by David Brin
There was the controversy in a nutshell. The whole world waited to see If the believers in Darwin, or those who followed Von Daniken, were right. The Skins and Shirts were only the more fanatical fringes of a split that had divided humanity into two philosophical camps. The issue: how did Homo-Sapiens originate as a thinking being?
Or was that all the Shirts and Skins represented?
The former group took their love of aliens to almost a pseudo-religious frenzy. Hysterical Xenophilia?
The Neoliths, with their love of caveman garb and ancient lore; were their cries for “independence from E.T. influence” based on something more basic—fear of the unknown, the powerfully alien? Xenophobia?
Of one thing Jacob was sure. The Shirts and Skins shared resentment. Resentment of the Confederacy’s cautious compromise policy towards E.T.’s. Resentment of the Probation Laws which kept so many of them in a form of Coventry. Resentment of a world in which no man any longer knew his roots for certain.
An old, unshaven man caught Jacob’s eye. He squatted by the road, hopped up and down and pointed at the ground between his legs, shouting in the dust kicked up. by the crowd. Jacob slowed down as he approached.
The man wore a fur jacket and hand-sewn leather breeches. His shouting and jumping grew more frenzied as Jacob neared.
“Doo-Doo!” He screamed, as if delivering a terrible insult. Froth appeared on his lips and he again pointed to the ground.
“Doo-Doo! Doo-Doo!”
Puzzled, Jacob slowed the car almost to a stop.
Something flew past his face from the left and cracked against the window on the passenger side. There was a bang on the roof and within seconds a fusillade of small pebbles was striking the car, making a drumming that pounded in his ears.
He ran up the window on his left side, yanked the car out of automatic, and surged ahead. The flimsy metal and plastic of the runabout dimpled every time a missile struck it. Suddenly there were faces leering in Jacob’s side windows; young tough faces with drooping moustaches. The youths ran along, the side of the car as it sluggishly accelerated, hammering on it with fists and shouting.
With the Barrier only a few meters away, Jacob laughed and decided to find out what they wanted. He eased off a trifle on the accelerator and turned to mouth a question at the man who ran next to him, an adolescent dressed as a twentieth-century science fiction hero. The crowd by the side of the road was a blur of placards and costumes.
Before he could speak the car was shaken by a jolting bang. A hole had appeared in his windshield and a burning smell filled the little cab.
Jacob gunned the car toward the Barrier. The row of barber poles whizzed by and suddenly he was alone. In his rearview mirror he saw his entourage gather together. The youths shouted as he drove off, raising fists from the sleeves of futuristic robes. He grinned and opened the window to wave back.
How am I going to explain this to the rental company? he thought. Shall I say that I was attacked by forces of the Imperial Ming or do you think they’ll believe the truth?
There was no question of calling the police. The local constabulary would be unable to make a move without starting with a P-Search. And a few P-Transmitters among so many would be lost for sure. Besides, Fagin had asked him to be discreet in coming to this meeting.
He rolled down the windows to let a breeze carry away the smoke. He poked at the bullet hole in his windshield with the tip of his small finger and smiled bemusedly.
You actually enjoyed that, didn’t you? he thought
It was one thing to let the adrenalin flow, and quite another to laugh at danger. His sense of elation during the fracas at the Barrier worried a part of Jacob more than the mysterious violence of the crowd did . . . a symptom out of his past.
A minute or two passed, then a tone sounded from the dashboard.
He looked up. A hitchhiker? Out here? Down the road, less than half of a kilometer away, a man by the curb held his watch out into the path of the guidebeam. Two satchels rested on the ground beside him.
Jacob hesitated. But here inside the Reserve only Citizens were allowed. He pulled over to the curb, just a few meters past the man.
There was something familiar about the fellow. He was a florid little man in a dark grey business suit and his paunch jiggled as he heaved two heavy bags to the side of Jacob’s car. His face was perspiring as he bent over the door on the passenger’s side and peered in.
“Oh boy, what heat!” he moaned. He spoke standard English with a thick accent.
“No wonder no one uses the guideway,” he went on, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “They drive so fast to catch a little tiny breeze, don’t they? But you are familiar, we must have met somewhere before. I am Peter LaRoque . . . or Pierre, If you wish. I am with Les Mondes.”
Jacob started.
“Oh. Yes, LaRoque. We’ve met before. I’m Jacob Demwa. Hop in, I’m only going as far as the Information Center, but you can get a bus from there.”
He hoped that his face didn’t show his feelings. Why hadn’t he recognized LaRoque when he was still moving? He might not have stopped.
It wasn’t that he had anything in particular against the man . . . other than his incredible ego and his inexhaustible store of opinions, which he would thrust upon anyone at the smallest opportunity. In many ways he was probably a fascinating personality. He certainly had a following in the Danikenite press. Jacob had read a number of LaRoque’s articles and enjoyed the style, if not the content.
But LaRoque had been a member of the press corps that had chased him for weeks after he’d solved the Water-Sphinx mystery, and one of the least tactful at that. The final story in Les Mondes had been favorable, and beautifully written as well. But it hadn’t been worth the trouble.
Jacob was glad that the press hadn’t been able to find him after the still earlier Ecuadorian fiasco, that mess at the Vanilla Needle. At that time LaRoque would have been too much to bear.
Right now he was having trouble believing LaRoque’s obviously affected “Origin” accent. It was even thicker than the last time they’d met, if possible.
“Demwa, ah, of course!” the man said. He stuffed his bags behind the passenger seat and got in. “The maker and purveyor of aphorisms! The connoisseur of mysteries! You’re here maybe to play puzzle games with our noble interplanetary guests? Or perhaps you are going to consult with the Great Library in La Paz?”
Jacob re-entered the guideway, wishing he knew who had started the “National Origins Accent” fad, so he could strangle the man.
“I’m here to do some consultant work and my employers include extraterrestrials, if that’s what you mean. But I can’t go into details.”
“Ah yes, so very secret!” LaRoque wagged a finger playfully. “You should not tease a journalist so! Your business I might make my business! But you, you must surely wonder what brings the ace reporter of Les Mondes to this desolate place, no?”
“Actually,” Jacob said, “I’m more interested in how you came to be hitchhiking in the middle of this desolate place.”
LaRoque sighed.
“A desolate place, indeed! How sad it is that the noble aliens who visit us should be stuck here and in other wastelands such as your Alaska!”
“And Hawaii and Caracas and Sri Lanka, the Confederacy Capitols,” Jacob said. “But as to how you came to be . . .”
“How I came to be assigned here? Yes, of course, Demwa! But maybe we can amuse ourselves with your renowned deductive talents. You perhaps can guess?”
Jacob suppressed a groan. He reached forward to poll the car out of the guideway and put more weight onto the accelerator pedal.
“I’ve got a better idea, LaRoque. Since you don’t want to tell me why you were standing there in the middle of nowhere, perhaps you’d be willing to clear up a little mystery for me.”
Jacob described the scene at the Barrier. He left out the violent ending, hoping that LaRoque hadn’t noticed the hole in the windshield, but he car
efully described the behavior of the squatting man.
“But of course!” LaRoque cried. “You make it easy for me!
“You know the initials of this phrase you used, ‘Permanent Probationer,’ that horrible classification which denies a man his rights, parenthood, the franchise . . .”
“Look, I agree already! Save the speech.” Jacob thought for a moment. What were the initials?
“Oh . . . I think I see.”
“Yes, the poor fellow was only striking back! You Citizens, you call him Pee-Pee . . . so is it not simple justice that he accuse you of being Docile and Domesticated? Ergo the doo-doo!”
Jacob laughed, despite himself. The road began to curve.
“I wonder why all those people were gathered at the Barrier? They seemed to be waiting for somebody.”
“At the Barrier?” LaRoque said. “Ah yes. I hear that happens every Thursday. Eatees from the Center go up to look at non-Citizens and they in turn come down to look at an Eatee. Droll, no? One doesn’t know which side throws the peanuts!”
The road turned around one hill and their destination was in sight.
The Information Center, a few kilometers north of Ensenada, was a sprawling compound of E.T. quarters, public museums and, hidden around back, barracks for the border patrol. In front of a broad parking lot stood the main structure where first-time visitors took lessons in Galactic Protocol.
The station was on a small plateau, between the highway and the ocean, commanding a broad view over both. Jacob parked the car near the main entrance.
LaRoque was chewing, red-faced, on some thought. He looked up suddenly.
“You know I was joking, Just then, when I spoke about peanuts. I was only making a joke.”
Jacob nodded, wondering what had got into the man. Strange.
3. GESTALT
Jacob helped LaRoque carry his bags to the bus station, then made his way around the main building to find a place outside to sit. Ten minutes remained before he was due at the meeting.
Where the compound overlooked a small harbor he found a patio with shade trees and picnic tables. He «chose one table to sit on and rested his feet on the bench. The touch of the cool ceramic tile and the breeze off the ocean penetrated his clothing and drew away the redness from his skin and the perspiration from his clothes.
For a few minutes he sat quietly, letting the hard muscles of his shoulders and lower back relax one by one, sloughing off the tension of the drive. He focused on a small sailboat, a daycraft with jib and main colored greener than the ocean. Then he let a trance come down over his eyes.
Floating. One at a time he examined the things his senses revealed to him and then he canceled them. He concentrated on his muscles one by one, to cut off sensation and tension. Slowly his limbs grew numb and distant.
An itch in his thigh persisted, but his hands remained in his lap until it left of its own accord. The salt smell of the sea was pleasant but equally distracting. He made it go away. He shut off the sound of his heartbeat by listening to it with undivided attention until it became too familiar to notice.
As he had for two years, Jacob guided the trance through a cathartic phase, in which images came and went startlingly fast in healing pain, as two pieces, split apart, tried again to fuse whole. It was a process that he never enjoyed.
He was alone, almost. All that remained was a background of voices, murmuring subvocal snatches of phrases at the edge of meaning. For a moment ha thought he could hear Gloria and Johnny arguing about Makakai, then Makakai herself chattering something irreverent in pidgin-trinary.
He guided each sound away gently, waiting for one that came, as usual, with predictable suddenness: Tania’s voice calling something he couldn’t quite understand as she fell past him, arms outstretched. He still heard her as she fell the rest of the twenty miles to the ground, becoming a tiny speck and then disappearing . . . still calling.
That little voice too faded, but this time it left him more uneasy than usual.
A violent, exaggerated version of the incident at the Zone Boundary flashed through his mind. Suddenly he was back, this time standing among the Probationers. A bearded man dressed as a Pictish Shaman held out a pair of binoculars and nodded insistently.
Jacob picked them up and looked where the man pointed. Its image warped by heat waves rising from the highway, a bus rolled to a*stop just on the other side of a line of candy-striped poles that stretched to each, horizon. Each pole seemed to reach all the way up to the sun.
Then the image was gone. With practiced indifference, Jacob let go of the temptation to think about it and allowed his mind to go completely blank.
Silence and Darkness.
He rested in a deep trance, relying on his own internal clock to signal when the time to emerge was near. He moved slowly among patterns that had no symbols and long familiar meanings that eluded description or remembrance, patiently looking for the key he knew was there and that he’d someday find.
Time was now a thing like any other, lost in a deeper passage.
The calm dark was pierced, suddenly, by a sharp pain driving past all of his mind’s isolation. It took a moment, an eternity that must have been a hundredth of a second, to localize it. The pain was a bright blue light that seemed to stab at his hypnosis sensitized eyes through closed lids. In another instant, before he could react, it was gone.
Jacob struggled for a moment with his confusion. He tried to concentrate solely on rising to consciousness while a stream of panicky questions popped like flashbulbs in his mind.
What subconscious artifact had that blue light been? A corner of neurosis that defends itself so fiercely has to mean trouble! What hidden fear did I probe?
As he emerged, hearing returned.
There were footsteps ahead. He picked them out from the sounds of the wind and sea, but in his trance they seemed like the soft padding ostrich feet might make if clothed in mocassins.
The deep trance finally broke, several seconds after the subjective burst of light. He opened his eyes. A tall alien stood in front of him, a few meters away. His immediate impression was of tallness, whiteness, and huge red eyes.
For a moment the world seemed to tilt.
Jacob’s hands flew to the sides of the table and his head sank as he steadied himself. He closed his eyes.
Some trance! he thought. My head feels as if it’s about to crash through the Earth and come out the other side!
He rubbed his eyes with one hand, then carefully looked up once again.
The alien was still there. So it was real. It was humanoid, standing at least two meters tall. Most of its slender body was covered by a long .silvery robe. The hands, folded in front in the Attitude of Respectful Waiting, were long, white and glossy.
A very large round head bowed forward on a Bleeder neck. The lidless, red, columnar eyes and the lips of the alien’s mouth were huge. They dominated the face, on which a few other small organs served purposes unknown to him. This species was new to Jacob.
The eyes glowed with intelligence.
Jacob cleared his throat. He still had to fight off waves of dizziness.
“Excuse me. . . . Since we haven’t been introduced, I . . . don’t know how I’m to address you, but I assume you’re here to see me?”
The big, white head nodded deeply in assent.
“Are you with the group the Kanten, Fagin, asked me to meet?”
Again, the alien nodded.
I suppose that means yes, Jacob thought. I wonder if he can speak, what with any imaginable kind of mechanism lurking behind those huge lips.
But why was the creature just standing there? Was there something in its attitude . . . ?
“Am I to assume that, that yours is a client species and you are waiting for permission to speak?”
The “lips” separated slightly and Jacob caught a glimpse of something bright and white. The alien nodded again.
“Well then speak up, please! We humans are notoriously short on protoc
ol. What’s your name?”
The voice was surprisingly deep. It hissed out of a barely widened mouth with a pronounced lisp.
“I am Culla, Shir. Thank you. I have been shent to make sure that you were not losht. If you will come with! me, the othersh are waiting. Or, if you prefer, you can continue to meditate until the appointed time.”
“No, no let’s go, by all means.” Jacob rose to his feet unsteadily. He closed his eyes for a moment to clear his mind of the last shreds of the trance. Sooner or later he would have to sort out what had happened, while he’d been under, but that would have to wait.
“Lead on.”
Culla turned and walked with a slow, fluid gait toward one of the side doorways to the Center.
Culla was apparently a member of a “client” species—one whose period of indenture to its “patron” species was still active. Such a race rated low on the galactic pecking order. Jacob, mystified as he still was by the intricacies of galactic affairs, was glad that a tacky accident had won for humanity a better, if insecure, place on the hierarchy.
Culla led him upstairs to a large oaken door. He opened it without announcement and preceded Jacob into the meeting room.
Jacob saw two human beings and, besides Culla, two aliens: one short and furry, the other smaller still, and lizardlike. They were seated on cushions between some large indoor shrubs and a picture window overlooking the bay.
He tried to sort his impressions of the aliens before they noticed him, but had only a moment before someone spoke his name.
“Jacob, my friend! How kind it is for you to come and share with us your time!” It was Fagin’s fluting voice. Jacob looked quickly about the room.
“Fagin, where . . . ?”
“I am here.”
He looked back at the group by the window. The humans and the furry E.T. were rising to their feet The lizard-alien remained on its cushion.
Jacob adjusted his perspective and suddenly one of the “indoor shrubs” was Fagin. The old Kanten’s silver tipped foliage tinkled softly as if there were a breeze.
Jacob smiled. Fagin presented a problem whenever they met. With humanoids, one looked for a face, or something that served the same purpose. Usually it took only a little time to find a place in an alien’s strange features on which to focus.
