteenth floor. Rather than trying to cheer him, she had driven him away with harsh words. Maybe she should have asked the screens about how to behave with one of her own people.

  Llipel had not told her about Sven. Now she wondered if her guardian might have been justified in keeping that secret. The boy had said that his kind, and Nita’s, were cruel; perhaps Llipel and Llare had wanted to shield them both from that cruelty. The screen images did not seem unkind, but then they weren’t really people at all, only images stored in the mind’s memory. The real people might have been different. Maybe a time for togetherness came only rarely to her people, as it apparently did for Llare and Llipel.

  Nita turned away from the lift and walked toward the front doors; two images on the wall to her left suddenly caught her eye. Unlike those of the screens, these two faces did not move or speak. Metal plates under the images held lettering, but she would have recognized the faces even without seeing their names.