Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (11 page)

“Oh, no, not at all. There are lots of programs that do it. Utilities, they’re called. Very simple to operate.”

Sikes tried to go along with the idea to see where it might take him. “You just sort of tell the disk to erase itself, and that’s that?”

Grazer looked at Sikes with a pitying expression. “You really should try to find out more about these machines, detective. If you asked the disk to erase itself, then in most cases you’d be erasing the program that told the machine how to run. No, you’d need a second disk to erase the first—something that would not be erased itself.”

Sikes reached over to tap Grazer’s hard disk drive. “So whoever overwrote the disk in the computer needed something like this to do it.”

Grazer sighed. “It wouldn’t have to be hard drive. It could just as easily be a floppy for in here.” He pointed to the computer’s floppy disk drive ports.

That’s it! Sikes thought excitedly. He didn’t have to go back through the house with a neighbor to find out if something was missing. Something
had
been missing right from the start. Not only had there been no other hard disk drive on Petty’s desk, there had been no other floppy disks at all.

“You just think of something?” Grazer asked.

“Yeah,” Sikes said. “My daughter’s got a computer. An Apple—”

Grazer looked on Sikes with pity.

“—and she’s got boxes of disks all around. Start-up disks. Game disks. CDs. Graphics. Programs. Hundreds of them. At least it seems like hundreds.”

“So?” Grazer asked.

“So there were no other disks in this guy’s den. Nothing on the desk with the computer. Nothing in the drawers. I know. I went through all of them.” He looked questioningly at Grazer. “Does that sound unusual to you?”

“Oh, yes, very unusual. You almost always have at least one set of disks nearby—emergency start-up, data storage, diagnostic programs. Just in case anything goes wrong.”

“Goes wrong,” Sikes repeated dreamily. Had something ever gone wrong.

Grazer raised one eyebrow. “What kind of case are you working on, anyway?”

“Murder,” Sikes said.

Grazer’s eyes widened enviously. “But . . . you’re a Detective Three. You shouldn’t be working Homicide.”

Sikes grinned. Whatever had been stolen last night was something that could be stored on a computer. He was certain of it. Someone had set up Professor Randolph Petty in a late-night meeting, killed him, then gone back to his house to wipe out whatever was on his computer and stolen his loose disks at the same time.

“I said,” Grazer repeated, “that as a Detective Three you shouldn’t be working Homicide. Especially not on your first day.”

Sikes shrugged. “I guess you just gotta know who to suck up to, Bryon.”

Grazer leaned forward, eyes wide. “And who would that be?”

Sikes jumped to his feet, wondering if he could still catch Angie at Casey’s. Or do I want to tell her so soon? he suddenly thought. Before I’ve had a chance to check it out so she won’t shoot me down again? He still had one day left on the tight schedule she had given him.

“Sikes, c’mon. I helped you out here.”

Sikes clapped Grazer on the shoulder. “Want to help me out again?”

Grazer looked at the hand that dared touch him. “Will you put me in your report?”

“Absolutely.”

Grazer coughed. “But only . . . only if everything works out, that is.”

“Only if everything works out,” Sikes agreed. And he knew it would. It
had
to.

“So what do you need me to do first?” Grazer asked.

“First,” Sikes said, “we need a computer like this one that works, and that will let us talk with the victim’s daughter in Australia.”

Grazer nodded. “I’ve got a modem. Paperwork to get approvals for the long-distance charges should take more than a week to—”

“We’ve got twenty-four hours,” Sikes said.

Grazer looked panicked. “But we have to follow procedures. I mean, it’s bad enough that I’m taking time away from my assignments in forensic accounting to help you out on . . . on . . . what exactly am I helping you out on, anyway?”

Sikes patted the computer on his desk. “Twenty-four hours ago someone thought this computer held information that was worth killing a retired seventy-two-year-old astronomy professor for.”

“Good Lord,” Grazer said. “What kind of information?”

The answer to Grazer’s question was just over three billion miles away, traveling at a speed beyond human science, and heading straight for the sun, the Mojave, and the rest of Matthew Sikes’s life.

But seven days from descent and counting, Sikes still didn’t know. In fact, the only being who
did
know was an ancient Tenctonese priest named Moodri.

Because the youth who would be known as Buck Francisco was right.

Moodri knew everything.

F
EW
T
ENCTONESE HAD NEED
for more than a single name. Each knew who he or she or
binn
was, and, to the trained eye at least, their spots told the story of their lineage, for the patterns formed by those patches of darker pigmentation were a blending of the patterns of their mother and father. In such a situation, how many names would any intelligent being need?

Thus there were hundreds of Moodris aboard the ship as it hurtled down toward its final gravity well where a single yellow star waited impassively at the center. But there was only one Moodri among them who carried the distinctive trident marking of the Family: Heroes of Soren’tzahh above his left temple counterbalanced by the graceful brushstroke of the Family: Third Star’s Ocean, that adorned the crest of his skull.

That singular Moodri was an Elder, born on the home world before the coming of the ships. In the measurement of time on the planet that would be his final resting place he was almost one hundred and forty years old. Yet his spots remained dark, his eyes alert, and his mind far sharper than any exposed to the holy gas for so long had any right to expect—and far sharper than any Overseer would suspect.

As an Elder, Moodri worked his shifts in whatever crowded day crèche had need of an extra pair of hands, tending to the podlings and the toddlers of those parents who toiled elsewhere in the ship. When the Overseers came on their inspection tours he let his eyes go vacant and hummed old Tencton tunes softly to himself, changing diapers, cutting up vegrowth, playing simple games with two-year-olds who appeared to be smarter and more aware than he.

For twenty years he had played this role, until he had become nothing more than another gray wall support to the Overseers’ eyes. A babbling old fool who sometimes donned priestly robes to calculate the position of the galaxy
Cen’tawrs,
and who other times recut his gray tunic and trousers into a skirt, just as he had worn a century before on Tencton. To the Overseers he was harmless, he kept the cargo blinded by the false hopes of a weak and passive religion; and as long as he could lift a child, he would not be recycled.

So the shifts passed, one after another, endlessly falling into the gray mist of the gas and lost memory.

At least, to the Overseers.

This shift, Moodri sat with five sick podlings in an isolation room off the level fifty-seven day-crèche infirmary. The podlings slept deeply, in no obvious distress, but across their tiny chests and thighs distinctive fan-shaped rashes of purple speckles grew—the first symptom of what might develop into an infection of the spartiary gland called
nensi
fever.

Nensi
fever could be fatal but not often enough for the Overseers to automatically recycle anyone with symptoms, as they did those patients with other, more vimlent diseases. More often than not,
nensi
patients recovered and were thereafter immune, just as Moodri was. Though because the lethargic symptoms of the disease could persist for several dozen shifts, seriously interfering with productivity, it was necessary to isolate the infected patients until the danger of contagion had passed.

From time to time an Overseer might peer through the small window on the door to the isolation room, but for the most part the sick podlings and the senile Elder dozing off in his chair among them were ignored. If the podlings lived, fine. If the podlings died, fine. The most important consideration for the Overseers was that the disease would not be permitted to spread, if in fact it was spartiary gland infection that had stricken the children. With the limited medical facilities on board the ship there was just no way to be certain.

But Moodri was certain. What had stricken the children was not
nensi
fever. They had simply been given a small dose of minced-up
ceel
root with their vegrowth. The
ceel
root made them sleepy and triggered a harmless rash that appeared to be the same as that caused by
nensi
fever, though any trained physician would see the difference at once. In a handful of shifts the podlings would reawaken, the rash would fade, and the isolation room would no longer be necessary. And no outbreak of spartiary gland infection would arise until the next time the Elders needed a secure and private place to meet and talk without fearing the approach of the Overseers. Thus, as the podlings slept in their swings and oscillators this shift, the Elders met in safety.

Vondmac was the eldest of the three who had assembled. Her spots were myriad—hundreds of tiny near-circles evenly spaced across her scalp. According to an old husbands’ tale, children born with such a distribution were destined for the life of science, and though it annoyed her no end to give any sort of support to such superstitious nonsense, Vondmac was proof of the legend.

This shift, however, instead of wearing the narrow, shawl-like tippet of a scientist, Vondmac wore her Ionian robes in honor of the goddess, as did Moodri and the youngest of the three, Melgil. Should any Overseer risk infection by intruding on this meeting, ancient star charts and ceremonial divining crystals were unrolled and scattered at the Elders’ feet, giving weight to their well-practiced story that this was yet another of the endless rounds of religious debates that consumed most of the Elders’ time and attention. Fortunately, none of the Overseers ever seemed to recall that on Tencton religious debates had been exceedingly rare, given the strong current of tolerance to which most Tenctonese faiths adhered.

But it was not religion being debated in the isolation room, it was the survival of the three hundred thousand Tenctonese aboard this ship. And Vondmac did not talk of the dual nature of the
serdos
or how the seasonal festivals of the goddess could be reconciled with the passage of relativistic time, but of planetary chemistry and distant atmospheric readings. On the home world she had been a biochemist and thus was the first to whom the stolen readings from the bridge were always given.

“In terms of distance to the primary, it is the second planet of this system that is better situated,” Vondmac reported. “But initial scans show it to be completely cloud-covered and far too hot to support life as we know it. I suspect that it does not even support life as we don’t know it.”

Moddri and Melgil waited patiently, a trait honed by spending more than a century aboard the ship and in slave camps on distant worlds. Vondmac would say what she had to say and in as much detail as she felt necessary. It was the way of things, and they were content.

“But the
third
planet is possessed of minimal cloud cover.
And
an oxygen atmosphere,” Vondmac said. She paused then, a subtle smile at play on her lips.

Melgil sat forward in his chair. His withered right arm was momentarily exposed by the wide sleeves of his robes. Melgil was a
binnaum,
and his spots were few but exceedingly large. “What is the planet’s mass?” he asked.

“Point eight seven of one Tencton mass,” Vondmac said.

Moodri asked the next question he was certain she was expecting. “And the percentage concentration of oxygen is . . .”

“At this distance and velocity, the spectrograph shows twenty percent,” Vondmac said, “with a plus or minus error factor of two.”

Moodri and Melgil exchanged a glance of hope, and of concern. With such a small mass the third planet could not be expected to maintain such a sizable portion of oxygen in its atmosphere as the result of purely mechanical and chemical means. The only explanation that would therefore account for that oxygen’s presence was for the third planet to have an established biosphere of carbon-based life—a biosphere that might be capable of supporting Tenctonese life.

Their concern was for the hard decisions that would have to be made if, in fact, the third planet was the long-hoped-for refuge the Elders had suspected it might be.

For the moment, though, Melgil concentrated on the facts at hand. “Then the old charts
are
correct,” he said. “This
is
a habitable system.”

But Vondmac did not immediately confirm the old
binnaum
’s conclusion. Moodri was afraid to guess why.

“The third planet is possessed of an organic biosphere,” she said. “But that is not all.”

Moodri was surprised by the force of the disappointment he felt. For almost fifteen years the Elders had had it in their power to disable the ship under certain conditions. Throughout that time, during each translation into normal space for a course-correction swing around a star, the Elders had searched for a world that could provide safe harbor for the wretched slaves on board.

So many stars they had swung about in that time, and fewer than one in three had met the combined conditions of emitting the proper range of light required for Tenctonese health
and
having planets the proper distance from their sun. Of those appropriate solar systems, almost nine in ten had supported some form of life on planets that were near the right size and temperature. But fewer than half of those had been planets on which the biosphere was organic—its life chemistry based on the carbon ring, as was the home world biosphere in which the Tenctonese had evolved.

Of the handful of planets that orbited a sun that produced the right light, were the right size, had the right temperature, and were home to carbon-based life, half again were already in the service of the ships—home to slave camps, mines, ocean farms, and energy converters constructed on a planetary scale, slowly transforming entire worlds into planetesimal debris.