Voyagers II - The Alien Within (29 page)

One of the Nigerians asked in a shaky voice, “Are you saying that if we come to a resolution here, these deaths will not happen?”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

“How do you know…?”

“I know. If you don’t believe me, leave now and return to your headquarters. You’ll learn soon enough that I’m right.”

The president of Zaire ran a hand across his dark, stubbled face. He was in shirt-sleeves and suspenders; his gaudy jacket had disappeared many hours earlier. Leaning across toward the Katangan, he asked, “Might it be possible to work out a form of federation, so that Katanga remains within the nation but obtains a measure of independent government?”

“I believe that my people might accept a federation,” the Katangan replied.

“And pay taxes to Kinshasa?” demanded the stubby president of Zaire.

“Why should we pay taxes to you?”

“In return for local autonomy.”

“How much of a tax?”

Stoner held up both hands. All eyes turned to him. “I want you all to agree to a cease-fire, here and now.”

Eleven heads nodded even as they turned to check one another.

“Good,” said Stoner. “That is the first step. The most important step. I’ll call Colonel Bahadur and ask him to join us here.”

The Nigerian in the Western suit called out, “I don’t think it is wise to let the Peacekeepers know we are here!”

Stoner smiled at him. “Don’t you think they already know? Don’t you realize that their satellite cameras tracked your helicopters to this spot?”

“Perhaps so,” admitted the Kenyan in his British old-school accent, “but don’t you think it’s a bit premature to invite him to come here?”

“I will ask him to come as you have come,” Stoner replied. “Alone and without saying a word to anyone but his closest aides.”

They muttered among themselves but finally agreed that the chief of the Peacekeepers had to be brought into their deliberations sooner or later. Under Stoner’s prodding, they opted for sooner. He wormed his way into the helicopter’s cramped flight deck and put in a radio call to Bahadur.

“This is astounding,” said Colonel Bahadur. “I see it and I hear it, but I still find it difficult to believe.”

Stoner said, “It’s a chance for peace. The first small step on a long and difficult road.”

The sun was setting at Olduvai, beaming reddish-gold light across the barren gorge, glinting in the canopies of the helicopters, throwing long, distorted shadows that reached eerie fingers toward the distant hills. Stoner and the mountainous Sikh stood in front of the Peacekeepers’ helicopter, a mammoth machine large enough to house a complete flying headquarters. The eleven African leaders and their staffs had gathered down at the end of the impromptu flight line, where the paleontologists were helping them to put together a dinner of local game and vegetables.

“A cease-fire.” Colonel Bahadur shook his turbaned head. “Two days ago I would not have believed it possible.”

“It’s fragile. And only temporary.”

“Yes, I realize that.”

“None of them have agreed to give up their arms.”

“Of course not.”

Stoner went on, “But it gives you a chance to begin the process of making real peace.”

“That will require disarming each of the factions,” said the colonel, his bearded face grim. “Simultaneously.”

“They won’t go for that. Not yet.”

“Then your cease-fire will break down within a week.”

“Not if you can prevent them from being resupplied.”

Bahadur’s impressive eyebrows rose almost into his turban. “Prevent…?” He broke into a bitter laugh. “My dear man, have you any idea of how many seaports and airports the arms shipments come in to? Do you think my people could blockade all of central Africa?”

“Where do their arms and ammunition come
from
?”

“From?”

“From,” Stoner repeated.

The colonel thought a moment, stroking his beard. “I cannot truly say. But I can find out!”

“I think it’s important that you do,” said Stoner.

“Yes, perhaps you are right.” He turned and went back toward his helicopter. Stoner, suddenly alone, jammed his hands into the pockets of his coveralls and, hunching his shoulders against the growing evening chill, headed for the tables that were being set up down at the end of the row of helicopters.

Several of the paleontologists’ workers were piling up logs and kindling. A small truck came into view, battered and dust-covered. Stoner saw that it was hauling more firewood. None of the wood was sawed; the paleontologists were picking up windfalls only and resisting the temptation to attack the distant forest with power saws. They respected this desolate land, revered it with almost religious intensity as one of the earliest sites of recognizable human habitation.

Stoner joined the team building the fire. They laid the branches in crosshatched rows several feet high, then filled the ground under it with twigs for kindling. Even before the fire was lit, the exertion began to warm him. He recalled the old Yankee aphorism to the effect that a wood fire warms you twice. The woman who headed the scientific dig climbed laboriously up the slope of the gorge, surveyed their work, and gave a satisfied nod. The chief of her crew, a gaunt, grinning Ethiopian, nodded happily at her approval and lit the kindling with a palm-sized laser lighter.

Within a few minutes the fire was crackling and blazing high into the night air, flinging sparks toward the dark sky. Even as its heat soaked into him, Stoner thought of the pyres lit every night at the refugee camp and knew that this night would be no different: there were still people dying each day from starvation and disease, being killed by bombs and bullets. Men, women, and children.

“They never had fire, you know.”

Stoner turned from the leaping, warming flames to see that the chief paleontologist was standing beside him. She was a chunky woman, somewhere in her middle fifties, he guessed. Gray hair. Solid barrel of a body with a man’s shoulders and hardly any shape at all. She wore shorts, and Stoner saw that her legs were thick and ungainly. But her hands were long-fingered and graceful; a ballerina’s hands on the stubby arms of a longshoreman. The dust of geological ages caked beneath her fingernails. Her eyes gleamed in the firelight.

“The hominids who camped here a few million years didn’t have fire,” she explained. “Fire came later, much later.”

“But they had tools, didn’t they?” Stoner asked, looking back at the dancing flames.

“Tools, yes.” She dug into the pocket of her shorts. “This is one of them.”

He put out his hand, and she placed a small piece of stone in his palm. It looked like a pebble, with one edge chipped and roughened.

“It’s a scraper,” the woman said. “They used it to clean the hides off the animals they had caught. Small animals, mostly. Rodents, field mice, like that.”

Stoner stared at the barely altered pebble in his palm. “How old is it?”

The woman shrugged her heavy shoulders. “Couple of million years, at least. Not more than four million.”

“One of our earliest tools.” He glanced up at the helicopters standing nearby and thought of the spacecraft he had flown in.

“Thanks for showing it to me,” he said, extending his hand back to her.

Instead of taking it back, she folded his fingers around the pebble. “I want you to keep it.”

“Me?”

“Ah Linh’s told me what you’re doing here. How you’re trying to stop the fighting. Please take the scraper as a tiny little thank-you from me…” She hesitated and smiled shyly. “And from our ancestors.”

“But this must be awfully valuable,” Stoner said.

“Only to someone who appreciates it.”

“Well, thank you, Dr….” He stopped. “I’m afraid I don’t know your name.”

“No reason why you should,” she replied. “I’m just a worker in the field, one of many.”

“But you do have a name, don’t you?”

The shy smile came back. “It’s Delany. Rosemarie Delany. And don’t call me Rosie! My friends call me Ro.”

“All right.” Stoner grinned at her. “Thank you, Ro. I’d like to be considered one of your friends.”

“Fine.”

“My name is—”

“Keith Stoner. An Linh’s spent the past thirty-six hours telling me all about you.”

“Really?”

Rosemarie Delany gave him an impish grin. “She certainly did.”

They feasted together that night, all eleven of the politicians and their staffs, the paleontologists and their crew, Colonel Bahadur and his half-dozen men, An Linh and Stoner.

I wonder what the original inhabitants of this site would have thought to see us here, Stoner wondered. A motley assortment. So many different tribes, so many different skin colors and backgrounds and loyalties. Yet we can all gather around the fire and share its warmth and protection.

Can we get all the peoples of Earth to gather around one central bonfire and share its warmth and protection? Stoner wondered. How could we accomplish that? How could we begin to try?

An Linh sat next to him on the grass as they ate. Dr. Delany explained the meal to everyone. “We keep goats. Very efficient animals. They eat anything and give us milk and meat.”

Stoner felt a slight pang of surprise. The meat was excellent, tender and delicious. His mental impression of goat meat was tough and stringy.

After dinner the politicians went to Colonel Bahadur’s helicopter to work out a joint communiqué announcing the cease-fire. They planned to leave in the morning and return to their various headquarters.

Bahadur took Stoner aside. “On the problem of where the arms shipments originate,” he said, his voice low, his bearded face etched in firelight, “I am surprised that more than eighty percent of the shipments come from only a half-dozen points: one in Czechoslovakia, two in the United States, one in Singapore, and the final two in Soviet Russia.”

“Can you stop the shipments?”

“Not without the cooperation of the local governments.”

“Surely the International Peacekeeping Force can exert enough pressure…”

Bahadur stopped him with a shake of his head. “It is not so simple. Four of those arms factories are controlled by a single international corporation.”

Without asking, Stoner knew which one it was. “Vanguard Industries,” he whispered.

“Yes.”

“And the Russian government controls the other two.”

“That is correct.”

Stoner drew in a deep breath. “Then I’ve got to get the Russians and the people who run Vanguard to agree to stop their arms shipments.”

“No one can do that,” said Bahadur.

“Maybe. But I can try.”

The huge Sikh placed a hand on Stoner’s shoulder. “My friend, why even bother?”

“To stop the war.”

“Even if you got them to agree to stop their arms shipments, the smaller suppliers would still send weapons and ammunition into central Africa. They would rush in to fill the gap!”

“And you couldn’t stop them?”

“There must be hundreds of them,” Bahadur said. “Perhaps thousands. The terrorists of the World Liberation Movement have been smuggling weapons in for years. They would merely step up their operations.”

Stoner looked deeply into the Sikh’s firelit eyes. “Then you’ll have to alter
your
operations to stop them.”

Bahadur heaved a heavy sigh. “I suppose we could try.”

“Yes. We must both try.”

“And you? What do you propose to do?”

With a tight smile, Stoner said, “I have an old friend in Moscow. I think it’s time for me to visit him. And to renew my acquaintance with the person who runs Vanguard Industries.”

“You know him?”

“Her.”

“Can you reach these people?”

“I can try. Just as you will try to do what must be done.”

Bahadur took his hand from Stoner’s shoulder, let his arm drop limply to his side. “You must be insane,” he said. “We must both be insane.”

Stoner shrugged.

“Yes,” said the Sikh. “You are a madman, Keith Stoner. That’s the only explanation. A madman. Or a saint.”

A man possessed, Stoner thought. That’s what he really means. What would he say if he knew that I truly am a man possessed? Stoner felt a faint echo, almost of amusement, inside his mind. Are you a god or a devil? he asked the alien within him. Are you a good witch or a bad witch?

He laughed aloud. “A madman or a saint,” he repeated to Bahadur. “Of the two, I think it’s easier to be a madman.”

“Yes,” agreed the colonel. “But if you can get Vanguard Industries and the Russian government to stop shipping arms into Africa, then you will be proclaimed to be a saint. Very definitely.”

Stoner laughed again and wished Bahadur good night. He walked back to the helicopter he and An Linh had arrived in. The copilot was sitting on the ground, his back against the ’copter’s nose wheel.

“She’s off with the scientists, I think.” He waved vaguely toward the tents down in the gorge.

Stoner nodded. “Tell the pilot we’ll be taking off tomorrow morning.”

“He knows. He’s already asleep.”

“Good. I like a well-rested pilot. And copilot.”

The man grinned in the flickering light cast by the dying fire. “Just let me finish my weed, huh?”

Stoner headed down the slope toward the lighted tents. He found An Linh with Delany and the other paleontologists. After an awkward round of farewells, including an impulsive bearlike hug from Delany, he took An Linh back toward their helicopter.

Halfway there she grabbed at his hand and came to a halt.

“Keith…there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

The night was cold now. The distant fire had almost burned itself out. The helicopters loomed against the star-bright sky like ancient birds of prey, asleep. The lights down among the scientists’ tents were winking out. Darkness and cold were enveloping Stoner. He felt An Linh’s hand in his, a small warm candle against the shadows.

“What is it?” he asked.

For several moments she said nothing. Her hand tightened in his, and he almost thought he could feel the blood pulsing in her fingers.

“I love you, Keith.” She said it in a rush, as if afraid that someone or something would stop her if she didn’t hurry the words out.

He felt his brows knit into a frown. He did not know how to respond.

“Make love to me, Keith. Here in the open, here in this place where people lived millions of years ago.”

She pressed close to him, and he automatically wrapped his arms around her tiny childlike frame. The alien presence in his mind allowed him to look at her calmly, rationally, with none of the surging emotions that another man might have felt.

“But what about Cliff Baker?” he asked gently.

“He’s dead. I know he is. They killed him—maybe because of me….”

“I don’t think so,” Stoner said.

“I don’t care!” she whispered fiercely. “I want you. Now. I love you!”

“An Linh,” he said softly, “I understand how you feel. But I can’t make love to you.”

She said nothing, merely looked up into his eyes, waiting.

“I wish I could,” he said. “I think it would be wonderful. But I can’t. I just can’t.”

“But Keith,” she whispered, “I love you!”

“You think you do.”

“I do! I love you, Keith. I want to be with you always. I want to bear your children.”

“It can’t be, An Linh.” As gently as he knew how, he said, “It just can’t be.”

“You don’t mean that,” she said, anguish in her voice. “I know you can’t mean that. I’ll wait, it doesn’t matter how long….”

He felt a rush of near panic at the thought of physically making love, of stripping and pawing and humping the way animals do, but it was immediately suppressed, frozen, immobilized in the alien’s glacial calm.

“An Linh, I can’t love anyone. Not the way you want to be loved.”

“But I don’t understand….”

“Neither do I. Not completely.” He hesitated, not knowing how much to tell her. “I don’t think that I’m completely human. There’s something inside me, something from the alien’s starship—maybe it’s his mind itself….”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible,” he said fervently.

“Except your loving me.”

He had no answer for that.

An Linh pushed away from him, tears glistening in her eyes. Wordlessly she walked back toward the helicopter. Stoner stood in the dark night, feeling cold and alone.