21st Century Science Fiction (14 page)

The automaton dipped its polished chrome ant’s head and eyed my damaged clothing, then it checked its screen, and after a moment it handed—or rather, clawed—over a key card. I headed for the elevator and soon found myself in the kind of room I’d never been able to afford on Earth, my luggage already stacked beside my bed, and a welcome pack on a nearby table. I opened the half bottle of champagne and began chugging it down as I walked out onto the balcony. Now what?

Prior to my brief exchange with the mugull doctor, I’d been told that my life expectancy was about four weeks, but that, “I’m sure the aliens will be able to do
something
!” Well, they had. The drugs and the assister frame enabled me to actually move about and take some pleasure in my remaining existence. The time limit, unfortunately, had not changed. So, I would see as much of this miraculous place as possible . . . but I’d avoid that damned park. I thought then about what had happened.

The park was fifteen kilometers across, with Earthly meadows, and forests of cycads like purple pineapples tall as trees. There were aliens everywhere, a lot of them strood. And one, which I was sure had been following me before freezing and standing like a monument in a field of daisies, started drifting toward me. I stepped politely aside, but it followed me and started making strange moaning sounds. I got scared then, but controlled myself, and stood still when it reached one of its tendrils out to me. Maybe it was just saying hello. The stinging cells clacked like maracas and my arm felt as if someone had whipped it, before turning numb as a brick. The monster started shaking then, as if this had got it all excited.

“Eat you!”

Damned thing. I don’t mind being the primitive poor relation, but not the main course.

I turned round and went back into my room, opened my suitcase, found my spare inhaler and patches, and headed for the bathroom. An hour later, I was clean, and the pain in my body had receded to a distant ache I attempted to drive farther away with the contents of the minibar. I slept for the usual three hours, woke feeling sick, out of breath, and once again in pain. A few pulls from one inhaler opened up my lungs, and the other inhaler took away the feeling that someone was sandpapering the inside of my chest, then more pills gave me a further two hours sleep, and that, I knew, was as much as I was going to get.

I dressed, buttoning up my shirt while standing on the balcony and watching the street. No day or night here, just the changing face of Jupiter in an orange-blue sky. Standing there, gazing at the orb, I decided that I must have got it all wrong somehow. The aliens had only ever killed humans in self-defense, so somehow there had been a misunderstanding. Maybe, with the strood being pathun “pets,” what had happened had been no more than the equivalent of someone being snapped at by a terrier in a park. I truly believed this. But that didn’t stop me suddenly feeling very scared when I heard that same bedlam ghost muttering and bellowing along below. I stared down and saw the strood—it had to be the same one—rippling across the street and pausing there. I was sure it was looking up at me, though it had no eyes.

The strood was still waiting as I peered out of the hotel lobby. For a second, I wished I had a gun or some other weapon to hand, but that would only have made me feel better, not be any safer. I went back inside and walked up to the automaton behind the hotel desk.

Without any ado, I said, “I was translocated here from a holding cell, to which I was translocated after running straight into a pathun’s personal space.”

“Yes,” it replied.

“This happened because I was running away from a strood that wants to eat me.”

“Yes,” it replied.

“Who must I inform about this . . . assault?”

“If your attack upon the pathun had been deliberate, you would not have been released from the holding cell,” it buzzed at me.

“I’m talking about the strood’s assault on
me
.”

Glancing aside, I saw that the creature was now looming outside the revolving doors. They were probably all that was preventing it from entering the hotel. I could hear it moaning.

“Strood do not attack other creatures.”

“It stung me!”

“Yes.”

“It wants to eat me!”

“Yes.”

“It said ‘eat you, eat you,’ ” I said, before I realized what the automaton had just said. “Yes!” I squeaked.

“Not enough to feed strood, here,” the automaton told me. “Though Earth will be a good feeding ground for them.”

I thought of the thousands of these creatures I had seen here. No, I just didn’t believe this! My skin began to crawl as I heard the revolving doors turning, all of them.

“Please summon help,” I said.

“None is required.” The insectile head swung toward the strood. “Though you are making it ill, you know.”

Right then, I think my adrenaline ran down, because suddenly I was hurting more than usual. I turned with my back against the desk to see the strood coming toward me across the lobby. It seemed somehow ragged to me, disreputable, tatty. The pictures of them I’d seen showed larger and more glittering creatures.

“What do you want with me?”

“Eat . . . need . . . eat,” were the only words I could discern from the muttering bellow. I pushed away from the desk and set out in a stumbling run for the elevator. No way was I going to be able to manage the stairs. I hit the button just as the strood surged after me. Yeah, great, you’re going to die waiting for an elevator. It reached me just as the doors opened behind me. One of its stinging tendrils caught me across the chest, knocking me back into the elevator. This seemed to confuse the creature, and it held back long enough for the doors to draw closed. My chest grew numb and my breathing difficult as I stabbed buttons, then the elevator lurched into progress, and I collapsed to the floor.

• • • •

“Technical Acquisitions” was a huge disc-shaped building, like the bridge of the starship
Enterprise
mounted on top of a squat skyscraper. Nigel kept Julia, Lincoln, and myself constantly on camera, while Pierce kept panning across and up and down—getting as much of our surroundings as possible. I’d learned that quantity was what they were aiming for; all the artwork was carried out on computer afterward. Pierce—an Asian woman with rings through her lip connected by a chain to rings through her ear, and a blockish stud through her tongue—was the one who suggested it, and Julia immediately loved the idea. I was just glad, after Julia and Nigel dragged me out of the elevator, for the roof taxi to get me out of the hotel without my having to go back through the lobby. Of course, none of them took my story about stroods wanting to eat people seriously; they were just excited about the chance of some real in-your-face documentary making.

“Dawson’s got a direct line to the head honchos here in the system station,” Lincoln explained to me. For “head honchos,” read pathuns, who, after their initial show-and-tell on Earth, took no interest in all the consequent political furor. They were physicists, engineers, biologists, and pursued their own interests to the exclusion of all else. It drove human politicians nuts that the ones who had the power to convert Earth into a swiftly dispersing smoke cloud might spend hours watching a slug devouring a cabbage leaf, but have no time to spare to discuss
issues
with the president or prime minister. Human scientists, though, were a different matter, for pathuns definitely leaned toward didacticism. I guess it all comes down to the fact that modern politicians don’t really
change
very much, that the inventor of the vacuum cleaner changed more people’s lives than any number of Thatchers or Blairs. Dawson was the chief of the team of human scientists aboard the system base, learning at the numerous feet of the pathuns.

“We get to him, and we should be able to get a statement from one of the pathuns—he’s their blue-eyed boy, and they let him get up to all sorts of stuff,” Lincoln continued. “According to our researchers, he’s even allowed access to curiol matrix tech.”

In the lobby of the building, Lincoln shmoozed the insectile receptionist with his spiel about the documentary he was doing for the Einstein channel, then spoke to a bearded individual on a large phone screen. I recognized Dawson right away, because my own viewing had always leaned toward that channel Lincoln and Julia had denigrated on our way out here. He was a short plump individual, with a big gray beard, gray hair, and very odd-looking orangish eyes. He’s the kind of physicist who pisses off many of his fellows by being better at pure research than they, and then making it worse by being able to turn his research to practical and profitable ends. While many of them had walked away from CERN with wonderfully obscure papers to their names, he’d walked away with the same, plus a very real contribution to make to quantum computing. I didn’t hear the conversation, but I was interested to see Dawson gazing past Lincoln’s shoulder directly at me, before giving the go-ahead for us to come up.

How to describe the inside of the disk? There were benches, computers, and big plasma screens, macrotech that looked right out of CERN, people walking, talking, waving light pens, people gutting alien technology, scanning circuit boards under electron microscopes, running mass spectrometer tests on fragments of exotic metal . . . . On Earth, there was a lot of alien technology knocking about, and a lot of it turned to smoking goo the moment anyone tried to open it up. It’s not that they don’t want us to learn; it’s just that they don’t want us to depopulate the planet in the process. Here, though, things were different: under direct pathun supervision, the scientists were having a great time.

Lincoln and Julia began by asking Dawson for an overview on everything that he and his people were working on. My interest was held for a while as he described materials light as polystyrene and tough as steel, a micro tome capable of slicing diamonds, and nanotech self-repairing computer chips, but, after a while, I began to feel really sick, and without my assister frame, I’d have been on the floor. Finally, he was standing before pillars with hooked-over tops, gesturing at something subliminal between them. When I realized he was talking about curiol matrices, my interest perked up, but it was then that Lincoln and Julia went in for the kill.

“So, obviously the pathuns trust you implicitly, or are you treated like a strood?” asked Julia.

I stared at the subliminal flicker, and through it to the other side of the room, where it seemed a work bench was sneaking away while no one was watching—until I realized that I was seeing a pathun sauntering across, all sorts of equipment on its back.

“Strood?” Dawson asked.

“Yes, their pets,” interjected Lincoln. “Ones whose particularly carnivorous tastes the pathuns seem to be pandering to.”

I tracked the pathun past the pillars to a big equipment elevator. Took a couple of pulls on one of my inhalers—not sure which one, but it seemed to help. I thought that I was imagining the bedlam moaning. Everything seemed to be getting a little fuzzy around the edges.

“Pets?” said Dawson, staring at Lincoln as if he’d just discovered a heretofore-undiscovered variety of idiot.

“But then I suppose it’s all right,” said Julia, “if the kind of people fed to them are going to die anyway.”

Dawson shook his head, then said, “I was curious to see what your angle would be—that’s why I let you come up.” Now he turned to me. “Running into a pathun’s curiol matrix wasn’t the best idea—it reacted to you rather than the strood.”

It came up on the equipment elevator, shimmering and flowing out before the observing pathun. The strood came round the room toward me. There were benches to my left, so the quickest escape route for me was ahead and left to the normal elevators. I hardly comprehended what Dawson was saying. You see, it’s all right to be brave and sensible when you’re whole and nothing hurts, but when you live with pain shadowing your every step, and the big guy with the scythe is just around the corner, your perspective changes.

“It bonded and you broke away,” he said. “Didn’t you study your orientation? Can’t you see it’s in love?”

I ran, and slammed straight into an invisible web between the two pillars—a curiol matrix Dawson had been studying. Energies shorted through my assister frame, and something almost alive connected to my gilst and into my brain. Exo-skeletal energy, huge frames of reference, translocation, reality displayed as formulae . . . there is no adequate description. Panicked, I just saw where I didn’t want to be, and strove to put myself somewhere else. The huge system base opened around me, up and down in lines and surfaces and intersection points. Twisting them into a new pattern, I put myself on the roof of the world. My curiol retained air around me, retained heat, but did not defend me from harsh and beautiful reality; in fact, it amplified perception. Standing on the steel plain, I saw that Jupiter was truly vast but finite, and that through vacuum the stars did not waver, and that there was no way to deny the depths they burned in. I gasped, twisted to a new pattern, found myself tumbling through a massive swarm of mugulls, curiols reacting all around me and hurling me out.

It’s in love
.

Something snatched me down, and, sprawled on an icy platform, I observed a pathun, linked in ways I could not quite comprehend to vast machines rearing around me to forge energies of creation. The curiol gave me a glimpse of what it meant to have been in a technical civilization for more than half a million years. Then I understood about huge restraint. And amusement. The pathun did something then, its merest touch shaking blocks of logic into order, and something went click in my head.

Eat you! Eat you!

Of course, everything I had been told was the truth. No translator problem; just an existential one. What need did pathuns have for lies? I folded away from the platform and stumbled out from the other side of the pillars, shedding the curiol behind me. Momentarily doubt nearly had me stepping back into the matrix as the strood flowed round and reared up before me: a raggedy and bloody curtain.