Trang (50 page)

“That is unexpected because I am of
an ordinary color.” said Creepy. He looked at the thrumming Hosts. “They are
unusually red in color.”

The Hosts looked at each other, and
then looked at Max.

The priest shuffled forward, awed.
“We color ourselves, all Hosts do,” he said. “We consume a chemical compound on
a daily basis that makes us red.”

“Why?” asked Creepy, baffled.

“So that we would look different
than you, our messiah, and we would be able to identify you instantly were you
to return to us,” said Max.

“There is a kind of people,” Creepy
said to Max. “They are the creators of the portals, and they are the ones who
took me and held me.”

Max gaped at Creepy in wonder.
“Were they the reason you were able to sing such a marvelous prophecy?” he
asked, excited.

Creepy looked slightly ashamed.
“These people witness time differently than people such as ourselves,” he said.
“They apprehended a crisis as well as a means to offset that crisis. They led
me to believe that this crisis would destroy our people, although I am no
longer certain that they were genuinely concerned about our people.”

Philippe started.
He felt the
same thing I did,
he thought.
Indifference. Not benevolence. Solipsism.
He looked at Shanti. She was nodding—she had felt it, too.

There had been something familiar
about that brief glimpse into the minds of those aliens, and Philippe suddenly
realized what it was. They had reminded him of Wouter Hoopen, the self-serving
manager of the Titan station.

Max, however, was radiant. “They
saved our world,” he said, with the assurance of a true believer. “Through you,
they provided our people with centuries of guidance that protected us from an
unprovoked attack.”

Creepy looked like he wished that he
could vanish again.

“We, uh, we don’t think that’s
exactly what they were after,” Shanti jumped in. “When I was under hypnosis,
this Host and I—we were very close, in our minds. We were able to really pool
our knowledge of physics.”

“You know about physics?” Philippe
asked.

“I minored in physics in college.
And I
read
,” she replied, annoyed.

Philippe successfully quashed any
expression of surprise.

“Anyway, that’s how we were able to
figure out how to reopen the portal,” Shanti continued. “We don’t think that
the aliens who took Creepy live here, you know, in our three physical
dimensions. But they use them to—well, kind of as a dump, that’s our best
theory, anyway. When they make the portals, it helps kind of clean things up
where they live.

“The crisis was those Cyclopes
engines. Those are . . . I guess
dirty
’s the word. They make portals,
but their portals are different from the other kind—they make, you know, dirty
energy. Plus they unmake the good kind of portals, so all the trash that got
cleaned up before is now right back in these aliens’ yard, along with all this
new junk. So what I think is that to prevent that engine from being put into
widespread use, those aliens grabbed our guy here and, um, did what they did.”

“That seems kind of selfish,” said
George.

“These people preserved our planet
from invasion and conquest,” said Max.

George managed to get out, “You
wouldn’t have been invaded if you hadn’t built that station,” before he spotted
Philippe’s gesticulations. He quickly covered with, “But what do I know? I’m
not an 850-year-old alien messiah.”

First, they had reached the
station, which had proven another shock to Creepy—he had thought that it would
be more along the lines of an artificial planet, and it took some explaining
for him to understand that they all lived inside it, not on the surface.

Then, Creepy had nearly had a panic
attack when he attempted to breathe the station’s atmosphere. It turned out
that Hosts who went on the station for the first time underwent a lengthy
acclimation process, but since Creepy was, after all, the messiah, none of the
Hosts had thought it would be necessary for him.

They were wrong, so for now, he was
staying on the merchant’s ship. The Hosts had already decided to convert an
entire unoccupied living spike into a home just for their messiah. It would no
doubt feature the sweetest air available, siphoned directly off the cleanest
mountaintops the Host planet could provide.

After hearing the Hosts discussing
their plans, Philippe had spoken with Creepy for a moment. The Host messiah’s first
official request was that three-quarters of his living area be set aside as
additional housing for the Snake Boys. Creepy’s generosity was celebrated by
the Hosts and taken as further evidence of his holiness, which annoyed him.
But, he had told Philippe, at least the number of people on the station who
thought he was their savior numbered in the dozens, not in the billions.

The Magic Man had not been seen on
the station since the portal to the Host world had closed. But Stern Duty and
three other Cyclopes on the station had fallen over dead shortly after the
Cyclopes armada had passed through the portal leading to their home planet, so
Philippe knew that part of the mysterious alien was still among them.

Their deaths and the closing and
reopening of the Host portal had alerted everyone on the station to the fact
that something very big had happened. The Swimmers were preparing a broadcast
on the attack and the Magic Man’s effective conquest of the Cyclopes planet,
and Philippe knew that the days ahead would be filled with debate and more than
a little panic.

And that wasn’t even considering
the response of Earth.

Philippe leaned over his desk,
sighing. Shanti was giving some sort of briefing to the SFers—a briefing that
he was not privy to—so he was left alone in his office to dismally contemplate
events.

God only knew how the Union was
going to react. Philippe wondered if they would all be pulled out, or if only
he would be, or he and Shanti and George. Then he wondered if any of them would
be allowed to set foot on Earth again, or if the best that he could hope for
was an orbiting isolation pod next to Arne’s.

Philippe slowly wrapped his arms
around himself.

There were things to feel good
about, he reminded himself. They had pretty much saved the Hosts from invasion
and the Cyclopes from extinction. And Shanti apparently knew more about the
portals than the best physicists on Earth.

Those were the things he was
really
going to have to emphasize in his report if he didn’t want a major Earth
freak-out on his hands. Philippe leaned forward, looking at the blank scroll on
his desk.

He sighed. Not one, but two alien
invasions—was there anything that he could write about that that would prevent
the Union brass from panicking?

Talk about an impossible task. .
. .

Someone knocked on his door and
opened it. It was Bubba. “Visitor,” he said, and walked off.

Philippe looked at the empty
doorway, puzzled, until a movement on the ceiling drew his attention. Another
White Spider.

He turned back to his report. Where
to begin? Obviously, he would have to say that they had traveled to the Hosts’
planet—he, Shanti, and George had agreed on that. They had to tell the Union
about their unauthorized mission; they couldn’t pretend that they had merely
heard about what had happened secondhand.

But it wouldn’t be very politic to
start the report with, “I was possessed by an alien, so I broke a bunch of
rules.”

Philippe stared at the scrolls on
his desk, unable to open even one to begin his report.

Was there any way?
He sat
back in his chair and rubbed his face with his hands. Suddenly grief overcame
him. His body was racked by silent sobs.

So many had died.
Again.
Brave Loyalty had been murdered in front of him. And as odd—as
alien
—as
the Cyclops had been, Philippe knew in his heart that a good man had been
brutally assassinated.

Others might disagree, but Philippe
had a gut feeling. Brave Loyalty might have been hard to understand, he might
have been misled, but he had been
good
, a good, decent person who didn’t
deserve to die the way he did.

What had he said to Philippe just
before he left the station? He had said that he wanted to keep the Cyclopes
focused on the Cyclopes. At the time, it had sounded like an insult, but now
Philippe knew better: Brave Loyalty had wanted the Cyclopes not to attack the
Hosts. He wanted them to focus on themselves, not to direct their energies at
one-upping the other species.

He had failed, and he had paid with
his life. Many, many other Cyclopes would die, too, Philippe was sure of it—the
Magic Man might contain his slaughter, but it would be a slaughter nonetheless.
As always, the innocent would die along with the guilty.

Philippe wiped his eyes.

Was this what the future held?
Death and murder, destruction without end? Would Philippe have to stand by and
watch it happen all over again, helpless again? Would the Union call him back,
deciding that Brave Loyalty was right, that entanglements with aliens were too
fraught with risk, that there was no upside to reaching out, that humans should
stay safe and snug at home?

And if they did that, could
Philippe honestly say they were wrong?

Could he answer the basic question,
What are we doing here?

A
plunk
interrupted his
thoughts. Philippe looked up and realized that the White Spider had dropped
onto his desk.

This one’s more inquisitive than
the others,
he thought.

He wiped his face and smiled at the
alien.

“Hello there!” he said, waving.

The White Spider raised a foreleg
and carefully repeated Philippe’s gesture, wiping the front of his body and then
rotating the front end of his right foreleg in Philippe’s direction.

“I bring from my people a loving
welcome to this station, human diplomat,” the strange, white creature said. “We
would be happy to call your people friends.”

THE END

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The
Trang
series:

Trang

Trust

Trials

Tribulations

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Sneak Peek at
Trust
,
Book 2 in the Trang Series!

Chapter 1

March 2, 2119

It's all OK,
Philippe Trang said to himself.
Everything
is OK. I just need to get my hands to stop shaking.

He stared at his trembling fingers,
willing them to stop. They wouldn't.

He tried again.

They shook harder, beating a
frantic rhythm against his thighs.

Philippe took a long breath in and
let it out slowly.

How's my suit?
he wondered.

He stood hunched over his hands.
His back rested against the wall of the white corridor that led to his ship.
His upper body was bent almost double, like a sudden wave of nausea had
overtaken him in the hallway.

Standing like this isn't going
to keep this suit neat!

He straightened his body.

He ran his hands over his navy-blue
dress jacket. (Were they shaking now? He could feel a slight quiver where they
pressed against him.) He bent down and smoothed out his pants. Then he realized
that by bending over, he had necessitated another check of his jacket.

It was hard to look disheveled or
tortured in a DiploCorps custom-tailored suit, but it wasn't impossible, so
Philippe shook out the jacket again. Everything seemed to be lying properly.