Alien Earth (30 page)

“What’s wrong?”

[This pretense does not feel like the doughnut one. Sensory images are not as rich.]

“I’ll try harder. Okay, there are gloves on their hands, and through them they feel the leather reins that go to the bits in the horses’ mouths. So when the horses move their heads, the riders feel the reins tug in their fingers….”

[Something is still different.]

“Maybe it’s because when we were doing the doughnuts, it’s something I really did used to do, when I was a kid. Oh, not go and buy the whole store out, but eat doughnuts and pie, and go shopping, and talk at the table with my mom and stuff.”

[But you have not been The Lone Ranger.]

“Well, I’ve ridden horses. And my dad was a
Lone Ranger
fanatic, he had the whole series on videotape, and I used to watch them over and over. He had Disney’s
Zorro
movies, too, and Pancho and Cisco, and a few of the
A-Team
series …”

[Why are we The Lone Ranger and Tonto?]

“Because you asked me why we had to save the shuttle, and why I was so excited about it when you did … we did. Because you wanted to know what I meant by being a hero, and why I wanted to be one.”

[I still do not understand. Why do heroes do these things?]

“To be kind to other people. To do what is right. To feel good. If a Beast were in trouble and called for help, you’d go help. And it would feel good, wouldn’t it?”

[Eating feels good. Touching feels good. To place one’s physical body in danger of dismemberment … this does not make sense. To go to another Beast who needed help; I think this would be a forbidden thing. I still do not understand.]

“Well, if you’d quit interrupting the pretense, maybe I could show you!”

Raef was getting tired, and the strain was showing. He
closed down into himself as much as he could anymore and mustered his fraying patience and dwindling strength. Some things she learned so easily, and others she seemed incapable of grasping no matter what he did. Why did those things have to be the ones he most needed to impart to her? If he concentrated, he could be aware of his heartbeat. And every beat of his own heart meant another heartbeat of time gone by, real time, time in which Humans on the poisoned surface of Earth could die.

He could feel her trying to reach him, sort of like a small child tugging at his sleeve. He turned back to her.

[Please do not go away again. I shall not interrupt our pretenses anymore.]

Raef froze within himself. As simple as that, he had her. Something in the plaintiveness of her communication made him suddenly realize how important he had become to her. To bend her to his purposes, all he had to do was withhold his contact from her. Run a game on her, just like a teacher ignoring an unruly child, or kids excluding someone who was different until he came around or …

No.

“I’m sorry, Evangeline. I didn’t mean to leave you alone. And if you need to interrupt to understand, then interrupt. It’ll be okay.”

Pause.

[You change what you asked of me? You allow me to interrupt?]

“Sure, interrupt. It’s just your way of asking for what you need. And when I give it to you, it’s the right thing to do. Just like in our pretense. It’s all part of being a hero. Getting for people what they need, helping people. It feels good to the people you help, and it feels good to you.”

Raef waited, and could, in the end, not distinguish if the amazement was his or hers.

[This feels good to you, to let me do what I need to do to understand?]

“Sure. It’s like our other pretense, when Raef’s mom feels good when she takes care of Raef, and makes him feel good.”

He sensed a contagious excitement, a mind on the brink of a discovery, an understanding.

[Then we shall continue the pretense?]

“We shall. Where were we?”

The horse was solid and warm and sudden under him, the sun just as hot. With a jolt, he realized she had continued the action without him, that the train was closer to Mabel, too close. They weren’t going to make it. How the hell was he going to handle that? If the train ran over Mabel, he didn’t know if he could handle explaining death to Evangeline. He had to stop this. But Evangeline had the scenario in hand now, he couldn’t just will the train to slow down. He thudded his heels against Silver, but the big stallion was already stretched to his limits. Mabel’s face was a white mask of terror, her mouth opened red in a scream as they raced toward her.

They were still ahead of the locomotive, but he could hear it gaining on them. How the hell was he going to explain it to Evangeline when the engine ran over Mabel? But even as the thought appeared in his mind, he felt the pretense reject it. Now they raced neck and neck with the locomotive. No way a horse could outrun a train. He tried to change the pretense, make the train see Mabel and slow down. Instead, hard by his left side, Scout’s nose appeared. With a sense of muffled outrage, he watched his sidekick draw alongside, and then Tonto passed him. Her long black hair streamed out behind her; her eyes were squinched nearly shut in the wind of their passage. A breath ahead of the locomotive, Scout leaped across the tracks, and as he did so, Tonto leaned down, slashing Mabel’s bonds and scooping her up in one fluid motion. Scout’s aerodynamic leap carried Tonto and Mabel to safety on the other side of the tracks.

In a daze, Raef watched his planned actions robbed from his mind and performed superhumanly. He pulled Silver to a halt as the locomotive slashed between himself and Tonto, pulling its rattling string of Lionel passenger cars. The red caboose went careening past, and a grinning brakeman idiotically waved a lantern at them. She was plundering his mind, stealing images of trains at random to complete the pretense. He knew a giddying moment of terror when he realized she had completely taken over the pretense, could plunge him into any experience she dared dredge up from his mind, in perfect and horrifying detail.

Then the train was past them and disappearing down the track. And Raef wanted to laugh and shout in amazement. On the other side of the track, Mabel was being comforted in Tonto’s arms. Scout had already helped himself to a doughnut from the white cardboard box on the table beside him. A table complete with red-checked tablecloth.

“You can’t do this!” The Lone Ranger objected. But he grinned as he dismounted and helped himself to a chocolate eclair.

[Yes, we can. We are heroes. Heroes can do whatever they must to help other people. And, Raef, it feels good. It does.]

Raef, AKA The Lone Ranger, hooked his thumbs in his gun belt and rocked back on the heels of his cowboy boots. “I guess a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,” he told Tonto. And Tonto smiled at him and stroked Mabel’s hair.

They should have built
a fail-safe into the system. Tug saw that now, and wondered if any other Arthroplana ever had. Probably not. In all of the recorded history of his race, there had been no incident similar to the one he was now involved with. Or there had been no survivors to tell, anyway.

Tug had completed a review of everything he’d ever learned about Beasts. Nothing physical or psychological he could come up with explained what was happening with Evangeline. She should have been totally miserable and frightened at being out of contact with him. She should have been begging him to talk with her, instead of refusing his summons. Beasts were naturally gregarious, having been herd creatures before the Arthroplana had changed their social patterns by domestication. They were simple and good-natured, requiring little more of their Masters than entertainment and praise. Their innate intelligence had severe limits, but they could learn, if one repeated the lesson almost endlessly. One early experimenter had made an effort at raising that intelligence by such teaching, but had only succeeded in creating an irritable and frustrated Beast that had to be euthanized. The consensus was that the experiment had been ill-conceived and irresponsible; such tampering with nature was forbidden, now. Older Beasts exhibited similar symptoms toward the ends of their natural spans of usefulness, but
Evangeline was neither overtrained nor old. It didn’t make sense.

And there was nothing he could do.

Judicious applications of pain brought no response from her. Tug wanted to think before proceeding to more radical pain levels. For one thing, his body’s arsenal needed time to replenish itself. For another, he wanted to consider what he could do if high levels of pain no longer brought any response from her.

The Humans would have considered him a parasite within Evangeline; he was aware of that. Arthroplana preferred to consider their intellectual connection rather than any physical dependence, and refer to their relationship as symbiotic. Denied mental contact with Evangeline, his physical arsenal was his only method of dealing with her. He could sting her to obedience with pain, calm her fears with sedatives, even quell her mating urges to keep the Beast population in check. All restraining devices. He could not stimulate her pleasure centers, if indeed, Beasts had any. The only bait he could offer her was his companionship. How could she suddenly not need that? What could compete with that? He knew if he could ponder out that answer, he might have an idea of how to regain control.

In the end
,
she touched him. She couldn’t lift John’s body, not in full Earth gravity, but she had tugged him into a more comfortable position, and propped a cushion under his head. As she covered him with a blanket, more to conceal the disgusting animal marks than anything else, she had wondered what he had done with his spacesuit, and if they dared attempt a takeoff without it. Then she sat for a while and watched him sleep the sleep of exhaustion.

He looked different, and it wasn’t just the reddened skin. Puberty. No wonder he was doing stupid things. The stubble on his face was a little shorter than that on his skull, and the same color. His eyelashes were longer and curled against his cheeks as he slept. His jaw was squaring, or so she thought. Maybe it had always been that way. It was hard to remember how he had looked when she had first signed on. She hadn’t really looked at him much then. It felt odd now to stare at him and not worry about being observed.

After a while she realized she wanted him to wake up. Not to talk to, just to have someone else be in charge. The weight of her present responsibility dragged at her. But admitting it meant she had to take action. She rose and tried for radio contact with Tug again. The computer assured her that the radio checked out fine, and that biological repairs were proceeding as expected. Somehow it was more depressing than cheering. She leaned back in the lounger at the communications console and wondered what to do. The pain of anxiety roiling through her stomach had unfamiliar overtones of urgency. It took her a while to recognize what it was.

She was hungry. It had been years since she’d last felt real hunger. Everything in the womb and on shipboard was set up to foresee her bodily needs before she was aware of them. Well, it wasn’t going to be like that down here. She was awake and on her own. She’d have to take care of herself.

She checked the rations locker. There was plenty there, a ten-day supply for two people. She took out a meal pack and a bubble of water and carried it back to the lounger. The rations were exciting stuff. Chewy bars, four identical ones. Probably designed to be easily consumed under almost any circumstances. The bland flavor would fend off any temptation to overconsume. Eating them was more of a jaw exercise than anything else. But she finished them and conscientiously drank the entire bubble of water before consuming the gelatinous wrappings. She leaned back in the lounger. Okay, that was done. Now what?

John was still sleeping peacefully. She’d never before have believed it, but company of any kind would have been welcome now. She sighed, and turned to stare out at the forbidding view.

It had gotten darker outside. The dull red plain was rust-brown under a deep grey sky. The grey-green bushes were merely grey now, with huddling black shadows beneath them. She hadn’t thought it could get uglier, but it had. The skies looked oppressive, heavy, while the waiting plain was like something tormented and exhausted. Suddenly, quite close by the ship, something broke from the cover of one shadowing plant and raced across the open space to another brushy area. It was about the size of a child’s play ball, and bounced like
one. As abruptly as she had seen it, it disappeared, before she could even begin to tally up its features. Was it dangerous? Would it be able to figure out the catches on the door system, would it wait for darkness and then try to enter the ship and prey on them?

Connie felt the bottom of her stomach vibrating. She leaned close to the glass, forced herself to peer out after it, but the creature had concealed itself again. She was totally unprepared for the flash of whiteness that blinded her. She flung herself back from the window and hit the floor rolling. She had scarcely fetched up against John before the entire shuttle shook with an ominous roar that she felt throughout her entire body. She screamed as the window hazed and began to melt away.

“What is it? What is it?” John had jerked awake. She clutched at him with an incoherent cry, then managed to point at the blurring window.

“Out there. An animal, I saw it, and then we were hit by some kind of blast….”

Even as she spoke, the blue-white light flashed again, burning John’s stark profile into her retinas. She clenched her eyes shut and huddled against him. She could feel his heart pounding. A few moments of intense terror, and then, just as she dared to open her eyes, the shuttle quivered with impact again. The dull rumbling sounded as much in her guts as her ears. She forced herself to turn toward the window and look.

She felt John’s grip on her shoulders slacken. “Thunder and lightning. A rainstorm. That’s all.” He let go of her and scrambled up to the shuttle’s window and stared out avidly.

Rain, she thought dully. Washing in floods down the window, making the glass look like it was melting. Lightning and thunder. That was all, sure. But the storm that lashed their ship and the surrounding plain was like nothing she’d ever experienced on gentle Castor. After a time she mustered her courage and crept to John’s side, to peer out beside him.