I knew he was talking about more than just my planet. I took his hand and pressed it against my cheek, savoring the feeling of being so close to someone who loved me, and needed me. I would have done anything to take away his shame, but anything I did would only increase it.
“I have hurt you so much, Tedla,” he said in a thick voice.
“No, you haven’t,” I said. “You have made me very happy.”
“You can blame everything on me,” he said. “Tell them I forced you. Tell them you were afraid to disobey me.”
I didn’t say anything. It had already occurred to me that I might do the exact opposite: claim that I had wormed my way into his confidence, manipulated him and deceived him, made use of his naiveté to serve my plans. I could make them believe me, I was sure of it. The thought filled me with a heady terror.
There was a knock on the door, and both of us tensed. Our eyes met, and I saw he was as frightened as I. Then I got up to answer it.
There were two people outside the door: a Gammadian security guard and the Capellan technician who operated the communications equipment. With a slightly resentful glance at the guard, the technician said, “Alair’s message from Capella Two just came in. He’s been such a pest about it I thought he’d want to see it.”
“Thank you,” I said, and took the tablet from her.
When he saw what it was, Magister Galele leaped up and snatched it from my hands, scrolling through the screens and reading eagerly. His whole body had changed: He was animate now with hope. When he reached the part he was looking for he shouted out, “Yes!” then threw his arms around me and hugged me tight. “You did it, Tedla!” he said, stepping back and looking at me with a glowing mix of pride and defiance. “I knew you could.”
“Did what?” I said.
“You’ve been accepted to the Universal Institute, Capella,” he said, showing me the screen. “The first Gammadian student accepted to a Capellan university. It’s a special program for non-Capellan students, but it’s still UIC. Look, your student visa.” He pressed a key, and a document appeared with my name, Tedla Galele.
“But I didn’t apply,” I said, bewildered.
“Yes, you did. Remember that test? That was the entry exam. I filled out a few forms for you, as well. I knew if I told you, you’d just give me some crap about not being able to do it.”
“They don’t know I’m a bland, do they?” I said. I knew how he operated.
“What difference do you think that makes to UIC?”
He was incorrigible. Insane. I said, “Magister, they’ll never let me go. Especially not now.”
“We’ll see about that!” he said. Energized, he sat down at the terminal and called the com room. The technician who had delivered the message was just coming back in. “Kirsten, you’re a darling!” Magister Galele said.
“Good news, eh?” she said. She had a cynical manner that was obviously only skin deep. I could tell she liked the Magister, though she would rather die than show it.
“Couldn’t be better. I only need one more thing now. Can you patch me through to the ship from this terminal?”
“Not without reporting it to His Vindness,” she said. “I’ve been told to tap all communications in and out of your room.” She paused. “Alair, do you know what deep shit you’re in? They’re sending the shuttle down tomorrow. Word is they intend to deport you. Now, do you still want to talk to the ship?”
“No,” he said. “Thanks, that’s all I need to know.”
He cut the connection and turned to me. “Tomorrow,” he said. “The shuttle pilot’s willing to help. He’s a Balavati: sister planet to the Vind, but complete opposites in temperament. They live to subvert power. Nadkarni and I are great buds; we used to drink beer together up in that can they call a questship. All we have to do is get to the shuttle, and Karni will take us. This visa of yours will keep him from getting in trouble, and get you to Capella.”
He had obviously been planning it for a long time. I was surprised at how many allies he had—but I shouldn’t have been. He could be terribly charming, in a reprobate way.
There were voices in the hall outside. “Quick, hide!” he said, pushing me toward the closet. But I knew hiding there was pointless; instead, I went for the graydoor. As I opened it I saw the cheeky confidence dissolve from his face. “You’ll come back?” he said.
“Yes,” I promised.
The bland-run was empty. I dashed down it and around a corner, then paused to think of where to go. In Tapis, there would have been a thousand crannies to hide in, but here I didn’t know grayspace well enough. Voices were coming toward me from a cross-corridor. I opened the first door I saw, and slipped through.
It was a storage closet, full of brooms and mops and chemicals. I stood immobile as the voices came nearer, then stopped. Just my luck, the closet was exactly where they were going. When the door opened, Misery looked straight at me, startled. I pressed my finger to my lips and signalled it to be quiet. It recovered its poise and pushed a rolling bucket into the closet. “Let’s go, or Deen will have a fit,” it said to its companion, who was hidden from my sight behind the door.
I listened to the footsteps receding down the hallway. Before they faded away, there were others, fast and light, coming back again. I blinked at the light as Misery opened the door again.
“Tedla, what’s going on?” it whispered.
“You’ve got to help me, Misery,” I said. “The humans want to take me away, and punish me. If I can just keep out of their sight for a day, I can get away. They’re going to search grayspace as soon as they find I’m missing. Do you know a place I could hide?”
Misery hesitated. I was asking it to take a terrible risk. “No one will know it was you,” I promised.
I could see the arguments pass across its face. “No,” it said at last, to someone who wasn’t there, “I ought to help. It’s what Deen’s been saying. You blands stuck together at Tapis. We ought to stick together, too. They wouldn’t be able to do these things to us if we stood up for each other.”
I was speechless. It was the first hint of solidarity I had heard from a bland’s lips. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s what Magister Galele’s been saying all along.”
“There’s a perfect place to hide,” Misery said, “if you don’t mind being in human space.” It remembered who it was talking to then, and said, “You won’t mind that. Come on.”
Misery led the way down the bland-run. We climbed the stairs to the next level up, and into a corridor lined with anonymous, identical graydoors. It stopped at the fourth one on the left and listened at the crack. “There’s someone in there right now. We’ve got to wait.”
“Where are we?” I asked, realizing I actually knew the building better from the human side than from the bland side.
“This is the room they’re using for their communication equipment. There used to be a graydoor into it, but when they moved the machinery in they blocked it off. They didn’t want us to go in there, anyway. But the way they arranged the equipment, there’s a crawl space behind. It’s not big, and you’ll have to keep really quiet.”
“It sounds just fine,” I said. I glanced nervously down the bland-run, wondering how long it would take them to start the search.
Misery listened again at the door, then said, “Okay, they’re gone.”
The graydoor opened inward only a couple of feet before it hit the back of a tall metal cabinet. You couldn’t see that there was any hide-hole until you slipped in and closed the door behind you. It was absolutely perfect. As I sidled down the narrow space between the machines and the wall, the electricity raised the hairs on my arms. The effect was not so bad down low, so I sat on the dusty floor. There was a crack between two machines where I could actually see into the room: a narrow view of the back of a chair, a coffee cup sitting on some equipment, and the viewscreen high on the wall, showing a picture but no sound.
I had barely settled down when the human door opened and two te
chnicians came back in. I couldn’t see them, but I recognized the voice of Kirsten. From his accent, the man with her was Gammadian.
“Look at that. Thirty-two more calls just since I went out,” Kirsten said. “That makes one hundred and seventy in the last half hour. Everyone on the planet wants to give us a piece of their mind.”
“I’m not surprised,” the Gammadian said. He sounded nervous.
“No, not with the crap that regressive pinhead is spouting.” Kirsten settled down in the chair. I glimpsed her for a moment before she wheeled out of my line of sight. “Did you hear the latest?” she said.
“No.”
“Galele’s bland disappeared.”
“You mean the one he...tampered with?”
“The very same. I’m the last one to have seen it.”
“They’re looking for it, aren’t they?”
She laughed grimly. “You bet they are. With handcuffs and hypodermics. Poor shit, I wouldn’t be in its shoes. Did you see the supervisor they sent? No wonder it ran.”
“What about the Magister?”
“Oh, he’s toast.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means they’re going to grill him for breakfast. He’ll never work again.”
“Why did your people send a man like that to us?”
She gave that laugh again. It was the most unamused sound I’d heard in a long time. “You might not believe this, but they didn’t have an easy time recruiting for this expedition. The very least we might lose is one hundred and two years out of our lives. Most of us will never make it back. The cream of the crop don’t jump for chances like this. WAC had to take what they could get.”
They kept on talking for a long time as I sat and listened. After a while they left to get something to eat, and I could move around and stretch. While they were gone, another human came in to look around the room. “Nothing here,” she reported to someone in the hall.
It was late when the two technicians came back. They turned on the viewscreen sound, and we all learned that Magister Galele had been subpoenaed to testify before the court the next day. The tenor of the talk had changed. It was no longer a matter of pinning the blame on Elector Hornaday and her policies. Now, everyone saw the spectre of a far more sinister plot. Elector Hornaday was now a mere dupe of the aliens.
It was so much more plausible than any bland conspiracy. No one could laugh this off, or say the Capellans lacked the intelligence. Listening, there were even moments when I felt a twinge of uncertainty myself. After all, he had planted strange new thoughts in my mind. I had been corrupted.
When at last they turned out the lights and left, I lay down to sleep. The room was still lit from the screens and dials, flickering, as if machine-thoughts were moving all around me. It was very hot behind the cabinets, and I found it hard to relax. I kept thinking of how far the messages on the screens had traveled to get here, from places that had never heard of supervisors, or blands.
At last a crack of gray light appeared around the door. It opened, then closed. I stayed silent. “Tedla? Are you still here?” Misery whispered.
I crawled toward it. “Did you bring some water?”
“Here. And a meat pie.”
I drank gratefully. “What’s going on?” I asked, and bit ravenously into the pie.
“They’ve turned the place upside down looking for you,” Misery whispered. “They think now you’ve escaped into the convergence.”
“Good.”
“They think you’re diabolically clever, Tedla. The humans are really scared of you.”
I stopped chewing in surprise. Misery was speaking in a tone of satisfaction, almost pride. “Really?” I said.
“Really.”
I couldn’t think what to say. Misery stood up. “I’ve got to get back to the roundroom.”
“Wait. Have you told anyone else where I am?”
“They all know. The whole roundroom.”
I felt a chill.
“Don’t worry, Tedla. You can trust them all.”
“I hope so,” I said.
It was a long time before I fell asleep, watching the phosphor ghosts from across the galaxy play on the ceiling.
***
The humans returned early the next morning. The mood was tense and expectant. “Ptanka-Ni’s ready to shit bricks,” Kirsten told her companion as they came in. “He’s been coaching Alair since the wee hours. There’s no way we can worm out of letting him testify.”
“Why do you want to?” the Gammadian man said. “Do you think he has something to hide?”
“No, it’s...well, you just never know what’s going to come out of his mouth next.”
If they had any work to do, it didn’t get done that day. They turned on the viewscreen early, and sat drinking coffee while waiting for Magister Galele to start talking. I sat cross-legged with my eye pressed to the crack.
He looked quite spruced up and respectable on screen, and I felt a pang that I hadn’t been there to help. At first the gravity of his interrogators kept his answers formal and short. He was constantly glancing toward the place where Emissary Ptanka-Ni sat, listening impassively.
“Yes, I was conducting a study of the group they called blue team,” he said in answer to a question. “I wanted to learn more about the culture of blands: the ways they think and behave among themselves, their mental models and communicative techniques.”
“Why do the Capellans feel they need to know this?” one of the judges said.
“It wasn’t just for me, you see,” Magister Galele said. “I thought it would be helpful information for you as well. In old Earth mythology, there is a figure called Janus, who has two faces on either side of his head. That’s what this planet is like. You have two faces: one gendered, the other neuter, and you can never tell what the other looks like, because you’re really two sides of the same person. You simply can’t know the blands, and they can’t know you, unless someone comes along with a mirror and shows you what’s behind you. Well, I was hoping to be that mirror.”
Often enough I had heard Squire Tellegen make the same sort of analogy; but from his mouth it had been self-analysis. From the mouth of an alien it was unasked-for criticism. I could see the commission stiffen defensively. Quite unaware, Magister Galele went on, “This whole episode, this so-called rebellion, is a case in point. You have completely misinterpreted it, because you don’t understand the worldview of the blands. If you’d had my data, none of this would have happened.”
It was a startling, even arrogant, assertion. Of course, they asked him to explain. He cheerfully embarked on a long, completely new, version of what had happened.
Over the days of testimony up to now, a picture of the events had emerged that was agreed on by all the humans. It was plausible and internally consistent; its only flaw was that it was completely false. Now, as Magister Galele began to talk about sorcery, hexes, and soul-stealing, I could see the disbelief on the humans’ faces. There in the bright lights of that hearing room, it sounded wild and improbable, an elaborate evasion.
“Is he out of his mind?” the Gammadian technician said to Kirsten.
“Don’t ask me,” she said.
“Given the context the blands were functioning in,” he concluded, “what was needed to reestablish control was not force but a demonstration of superior magic. That was, in fact, what my assistant was attempting to bring about when your martialists resorted to explosives.”
He stopped speaking then. There was a dead silence for a few seconds; then one of the more moderate judges said in a bemused voice, “How did you say you knew all this?”
“Primarily through my research assistant.”
“And who was that?”
My name had never been mentioned up to now, though my role had. When Magister Galele said my name, it meant nothing to the judges. He went on, “I had trained Tedla personally in ethnographic techniques and analysis. I’m confident the observations were accurate.”
&nb
sp; One of the judges was searching the papers in front of her for some previous mention of a Tedla. She said, “This was a questionary?”
“Oh no, a bland,” Galele said, as if it were the most ordinary statement in the world.
Slowly, in a tone of disbelief, the judge said, “Your research assistant was a bland?”
“Yes.” Glancing at Ptanka-Ni, he said, “We have decided to make all my field notes available to you, holding nothing back. All of Tedla’s reports to me, as well as my own notes and interpretations of the reports, will be released to you. Unfortunately, Tedla dictated a number of the most crucial reports in Capellan. I was encouraging it to use the language, you see. We’ll be happy to translate them back for you.”
He had finally broken the bounds of their credulity. One of the more hostile judges leaned forward and said, “Let me see if I can paraphrase this. You are claiming that some diabolically clever bland convinced you there was nothing going on at Tapis but some harmless superstition, and this same bland was responsible for creating most of the written documents that link you to the uprising, right down to writing your own reports—in Capellan.”
I almost groaned aloud. The Gammadian technician exclaimed angrily, “Does he think we’re complete idiots? Can’t he produce a better cover-up than that?”
“This is the bland who is so conveniently missing from the Capellan Emissarium?” another judge said.
Magister Galele looked utterly taken aback. He said hastily, “I’m not trying to pin anything on Tedla, or claim I was a dupe.”
“Really? What are you trying to claim?”
“Why, just the truth. Tedla wasn’t trying to deceive me. It’s clever, yes, but not diabolical.” He gave a nervous laugh. “I wish you could see Tedla. You’d know how ridiculous that is.”
“Yes, I wish we could see it, as well,” one of the judges said pointedly.
Ptanka-Ni rose from his seat and said with unshaken dignity, “We are doing our utmost to locate it.”
Halfway Human Page 40
