Authors: Mary Sisson
Trang (43 page)
He sat back in the chair and stared
at her as she sat behind her desk. “So you’re comfortable with this,” he said.
Shanti shrugged her shoulders.
“They make demands,” Philippe said.
“The demands escalate. They say that the Hosts are despots, would-be murderers,
and thieves. Then—even though none of their demands have been met, not a single
one,
and the Hosts have been
completely
inflexible—everything’s
suddenly OK, the Hosts are great, and the status quo is the best thing ever.”
Shanti shrugged again. “They made a
deal, maybe? Something you don’t know about? You know they were losing
allies—maybe this new crew didn’t understand how badly they were blowing it.
And then they realized how much they were hurting themselves, and now they’re
trying to make it up.”
Philippe shook his head. “They’re
still making enemies. It’s just that now they’re blaming the Snake Boys and
that poor Host trader for everything.”
“So, they’re bullies, these new
guys. They don’t learn. They lash out.” Shanti looked exasperated. “Fuck,
Trang, I don’t know.”
Philippe kneaded his temples. “This
worries me. It worries me because it doesn’t make any sense. And besides, it’s been
a week—have you seen any indication that the Cyclopes are trading again? I
haven’t. Baby hasn’t. No one has. If they want things to return to normal, then
things should be normal. It reminds me of Guantánamo—they’re saying what
everyone wants to hear, but their actions don’t match up.”
Shanti spread her hands. “There’s
not much we can do. I mean, I can tell everyone to keep an eye peeled, but if
it’s between the Cyclopes and the Hosts—”
“I know,” Philippe said. “I know.”
“Your people don’t seem to be able to relate to others the
way they used to,” Philippe said.
“That’s a shame,” Creepy replied,
clearly uninterested.
Philippe took a couple of deep
breaths and willed himself to stay relaxed. He wanted to be able to say this
without losing Creepy. “I think there may be an attack.”
“There are always attacks,” said
Creepy. “My planet is plagued with warfare—different families attack each other
all the time. The priests egg it on. It’s disgusting.”
Philippe took another breath. “I
don’t think that’s true now.”
Creepy looked skeptical. “Well,
that
would
be a significant improvement, if it’s true, but. . . . I take
it you haven’t actually
been
to my planet?”
“I haven’t.”
“So, basically, you just know what
the priests tell you. Believe me, they know how to lie.”
Philippe decided to drop the
subject. “Tell me about the catastrophe.”
“The one you’re supposed to
prevent?” asked Creepy, looking grim. “It’s bad—very bad. That’s why they took
me, so that I could help you stop it. It destroys their people, and my people—and
I guess probably your people, too, right? Otherwise why would you be involved?
Anyway, it’s bad news all around.”
“What is it?” Philippe asked again
“I don’t know.”
Philippe took a couple of breaths.
Stay
calm.
“You don’t?” he finally said.
“No,” said the Host.
“How will you stop it?” he asked
“
You
stop it,” said the
Host. “That’s why you were chosen. I help—or maybe I’ve already helped, maybe
just telling you that it’s going to happen is help enough. I don’t really
know.”
“Do you know when it happens?”
asked Philippe.
“I don’t even know when
now
is, how am I supposed to know that?” asked Creepy. “Anyway, if you’re worried
that it’s going to happen soon, you should visit my planet.”
“Why?” asked Philippe
“That’s where it happens—that much
I know,” said Creepy. “Whatever happens, happens there.”
A visit was surprisingly easy to arrange.
Philippe went to Max. “Your messiah
wants me to visit your planet,” he said.
“That is wonderful news,” said Max.
“I don’t think my government is ready
to allow something like that,” Philippe said.
“We can make the visit discreetly,
so that your government’s surveillance satellites are unlikely to see it,” Max
replied. “The ships of the merchant you have befriended make regular trips
between our planet and this station. I am certain he would be happy to assist
us.”
Everything seemed set, but a hitch
occurred to Philippe that night as he was lying in bed: He had lost Creepy when
he went back to Earth, and Creepy had attributed that to Philippe’s trip through
a portal.
Assuming that Creepy’s theory was
right—that he couldn’t stay with Philippe when they traveled through a
portal—then going through the portal to the Hosts’ planet would force Creepy
out of his head and into someone else’s again.
Well,
thought Philippe,
I
should probably have company anyway.
“Hi, Shanti,” he said the next day,
closing the door to her office. “I have to tell you something.”
“Go for it,” she said.
Philippe took a deep breath. It was
just a little lie.
“I’m going on a top-secret
mission,” he said.
Shanti nodded, her face impassive.
“I’m going to visit the Hosts’ home
world.”
“Oh,” she said.
“They’re OK with it, but you know,
it has to be an unofficial visit,” Philippe continued. “Very hush-hush. I’m
telling you because I don’t want you to worry when I disappear for a few days,
and because I suppose I need a guard. But this is top secret: You can’t mention
it to
anybody.
”
“Sounds exciting,” she replied,
looking down and poking at something on her desk. “Top secret?”
“Yeah,” said Philippe. “It’s
really, really top secret.”
Shanti picked up a scroll. “
So
top secret that I haven’t heard a peep about it from Special Forces
or
Union Intelligence.”
“
Very
top secret,” Philippe
replied, feeling a little foolish.
“Can I ask you something?” Shanti
put down the scroll and looked him in the eye. “Is it
so
very top secret
that even the DiploCorps doesn’t know about it?”
Philippe flushed.
“Yeah, I’ll get in a lot less
trouble if you don’t answer that question,” she said, unperturbed. “Well, considering
the sensitive nature of the mission, I guess I’d better go myself.”
Philippe started.
“Just remember,” Shanti said, her
voice getting harder, “top fucking secret. That means you keep your mouth
fucking shut, now and for always. I don’t want to spend six months in an
orbital capsule with my thumb up my ass because you like to talk. And we take
George.”
Philippe nodded—that actually
sounded like a good idea. So there would be three of them: The unit’s doctor,
its diplomat, and its commander. . . .
“Won’t we be missed?” he asked.
Shanti laughed. “And you wouldn’t
be missed if you went by yourself?” she asked. “Don’t worry—we’ve pulled this
kind of shit before. Patch will cover for me, and Vip and Thorpe can fake up
the surveillance footage. If you’re not already behind on your messages, get
behind on them—it’s a good idea, too, if you prep some mail to go out while
you’re gone, that way there’s no gap. Unless there’s some colossal sister-fuck,
no one on Earth will have a clue that we went.”
“Um, thank you,” said Philippe.
“Hopefully there won’t be.”
“Yeah, but you gotta tell me what
we’re doing,” said Shanti. “Just a couple of days, right?”
“Just a couple of days,” said
Philippe. “Max says that their home world is basically right next to their portal,
so we just run over there, spend a day visiting, and run back.”
“And you’re not doing anything
stupid, right? Like signing a treaty or committing Earth to anything?” she
asked.
“No, no,” said Philippe. “I just
want to take a look.”
Shanti grinned. “Me, too.”
It was surprising to see how docile the SFers were—usually
there was endless gossip when something out of the ordinary happened. But this
time, Shanti just told the relevant parties that the three of them were going
to be gone and that they didn’t want any record of their absence. And everyone
just accepted it—no one asked them where they were going or what they were
planning to do or why they didn’t want the Union to know about it. No one asked
questions, not even Baby.
“That’s what it means to have
discipline,” Shanti said when Philippe remarked on it.
He got the same kind of
unquestioning acceptance when he told Max and the merchant that they’d need to
go through the portal exactly three times before landing on the Host planet and
exactly three times before returning to the station.
Philippe had come up with that idea
to solve the problem of Creepy being forced out of his mind when they passed
through the portal. Once he hit on that solution, he was doubly happy that the
doctor was coming along—with three people Creepy could bounce from Philippe’s
head into, say, George’s on the first pass through the portal, then on the
second pass, he could go into Shanti’s head, and then on the third pass he’d be
back in Philippe’s head just in time for them to land on the Host planet.
“What?” asked Creepy when Philippe
explained this to him.
“We’ll go through the portal six
times total,” said Philippe, pausing for breath, “The first two times you’re
forced out, go into one of my companions’ heads. Then on the third pass, go
into my head. Then follow that pattern a second time. That way you’ll be with
me when we land on your planet, and you’ll be with me when I come back here. We
don’t want you in someone else’s head when we reach your planet, right?”
Amazingly, he was able to get all
that out before losing focus and Creepy. Even though what he was doing hardly
qualified as traditional meditation, it really was getting easier to achieve
and maintain that relaxed, slightly zoned-out state.
Things had been quiet on the
station—too quiet, really, since the Cyclopes had not resumed trading and were
largely avoiding the common areas. Despite that, when Philippe, Shanti, and
George finally walked out of the humans’ living area and headed over to the
Hosts’, Philippe felt confident.
And excited: He was going to an
alien planet! No human had ever done that before. Sure, he was going to make
sure there wasn’t some Universe-ending catastrophe about to happen, but even if
Philippe took every single thing Creepy said at face value—and really, why
should he?—it didn’t mean that this trip would be anything other than a
fascinating bit of adventure travel. After all, the catastrophe might not
happen for years and years. And Philippe’s mere presence might be enough to
stop it—he might have stopped it already, without even knowing it.