Alien Nation #7 - Extreme Prejudice

by L. A. Graf

  “I sat with them in first class on the plane.” Emma picked at her low-cal fungus with dramatically manicured nails. “They were the only Newcomers up there besides me. Well, me, and Ann Arbor.” She made a little face, then seemed to think better of it and smoothed her features again. “That’s her over there at the head table. She’s such a butch, it’s terrible.”

  Sikes stole a glance toward the front of the room and immediately focused on the linnaum at one end of the long head table. She looked unfortunately like a man in drag with her tasteful jewelry and well-cut dress, and she picked at her food almost as much as George. Thinking how he must look in his too-long hair and too-old tie, Sikes knew just how she felt.

  “She’s the Olympic gold medalist, isn’t she?” At least Cathy had the brains to whisper the question to Sikes, rather than direct it at Emma.

  Newcomer hearing did them in, though. Even as Sikes was opening his mouth to reply, Emma leaned around Susan and George to declare, “A decathlete, dear—gold medals in four or five things. Isn’t it a shame?

  Sikes threw his napkin across his plate like a sheet over a corpse. “Of course. Sports I can deal with. So they stick Superwoman with Peeping Westbeld and stick Supermodel with me.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ll get your chance with her.” Emma glanced around as though to make sure no one was listening, then leaned even further across Susan’s plate. “They say she likes human guys.”

  Cathy caught Sikes’s wrist under the table, but he was too tired of all the nonsense tonight to have thought of anything brutal to say, anyway. “It’s all right,” Cathy said, very close to his ear. “That just means she has good taste.”

  Sikes smiled at her, his face growing warm, and squeezed her hand without a word.

  At the front of the room, a flurry of murmuring diners and popping flashes drew attention to Nancy Thompson as she stepped up to the speaker’s platform. She and a handful of mixed Newcomers and humans had chatted at tables to either side of the podium all evening. Sikes recognized the sour-faced Overseer and his wife among them, but except for Ann Arbor, none of the other Newcomers looked familiar or interesting.

  The dining room itself jutted from the side of the hotel like a huge, glassed-in balcony. Beyond the transparent walls, lights from both homes and trafficways etched twinkling paths up the tree-choked hills; the rivers moved past like slow, glossy ribbons less than a block away from the hotel’s front door. Everything looked impossibly bright and clean in the brilliance of the still-deepening snow.

  With an unexpected throb of discomfort, Sikes wanted very much to be back home in L.A.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, humans and Tenctonese . . .” Nancy Thompson smiled across the roomful of symposium guests and reporters. “Welcome to the first annual Tenctonese Businesspersons Symposium. This convention has been established to foster human-Tenctonese relations across the United States by encouraging human-owned businesses to embrace the presence of successful Tenctonese in America’s marketplace. We have with us today some of the country’s most prestigious Tenctonese—businesspeople, police officers, athletes, and doctors—”

  “—and models,” Emma Bovary whispered huffily. “What kind of publicity is she shooting for? Nobody’s going to photograph a doctor over a model.”

  Sikes was surprised when Susan was the one to shush her.

  “—especially grateful to Mr. Ross Vegas of Vegas Gengineering in La Jolla for his generous funding and organizational efforts on the symposium’s behalf.”

  Applause swelled around them as Thompson stepped away from the microphone and the tall Overseer stood with an icy smile to replace her. Sikes snorted into his lukewarm coffee. Well, that explained that. Bring money into the picture, and you could probably get away with inviting a Nazi to a concentration camp reunion.

  “Thank you, Ms. Thompson.” The microphone popped when Vegas bent it to accommodate his larger height. “And thank you, Pittsburgh, for opening your arms to Tenctonese, kleezantsun and sansol alike.”

  Two seats down from Sikes, George dropped his silverware onto his plate with a disgusted clatter.

  “When we came to your planet six years ago, we had no idea what reception we would receive. It was not by choice, our landing. It was not by choice, our permanent exile here—”

  “Is it by choice that you use your alien technology and alien brains to engineer monsters in your labs, Mister Vegas?”

  Sikes twisted around to track down the strident voice at the back of the room. One of Protzberg’s uniforms was already homing in on the guy even as various other reporters and news people tried to push him back out the door.

  “Well, Mister Vegas?” The heckler caught himself on the doorjambs, bouncing up on his toes to see above the heads around him, “Isn’t it true that your labs are being used to genetically engineer monsters for the military?”

  Vegas’s icy eyes grew even paler with anger. “That’s absolutely absurd.”

  “Isn’t it true you used fetal cells from your own baby to create test-tube slags for use—!”

  “Enough!” Vegas’s voice cracked through the room, almost drowned out by the microphone’s protesting squeal. “I will not stand here and allow some slave-minded tert to vilify me.” It didn’t seem to matter to him that the shouting protestor was already gone. Vegas raked a lizardine stare across the assembled humans and former slaves. “You complain that we treat you like animals, yet this is the best you can do. You shame your race as much as you shame mine.”

  George hissed something Sikes assumed was impolite but made no effort to speak aloud or follow the Overseer when Vegas stormed away from the podium and into the murmuring crowd.

  “So much for Ross’s speech.” Sikes downed the last of his coffee and kicked back in his chair. He grinned down the table at George. “Anybody for dessert?”

  A shriek from the doorway behind him was his only answer. That, and the sticky, salt-sweet spatter of blood as a baby’s mutilated corpse smacked to the tabletop between them.

  C H A P T E R 4

  HUMAN SCREAMS AND stammering Tenctonese clicks exploded around the room as the symposium guests shrank back from the small bloody heap on the table. George scowled and dragged off his dinner jacket, flinging it over the pitiful body before the TV cameras could focus on it. In the night-dark reflections of the curving glass windows he saw Sikes vault through the double doors after the retreating protestors, Jen Protzberg and the hotel security guards at his heels.

  “Oh, my God.” Nancy Thompson stared down at the lump on the table as if she couldn’t turn away, the fine dust of her makeup suddenly visible against her white cheeks. “Is that—” She swallowed hard. “—a baby?”

  “No,” George said flatly. “It’s a monkey.”

  “A monkey?” Westbeld looked up and motioned the cameras to continue filming while they talked. She may have been a pro-Newcomer activist, George reflected dryly, but she was also a member of the press. News was news.

  “How do you know that, Detective Francisco?” Westbeld asked, putting just a slight emphasis on his official title.

  George put his hands on his hips, the Newcomer equivalent of a shrug. “Back during the Purist riots in L.A., this was a common Purist shock tactic. They’d buy a monkey from a pet store or steal one from a medical research lab, then kill it and skin it without draining the blood.” He gestured at the dark stain spreading across the tablecloth. “As you can see, it makes a very effective mess.”

  “But it looked so human,” protested Thompson, unconvinced. “Are you sure it’s not a baby?”

  “Bring in a curator from the Pittsburgh Zoo if you don’t believe my husband.” Susan’s calm and sensible voice startled George by its nearness. He turned to see her standing just behind him, frowning at the bloodstains on his dinner jacket as if daring them to spread any further. “But even I know that human babies have much larger heads in proportion to their bodies than this poor thing does.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Relie
f crept into Nancy Thompson’s face with a rush of returning color. George saw the humans in the room glance thoughtfully at the silhouetted shape under the cloth, the horror fading from their faces. Not for the first time, he blessed his wife’s talent for saying the right thing at the right time. “Thank you for pointing that out, Mrs. Francisco. You have no idea what it feels like—”

  George felt his skin shake with sudden cold under his thin silk shirt. None of the humans in the room, he realized, understood just what the Purists had done. He reached a long arm out and gathered Susan tight against his side, as much for his own comfort as for hers.

  “My wife knows exactly how you feel,” George told Thompson, trying to keep his voice from sounding too fierce. He felt Susan’s shoulders tremble beneath his arm and knew it wasn’t from the cold. “Ms. Thompson, this protest wasn’t aimed at humans.”

  Thompson gave him an uncomprehending look. “It wasn’t?”

  “No.” George heard the small whir of a camera lens refocusing and looked up to find the TV crews aiming their equipment at him. He met the camera’s watchful eye steadily. “Compared to human babies, newborn Tenctonese have smaller heads, longer limbs, and darker eyes. They are also born with many of their teeth already formed.” He glanced at the small wet bulge under his coat, remembering the gleam of teeth inside its bloody mouth. “That skinned animal wasn’t meant to frighten you,” he said grimly. “It was meant to frighten us.”

  “Do you really think they believed you?”

  George looked across the elevator, startled by the salt-bitter edge in Lydia Vegas’s voice. The Overseer’s wife refused to meet his gaze, staring instead at the sliver of her own spotted head visible in the thin mirrored strip that accented one wall. The murmuring group of Tenctonese who had just entered the elevator fell silent, waiting for his reply.

  “I believe Nancy Thompson did,” George said while the elevator doors slid closed. “She apologized several times to Susan for her comment. And I heard Kathleen Westbeld repeat my description of Tenctonese babies to several of the other reporters there.”

  “I don’t mean them.” Lydia untwined her tensely knotted hands and flung them outward, as if to encompass the entire city of Pittsburgh and beyond. “I mean them. All those humans who watched us on television—do you think they understood?”

  “Not all of them did, I suppose,” George admitted. “But surely some—”

  “Some isn’t enough,” Lydia said fiercely. She turned away from the wall when the elevator slowed for their floor, and George was shocked to see red rims of grief around her pale eyes. “Don’t fool yourself, Detective Francisco. You can’t keep all humans from hating us, no matter how hard you try.” Her mouth flattened into an expression bleaker than a frown, an expression George had seen too often among Tenctonese on the ship. “Vots garsa ot aeb’ blafta lon coke see ’ser la su rom heef.” she added in flat Tenctonese. Your struggle to change things only brings the rest of us more pain.

  George felt anger surge hotly up his throat. “That’s a slave saying!” he snapped. “You only think that way because the Overseers trained—”

  Susan thumped a sharp elbow into his chest, and George grunted in surprise. The blow kept him breathless long enough to remember that Lydia Vegas was married to an Overseer. No wonder she still talked like a slave, he thought grimly. A glance into Susan’s determined eyes told him that further comment on that subject wouldn’t be welcome.

  The elevator doors hissed open, breaking the painful silence that had fallen over the small crowd of Newcomers inside. They trickled out, breaking into ones and twos as they moved down the third-floor hall to their allotted hotel rooms. At last only George and Susan remained, blocked from leaving by Lydia Vegas’s rigid figure. The Overseer’s wife hadn’t moved at all since her outburst, not even when the other Newcomers jostled past her. George had to reach out and flatten his palm across the elevator’s retracted door to keep it from closing on her face.

  “Come on.” Susan pushed at Lydia’s elbow, urging her gently out of the elevator. “You need to get back to your room now, Mrs. Vegas. You’re upset.”

  “Upset.” The thin, bitter laugh that jerked out from the older linnaum shocked George into adding his efforts to Susan’s. Between the two of them, they managed to get Lydia Vegas out and walking slowly down the hall. She shuddered beneath their hands, her slight bones vibrating with the stress. “I suppose you could call it that. But you can’t know how it felt to see that—thing—on the table. You’ve probably never lost a child—”

  George stiffened, more in surprise than offense. “We all lost children on the ship,” he reminded her sharply.

  “I don’t mean having a child taken away.” Lydia gazed down the long, dimly lit hall, the bleak look back on her face. George wondered if she was thinking about her husband. “I mean lost in birth, lost while he incubated in his father’s pouch. Lost when he looked just like that—”

  Susan reached out with her usual quick sympathy to press her palm against Lydia’s scarred cheek. “You had a miscarriage.”

  “Yes.” The older Newcomer’s brittle voice cracked into a sob, but she kept walking. “It happened last year, just before the Days of Descent. Ross was never home, he was working so hard to get his business started, and he wouldn’t listen when I told him—”

  A door slammed open a few meters down the hall, spilling a fan of brighter light across the floor. The stocky figure of Ross Vegas stood silhouetted in the doorway, his shadowy face unreadable but his shoulders high with anger.

  “Lydia.” He strode forward to catch her by the arm and yank her toward him, as if Susan and George’s touch had somehow contaminated her. “You shouldn’t inflict your personal problems on strangers.”

  His wife fell silent, a blank wall of politeness slamming down across the pain in her face. Vegas turned toward George and Susan, his eyes clenched with anger. “I don’t know what you said to upset my wife,” he growled, “but from now on I want you both to stay away from her. Is that clear?”

  Years of resentment rose inside George, making his own eyes narrow reflexively. He held Vegas’s pale gaze for a long moment before he spoke, silently informing the Overseer that he wasn’t intimidated. “Your wife was distressed by what happened at the press conference, after you stalked out and left her there,” he said at last. “If you’re looking to blame someone for that, I suggest you check a mirror.”

  Vegas scowled at him, anger and surprise mixing in his face. “You’re cha’dikav!” he said, using the Tenctonese word that meant “too intractable to be trained.” An insult among the Overseers, but not so among the slaves. “What are you doing here? Someone like you should have been sold off the ship long ago.”

  George smiled back at him, tightly and without humor. “I was,” he agreed. “Several times. But I was cha’dikav, so they always sent me back.”

  The welcome kiss of warm air met them when they opened the door to their hotel room, and George felt some of the tension drain out of his feet. Beside him he heard Susan release a grateful sigh as she locked the door behind them. “You remembered to turn up the thermostat,” she said, and turned to brush her temple against his. “Thank you, neemu. I don’t think I could have stood the cold much longer.”

  “Neither could I.” George leaned his cheek against the silken heat of hers. A little more worry seeped away. “We could get even warmer in bed.”

  Susan laughed and pushed him away. “I think you’ve spent too much time with Matt lately.”

  “I have,” George agreed seriously. “We were on a stakeout together for most of last week.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Susan kicked off her shoes and headed for the bathroom, her voice floating out past the half-open door. “You never used to feel the need to antagonize Overseers, George, no matter how much you disliked them.”

  George settled on the nearest flower-patterned bed, working his own shoes off and massaging his stiff ankles. “I never had an Overseer insul
t my wife after she had gone out of her way to be nice to his.”

  “Poor Lydia.” Susan emerged from the bathroom with her face scrubbed clean and glowing. She unzipped her strapless blue dress and slid out of it, then folded it carefully away in a dresser drawer. George appreciatively eyed the translucent silk slip she wore under it, wondering what kept it in place. “That’s a terrible thing to have gone through. I keep thinking about how close we came to losing Vessna—”

  “Don’t.” George reached out and pulled her onto his lap, stroking a distracting hand down the nape of her neck. Susan sighed in surprise and delight. “I like this slip you almost have on. Is it new?”

  His wife chuckled wickedly. “No. Cathy lent it to me.”

  “Oh.” George paused, a little disturbed by the thought of Sikes seeing this same garment, even if it had been on a quite different female. “She didn’t think Matthew would mind?”

  “She didn’t think he’d notice.” Susan leaned over to run a knowing finger down the most sensitive line of his spots. “But if you’re really worried about it, we can always take it off.”

  “Good idea,” George said, and started to implement it. Unfortunately, the phone rang before he could finish. He groaned and reached for it.

  “Matthew, if you need me to bail you out—”

  “It’s me, Dad.” It was Buck’s voice, unusually cheerful and as clear as if he were calling from the next room instead of from Los Angeles. “Bad time to call?”

  “Not as bad as it could have been.” George pulled Susan down onto the bed beside him and cradled the phone between their faces so that both of them could hear their son. “How are things at home?”

  “All right so far. Albert took pretty good care of Vessna while Em and I were at school.”

  “Except for putting her diaper on backwards,” Emily’s indignant voice said from another phone. “I had to show him the right way to do it.”