Calendrical Regression

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  In that instant, I recognized not only the race of the alien that had just invaded my dressing room, but also the weapon. The first part was easy. Only the Svenkali had skin that looked like a layer of tiny, grey pebbles. As for the device, I’d only seen one once, fifteen years before, when a different Svenkali had pressed it against my own throat. It was called a peeler, and I’d been scant seconds away from being killed over a misunderstanding of religious proportions. In anyone else’s hands the device was nothing more than a pretty paperweight of palladium and crystal, too light to be lethal even as a bludgeon. But I’d since learned that a Svenkali could channel a portion of lifeforce into it, empowering the device to subatomically peel away the layers of its victim’s nervous system and leave a clear signature of who had done it.

  Whether or not Nicole recognized it or just understood it as a weapon at her throat, she froze in place. She continued to hold my buffalito awkwardly in her outstretched arms. Reggie meanwhile began growling.

  I froze too. They were only steps away from me but if the alien wanted her dead, he could activate the peeler and kill her before I could cover half the distance.

  He spoke, and at his words Nicole blanched. He used Traveler, a galactic pidgin commonly spoken among aliens of different races, and not something I’d expected a young woman in Nebraska to have understood.

  “I am Lorsca, third seeker on the path. You have hidden among others, but you cannot disguise your true self from my mission. You are the Uary. Eight hundred and fourteen Uary have I corrected. Today that number grows. I identify you as your kind have named yourself since the moment of your first, unforgivable offense. Acknowledge this truth as your last fact and I will end you more swiftly than you deserve.”

  The crystal facets of the Svenkali’s peeler gave off a lambent cerulean pulse. Nicole whimpered. Her lips parted as if to respond to his command, but before she could say a word Reggie acted. He writhed in her grasp, craning his face toward the fascinating object in the Svenkali’s hand. His muzzle pressed and braced against Nicole’s neck. He opened his mouth and his lips engulfed the device from its tip to the edge above where Lorsca gripped it. Reggie bit through the peeler like it was a piece of meringue, chewed twice, and swallowed.

  Tiny blue fireworks erupted from the gleaming end of what remained of the weapon. Lorsca cried out, hand spasming backward. The Svenkali stared at the fragment of weapon, a mingled expression of horror and disbelief shone on its pebbly face. Squirming in Nicole’s hands, Reggie switched from growling to barking.

  The Svenkali reached for Reggie, letting the ruined device slip from its hand as it grabbed him by the back of the neck and yanked him from Nicole’s grasp. Reggie yelped and the Svenkali pushed Nicole at me. I caught her, the force of the shove throwing us the remaining distance to the back wall. We crashed into the makeup table as the Svenkali backed out of my dressing room while angrily shaking my buffalo dog.

  “This is only a temporary respite,” said Lorsca. “Nothing will remove you from my path. I will fashion another instrument for your correction. You will not leave this world.”

  He slammed the door and an instant later its edges buzzed and merged with the walls and floor. It was as if someone had painted the image of a door on the wall; the actual exit had ceased to exist.

  Nicole slumped against me. I cradled her in my arms a moment, then eased her into one of the chairs. I started to reach for the comm on the wall but her hand stopped me.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Calling hotel security.”

  “Don’t. He’s not a danger to anyone but me. They’ll only get hurt if they try to stop him.”

  “He took Reggie!”

  She shook her head. “As a point of honor. To ensure that the creature that disrupted his attempt will be present when he completes what he started. Reggie is in no danger.”

  “Why is a Svenkali hunting you? With a peeler, no less.”

  “Oh? You recognized the weapon?” She smiled. “Ah, further verification, not that it was needed.”

  In the aftermath of the moment, pieces began falling into place. The first and last place where I’d met two of the Svenkali, where one had threatened me with a peeler, had been the mausoleum world of Hesnarj, where Nicole had said her uncle had seen me.

  “What are you talking about? What’s really going on here?”

  “Truly, I did not mean to deceive you, Mr. Conroy. My intention was to reveal myself once we had reached the privacy of this chamber. Events… proceeded rapidly in other directions before I could do so.”

  “Reveal yourself how?” I asked.

  She shrugged, gesturing to herself. Any sign of distress over the attempted murder had vanished. “I am not as I appear to be. Not human. It is why Reggie reacted as he did when I entered the room. Buffalitos have always been able to detect my kind.”

  “And what kind might that be?”

  “I am the Uary,” she said.

  I frowned. I’d met many of the aliens that regularly traveled in Human Space, and knew the names of most of those that I hadn’t come across. I didn’t recognize hers.

  “And the Uary are…”

  She paused. An expression fluttered across her face like she wanted to correct me on something but it passed and she answered me.

  “The hereditary enemy of the Svenkali, for more than five billion years.”

  I crossed to a spot just to the left of what used to be the dressing room’s only door and kicked at the wall hard enough to break through the plaster. I winced and hopped backwards, wiggling my toes to check if I’d broken something in my foot. Whatever Lorsca had done to the door had affected the rest of the wall too.

  I turned back to Nicole. As much as I wanted her to elaborate on the Svenkali’s five billion year vendetta, I wanted to get out of that room more. “Is there a way to undo whatever he did?”

  She frowned and her eyes glazed over for a moment. As I watched, I’d have sworn her irises changed color from a robin’s egg blue to turquoise, and then back as she blinked and tossed her head like someone who’d briefly fallen asleep.

  “There is, but we don’t have the necessary equipment to restore the molecular bonds. Nor is just the door barred to us; the effect will have spread to the contiguous walls for a distance of at least twelve meters. You’d need power tools to cut through any of them.”

  “Sorry, I left them in my other tux.”

  The look she gave me made it clear that she didn’t find me as clever as I liked to think I was.

  “It shouldn’t matter. Lorsca is a hunter-drone. Physically much stronger and swifter than gendered Svenkali, but also much less sophisticated in its thought processes. It rendered the existing door unusable and likewise has blocked us from creating new ones in the wall.”

  “And that doesn’t matter?”

  She stood up, climbed onto her chair and stepped from there to the surface of the makeup table, raising her arms above her head and pressing her hands against a panel of the dressing room’s drop ceiling. A hard shove later and she was gesturing to the dark space above.

  “We should be able to crawl through here until we’re on the other side of the wall and then drop back down into the hall.”

  I followed her onto the table. It wobbled under our combined weight so I wasted little time and helped her clamber up into the area above the ceiling and onto a support beam. Then I pulled myself up and scrambled after her. Two minutes of crawling later and we stood in the hallway, dusty but not otherwise worse for the trip.

  Which isn’t to say I wasn’t more than a little freaked, but I had enough experience to know I needed to gain a better perspective before putting as much distance as possible between Nicole and myself. More importantly, I had to recover Reggie!

  I glanced at Nicole, making a mental note to stop thinking of her as a model-perfect human girl and to start thinking of her as a humanoid female from a race of aliens I’d never heard of before. That’d get easier the more I knew.

/>   “Tell me about this whole ‘hereditary enemy’ thing,” I said.

  “Here? Now?”

  I shrugged and made no sign of moving anywhere. “This is where we happen to be, and the more I understand about this, the better the odds of coming up with a plan to recover Reggie.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Conroy, but I’d like for us to leave here and reconnoiter with my uncle. I’ve left him a message about what’s happened. He’s securing transportation for us right now. We can be in Veracruz by dawn.”

  “You left a message? How? When?”

  “When you asked me to check for a way to undo what the Svenkali did to the wall. It’s what the Uary does. Please, I’ll explain on the way.”

  “The way to where?”

  Her eyes glazed over again. The poor lighting in the hallway prevented me from seeing if they changed color. She blinked once and said, “The airport. Nikos has called a cab for us. He’ll have a plane ready to leave by the time we arrive.”

  “And Nikos is…”

  She shrugged, sending her blonde curls dancing in all directions. “I would have introduced him to you as my uncle, but there’s no point to that now. He is also the Uary. That’s how important this is, Mr. Conroy. The Uary always works alone. Like the Svenkali, our numbers are very limited, and we cannot normally risk that more than one of us will be found at a time.”

  “But you’re making an exception so that you can introduce me to a Mexican cookbook author? That makes no sense.”

  She smiled that same perfect smile and held out both hands. “I promise I’ll explain it all on the way to the airport.”

  There was no way I was going to Mexico with an unknown alien for some unexplained purpose. But… all I had right then were questions and maybe she or her ‘uncle’ could answer them. Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly. A different alien with murder in its eye had just stolen my buffalo dog and imprisoned me in my own dressing room. Yeah, I needed to know what was going on and whether I liked it or not, my best source for finding out seemed determined to jump in a cab.

  “I haven’t said I’m going to Veracruz.”

  “Understood, but if you change your mind, won’t it be convenient to find ourselves already at the airport?”

  One end of our hallway led to the stage I’d so recently quit, the other opened onto the employee parking lot behind the hotel. A cab pulled up as we exited and if the driver found anything unusual about picking up a fare there he gave no sign. I held the door for Nicole and we climbed into the backseat.

  “The Airfield, please.” An instant later we began moving and she sat back and turned her attention to me.

  “To understand any of this, you have to begin with a simple premise: The Svenkali believe themselves to be perfect.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They make a compelling argument. Our galaxy is over thirteen billion years old, and the Svenkali have existed for most of that span. They are extremely long-lived, and even back at the beginning they were not terribly fertile, but it balanced out. From their earliest recorded history they have had the singular ability to invoke the consciousness of any Svenkali who ever lived, to commune with and access all that had ever been known by any of them.”

  “I… have some familiarity with that.”

  “Oh yes, you channeled your dead relative. That’s part of why I’m here.”

  “You know about that? How could you know about that?”

  She waved my questions away. “Later. We must stay focused. I was speaking of the Svenkali. They developed as all true sapients do, and successfully passed through that adolescence where, if a species manages not to destroy itself, it flourishes and enjoys a technological and/or spiritual renaissance. They poured out into a mostly empty galaxy, expanding into many clusters of planets and satellites and daring adventures in social engineering. They learned, they fought, they transformed, they reinvented. By the end of their first three billion years, they had explored every possibility they could imagine. They shaped their society to embrace certain beliefs and reject others.”

  “Three billion…?”

  She nodded. “They are by all estimates the longest lived race that remains. Fewer than one in ten thousand survives even a billion years, and they have been here for thirteen times that. But I am getting ahead of myself. After three billion years, other sapients were also exploring the galaxy. The Svenkali retreated from tens of thousands of worlds, preferring isolation to interaction. That preference has never changed. For the past ten billion years they have been self-contained. They have no need of us, no need of anyone but themselves. And because they can invoke any ancestor they choose, they are their own beginning, middle, and end.”

  “And that makes them perfect?”

  Nicole shrugged. “I didn’t say they were, I said they believe themselves to be. It’s worth noting that they never commune with anyone from the time before they locked in to their current ethos. Having rejected those earlier perspectives, they fear possible contamination from them.”

  “You’re saying they’ve been static for ten billion years?”

  “It’s not as dramatic as it seems from your perspective. Keep in mind, their average life span is half a million years.”

  I sagged against the cab’s seat and closed my eyes. “Sorry, I’m having some trouble wrapping my head around these orders of magnitude.”

  “You’re a young race with no perspective on galactic history. It’s understandable,” said Nicole, and we spent the rest of the ride in silence.

  Our cab took us out of Omaha on the old Interstate 29, over the Missouri River and into Iowa, causing me to briefly wonder if crossing the state line complicated any possible crime I’d unknowingly involved myself in. The driver took us through a parking lot and past a low building, pulling to a stop in front of a gate in a chainlink fence that, according to the sign, marked one side of a municipal airport in Council Bluffs. Other than a handful of security lights, everything on both sides of the fence lay in darkness. I could make out the general shape of a couple other buildings, presumably locked up tight. As I exited the cab, lights beyond the fence came on, illuminating a runway. A private plane waited at the near end of it. As I approached the gate, a hatch opened in its side. Brighter light spilled out and a silhouetted figure kicked at something which unfolded into a set of steps to the tarmac. He came down them, his speed part illusion caused by a stoop to his posture that had him leaning forwards like a man sprinting, and part due to a pair of short legs working to produce rapid if tiny steps. Despite the greater distance, he reached his side of the gate first and passed through, stepping into the beams of the cab’s headlights and revealing himself to be an old man.

  “Welcome, Mr. Conroy, I am Nikos.”

  “Please. I know that’s not your real name, any more than your ‘niece’ is Nicole. And you know that I know it.”

  He shrugged. “That’s what it says on my passport. Nikos Oriekas, of Shaumburg, Illinois.”

  He moved with a fluid grace that contradicted his apparent age. If I hadn’t known he wasn’t human, I’d have pegged him at eighty — possibly ninety if he'd been wealthy and well enough connected to purchase one of the legitimate longevity drugs that existed for those with sufficient privilege.

  I can't tell you why, but when I'm meeting new people I always look at their chins first. For a man it manifests in a question of whether he has a beard or not, and if so of what style; how is it trimmed and does the facial hair match what's on top. With women, it's about the shape of the chin, the tautness and perceived elasticity of the skin. Nikos Oriekas had a goatee, neatly trimmed, a mixture of black and grey hair that matched the hair on his head. Most people look at the eyes first, not the chin, but that option didn't exist here. Despite the surrounding darkness, Nikos wore lightly tinted wraparound sunshades. These bore more than a passing resemblance to the x-ray visors my childhood friends in less religious households had bought online after hoarding their allowance for weeks. His clothing was unr
emarkable, the sort of pico-fiber earth-toned leisure suit and collarless linen shirt that would have let him fit in at any retirement community from Sarasota to Seattle. I could well imagine a community room somewhere in a Chicago suburb, filled with similarly dressed oldsters swapping tall tales of their salad days and stories of talented and precocious grandchildren who never came to visit.

  And then I glanced down at his shoes, realized that the heels had been built up to add at least five centimeters to his height, and it hit me. Nicole’s oversized jerseys had hidden her figure, and Nikos’s eyewear covered a good portion of his face, but the size of their heads and hands, the height and breadth and shapes of their lips and noses, were identical. Take away his lifts and the pair were exactly the same height. It went far beyond family resemblance.

  “Does it say that on Nicole’s passport, too?” I asked. “Or does she bother with one? Do you share?”

  Nicole answered for him. “I told you the Uary works alone. What you think you’ve deduced isn’t the main reason, but it’s a contributing factor.” She finished paying the driver and he pulled away, taking the light with him.

  I nodded. “That’s the phrasing you used before. You didn’t say you were an Uary, or one of the Uary. You said you’re the Uary.”

  “Yes,” said Nicole.

  “And so is Nikos?”

  “I am, Mr. Conroy.”

  “You’re the same person.”

  “Not… quite so simple, but in many ways, yes,” said Nikos. “Unlike your own race, and the other alien races you’ve likely encountered, we were not born. The seeds from which all the Uary spring were created billions of years ago. Most lay dormant for hundreds of millennia. I was quickened some eighteen centuries ago, Nicole just over one hundred fifty years past.”

  “Is that why the Svenkali want to kill you? Some sort of protective jealousy of longevity?”

  Nikos cocked his head. “Jealousy, yes. But not because of life span. Even without a violent ending we’d live the merest fraction of what they manage. Rather it is because like the Svenkali, the Uary comprises a vast array of experience. Each of us shares everything that we learn to it. And each can access that array, thus all the information any of us has is there for all.”