Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  "Definitely not," Noah said. At least this was something she could be sure of. "That was one of the hardest parts of being a captive of the Communities. Until they got to know us, they didn't have anything like hypnosis or mood-altering drugs. They didn't even have the concept."

  Rune Johnsen turned to frown at her. "What concept?"

  "Altered consciousness. They don't even go unconscious unless they're sick or injured, and a whole Community never goes unconscious even though several of its entities might. As a result, Communities can't really be said to sleep—although at long last, they've accepted the reality that we have to sleep. Inadvertently, we've introduced them to something brand new."

  "Will they let us bring medicine in?" Michelle Ota asked suddenly. "I have allergies and I really need my medicine."

  "They will allow certain medicines. If you're offered a contract, you'll have to write in the drugs you'll need. They will either allow you to have the drugs or you won't be hired. If what you need is allowed, you'll be permitted to order it from outside. The Communities will check to see that it is what it's supposed to be, but other than that, they won't bother you about it. Medicine's just about all you'll have to spend money on while you're inside. Room and board are part of the agreement, of course, and you won't be allowed to leave your employers until your contract is up."

  "What if we get sick or have an accident?" Piedad demanded. "What if we need some medicine that isn't in the contract."

  "Medical emergencies are covered by the contract," Noah said.

  Thera slapped her palms down against the table and said loudly, "Screw all that!" She got the attention she wanted. Everyone turned to look at her. "I want to know more about you, and the weeds, Translator. In particular, I want to know why you're still here, working for things that probably put you through hell. Part of that no drug thing was no anesthetic when they hurt you, right?"

  Noah sat still for a moment, remembering, yet not wanting to remember. "Yes," she said at last, "except that most of the time, the people actually hurting me were other human beings. The aliens used to lock groups of two or more of us up together for days or weeks to see what would happen. This was usually not too bad. Sometimes, though, it went wrong. Some of us went out of our minds. Hell, all of us went out of our minds at one time or another. But some of us were more likely than others to be violent. Then there were those of us who would have been thugs even without the Communities' help. They were quick enough to take advantage of any chance to exercise a little power, get a little pleasure by making another person suffer. And some of us just stopped caring, stopped fighting, sometimes even stopped eating. The pregnancies and several of the killings came from those cell-mate experiments. We called them that.

  "It was almost easier when the aliens just made us solve puzzles to get food or when they put things in our food that made us sick or when they enfolded us and introduced some nearly lethal substance into our bodies. The first captives got most of that, poor people. And some of them had developed a phobic terror of being enfolded. They were lucky if that was all they developed."

  "My God," Thera said, shaking her head in disgust. After a while, she asked, "What happened to the babies? You said some people got pregnant."

  "The Communities don't reproduce the way we do. It didn't seem to occur to them for a long time to take it easy on the pregnant women. Because of that, most women who got pregnant miscarried. Some had still births. Four of the women in the group that I was usually caged with between experiments died in childbirth. None of us knew how to help them." That was another memory she wanted to turn away from.

  "There were a few live births, and of those, a few babies survived infancy, even though their mothers couldn't protect them from the worst and the craziest of our own people or from the Communities who were … curious about them. In all thirty-seven of the world's bubbles, fewer than a hundred such children survived. Most of those have grown up to be reasonably sane adults. Some live outside in secret, and some will never leave the bubbles. Their choice. A few of them are becoming the best of the next generation of translators."

  Rune Johnsen made a wordless sound of interest. "I've read about such children," he said.

  "We tried to find some of them," Sorrel Trent said, speaking up for the first time. "Our leader teaches that they're the ones who will show us the way. They're so important, and yet our stupid government keeps them hidden!" She sounded both frustrated and angry.

  "The governments of this world have a great deal to answer for," Noah said. "In some countries, the children won't come out of the bubbles because word has gotten back to them about what's happened to those who have come out. Word about disappearances, imprisonment, torture, death. Our government seems not to be doing that sort of thing any more. Not to the children, anyway. It's given them new identities to hide them from groups who want to worship them or kill them or set them apart. I've checked on some of them myself. They're all right, and they want to be let alone."

  "My group doesn't want to hurt them," Sorrel Trent said. "We want to honor them and help them fulfill their true destiny."

  Noah turned away from the woman, her mind filled with caustic, unprofessional things best not said. "So the children at least, are able to have a little peace," she did say.

  "Is one of them yours?" Thera asked, her voice uncharacteristically soft. "Do you have children?"

  Noah stared at her, then leaned her head against the chair back again. "I got pregnant when I was fifteen and again when I was seventeen. Miscarriages both times, thank God."

  "It was … rape?" Rune Johnsen asked.

  "Of course it was rape! Can you actually believe I'd want to give the Communities another human infant to study?" She stopped and took a deep breath. After a moment, she said, "Some of the deaths were women killed for resisting rape. Some of the deaths were rapists. Do you remember an old experiment in which too many rats are caged together and they begin to kill one another."

  "But you weren't rats," Thera said. "You were intelligent. You could see what the weeds were doing to you. You didn't have to—"

  Noah cut her off. "I didn't have to what?"

  Thera backpedaled. "I didn't mean you personally. I just mean human beings ought to be able to behave better than a bunch of rats."

  "Many did. Some did not."

  "And in spite of all that, you work for the aliens. You forgive them because they didn't know what they were doing. Is that it?"

  "They're here," Noah said flatly.

  "They're here until we find a way to drive them away!"

  "They're here to stay," Noah said more softly. "There's no 'away' for them—not for several generations anyway. Their ship was a one-way transport. They've settled here and they'll fight to keep the various desert locations they've chosen for their bubbles. If they do decide to fight, we won't survive. They might be destroyed too, but chances are, they would send their young deep into the ground for a few centuries. When they came up, this would be their world. We would be gone." She looked at each member of the group. "They're here," she said for the third time. "I'm one of maybe thirty people in this country who can talk to them. Where else would I be but here at a bubble, trying to help the two species understand and accept one another before one of them does something fatal?"

  Thera was relentless. "But do you forgive them for what they've done?"

  Noah shook her head. "I don't forgive them," she said. "They haven't asked for my forgiveness and I wouldn't know how to give it if they did. And that doesn't matter. It doesn't stop me from doing my job. It doesn't stop them from employing me."

  James Adio said, "If they're as dangerous as you believe, you ought to be working with the government, trying to find a way to kill them. Like you said, you know more about them than the rest of us."

  "Are you here to kill them, Mr. Adio?" Noah asked quietly.

  He let his shoulders slump. "I'm here to work for them, lady. I'm poor. I don't have all kinds of special knowledge that only t
hirty people in the whole country have. I just need a job."

  She nodded as though he had simply been conveying information, as though his words had not carried heavy loads of bitterness, anger, and humiliation. "You can make money here." She said. "I'm wealthy myself. I'm putting half a dozen nieces and nephews through college. My relatives eat three meals a day and live in comfortable homes. Why shouldn't yours?"

  "Thirty pieces of silver," he muttered.

  Noah gave him a tired smile. "Not for me," she said. "My parents seemed to have a completely different role in mind for me when they named me."

  Rune Johnsen smiled but James Adio only stared at her with open dislike. Noah let her face settle into its more familiar solemnity. "Let me tell you all about my experience working with the government to get the better of the Communities," she said. "You should hear about it whether or not you choose to believe." She paused, gathered her thoughts.

  · · · · ·

  "I was held here in the Mojave Bubble from my eleventh year through my twenty-third," she began. "Of course, none of my family or friends knew where I was or whether I was alive. I just disappeared like a lot of other people. In my case, I disappeared from my own bedroom in my parents' house in Victorville late one night. Years later when the Communities could talk to us, when they understood more of what they'd done to us, they asked a group of us whether we would stay with them voluntarily or whether we wanted to leave. I thought it might have been just another of their tests, but when I asked to go, they agreed.

  "In fact, I was the first to ask to go. The group I was with then was made up of people taken in childhood—sometimes early childhood. Some of them were afraid to go out. They had no memory of any home but the Mojave Bubble. But I remembered my family. I wanted to see them again. I wanted to go out and not be confined to a small area in a bubble. I wanted to be free.

  "But when the Communities let me go, they didn't take me back to Victorville. They just opened the bubble late one night near one of the shanty towns that had grown up around its perimeters. The shanty towns were wilder and cruder back then. They were made up of people who were worshipping the Communities or plotting to wipe them out or hoping to steal some fragment of valuable technology from them—that kind of thing. And some of the squatters there were undercover cops of one kind or another. The ones who grabbed me said they were FBI, but I think now that they might have been bounty hunters. In those days, there was a bounty on anyone or anything that came out of the bubbles, and it was my bad luck to be the first person to be seen coming out of the Mojave Bubble.

  "Anyone coming out might know valuable technological secrets, or might be hypnotized saboteurs or disguised alien spies—any damned thing. I was handed over to the military which locked me up, questioned me relentlessly, accused me of everything from espionage to murder, from terrorism to treason. I was sampled and tested in every way they could think of. They convinced themselves that I was a valuable catch, that I had been collaborating with our "nonhuman enemies." Therefore, I represented a great opportunity to find a way to get at them—at the Communities.

  "Everything I knew, they found out. It wasn't as though I was ever trying to hold anything back from them. The problem was, I couldn't tell them the kind of thing they wanted to know. Of course the Communities hadn't explained to me the workings of their technology. Why would they? I didn't know much about their physiology either, but I told what I did know—told it over and over again with my jailers trying to catch me in lies. And as for the Communities' psychology, I could only say what had been done to me and what I'd seen done to others. And because my jailers didn't see that as very useful, they decided I was being uncooperative, and that I had something to hide."

  Noah shook her head. "The only difference between the way they treated me and the way the aliens treated me during the early years of my captivity was that the so-called human beings knew when they were hurting me. They questioned me day and night, threatened me, drugged me, all in an effort to get me to give them information I didn't have. They'd keep me awake for days on end, keep me awake until I couldn't think, couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. They couldn't get at the aliens, but they had me. When they weren't questioning me, they kept me locked up, alone, isolated from everyone but them."

  Noah looked around the room. "All this because they knew—knew absolutely—that a captive who survived twelve years of captivity and who is then freed must be a traitor of some kind, willing or unwilling, knowing or unknowing. They x-rayed me, scanned me in every possible way, and when they found nothing unusual, it only made them angrier, made them hate me more. I was, somehow, making fools of them. They knew it! And I wasn't going to get away with it.

  "I gave up. I decided that they were never going to stop, that they would eventually kill me anyway, and until they did, I would never know any peace."

  She paused remembering humiliation, fear, hopelessness, exhaustion, bitterness, sickness, pain.… They had never beaten her badly—just struck a few blows now and then for emphasis and intimidation. And sometimes she was grabbed, shaken, and shoved, amid ongoing accusations, speculations, and threats. Now and then, an interrogator, knocked her to the floor, then ordered her back to her chair. They did nothing that they thought might seriously injure or kill her. But it went on and on and on. Sometimes one of them pretended to be nice to her, courted her in a sense, tried to seduce her into telling secrets she did not know.…

  "I gave up," she repeated. "I don't know how long I'd been there when that happened. I never saw the sky or sunlight so I lost all track of time. I just regained consciousness after a long session, found that I was in my cell alone, and decided to kill myself. I had been thinking about it off and on when I could think, and suddenly, I knew I would do it. Nothing else would make them stop. So I did do it. I hanged myself."

  Piedad Ruiz made a wordless sound of distress, then stared downward at the table when people looked at her.

  "You tried to kill yourself?" Rune Johnsen asked. "Did you do that when you were with the … the Communities?"

  Noah shook her head. "I never did." She paused. "It mattered more than I know how to tell you that this time my tormentors were my own people. They were human. They spoke my language. They knew all that I knew about pain and humiliation and fear and despair. They knew what they were doing to me, and yet it never occurred to them not to do it." She thought for a moment, remembering. "Some captives of the Communities did kill themselves. And the Communities didn't care. If you wanted to die and managed to hurt yourself badly enough, you'd die. They'd watch."

  But if you didn't choose to die, there was the perverse security and peace of being enfolded. There was, somehow, the pleasure of being enfolded. It happened often when captives were not being tested in some way. It happened because the entities of the Communities discovered that it pleased and comforted them too, and they didn't understand why any more than she did. The first enfoldings happened because they were convenient ways of restraining, examining, and, unhappily, poisoning human captives. It wasn't long, though, before unoccupied humans were being enfolded just for the pleasure the act gave to an unoccupied Community. Communities did not understand at first that their captives could also take pleasure in the act. Human children like Noah learned quickly how to approach a Community and touch its outer branches to ask to be enfolded, although adult human captives had tried to prevent the practice, and to punish it when they could not prevent it. Noah had had to grow up to even begin to understand why adult captives sometimes beat children for daring to ask alien captors for comfort.

  Noah had met her current employer before she turned twelve. It was one of the Communities who never injured her, one who had worked with her and with others to begin to assemble a language that both species could use.

  She sighed and continued her narrative. "My human jailers were like the Communities in their attitude toward suicide," she said. "They watched too as I tried to kill myself. I found out later that there were at least t
hree cameras on me day and night. A lab rat had more privacy than I did. They watched me make a noose of my clothing. They watched me climb onto my bed and tie off the noose to a grill that protected the speaker they sometimes used to blast me with loud, distorted music or with old news broadcasts from when the aliens first arrived and people were dying in the panic.

  "They even watched me step off my bed and dangle by my neck, strangling. Then they got me out of there, revived me, made sure I wasn't seriously injured. That done, they put me back in my cell, naked and with the speaker recess concreted over and the grill gone. At least, after that there was no more horrible music. No more terrified screaming.

  "But the questioning began again. They even said I hadn't really meant to kill myself, that I was just making a bid for sympathy.

  "So I left in mind, if not in body. I sort of went catatonic for a while. I wasn't entirely unconscious, but I wasn't functioning any more. I couldn't. They knocked me around at first because they thought I was faking. I know they did that because later I had some unexplained and untreated broken bones and other medical problems to deal with.

  "Then someone leaked my story. I don't know who. Maybe one of my interrogators finally grew a conscience. Anyway, someone started telling the media about me and showing them pictures. The fact that I was only eleven when I was taken turned out to be important to the story. At that point, my captors decided to give me up. I suppose they could have killed me just as easily. Considering what they had been doing to me, I have no idea why they didn't kill me. I've seen the pictures that got published. I was in bad shape. Maybe they thought I'd die—or at least that I'd never wake all the way up and be normal again. And, too, once my relatives learned that I was alive, they got lawyers and fought to get me out of there.

  "My parents were dead—had died in a car wreck while I was still a captive in the Mojave Bubble. My jailers must have known, but they never said a word. I didn't find out until I began to recover and one of my uncles told me. My uncles were my mother's three older brothers. They were the ones who fought for me. To get me, they had to sign away any rights they may have had to sue. They were told that the Communities were the ones who had injured me. They believed it until I revived enough to tell them what really happened.