Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (2 page)

It was abandonment. It was futility. It was the absence of all purpose—for good or for evil. It was the complete negation of all cause.

Pain.

Punishment.

Oblivion.

The ship.

And it was the sum of George Francisco’s existence.

George Francisco pressed his hands against the smooth glass of the hospital observation window, six years free from the ship but never free from his memories of it. Yet now he looked into a vacuum even less forgiving than space, a void that was threatening to engulf him forever, yet end nothing.

Beyond the window, bathed in the soft purple glow of life-giving ultraviolet, misted in cool billows of soothing nitrogen, lay what remained of his new life and new destiny. On the charts clipped to their beds their human names were given: Emily Francisco. Susan Francisco. But to the watcher at the window they were his daughter and his wife and part of the reason for his life itself.

And this new world, this cruel planet and the aliens who called it home, even now were taking that reason from him.

George leaned his cheek against the window. Felt through the glass, the hum of the nitrogen misters reminded him of the subtle hull vibration of the ship’s stardrive. Six years of freedom and nothing had changed—he and his people were still slaves to patterns unrecognized and forces unknown. The Day of Descent had not brought freedom after all. It had simply been the day that they had traded one ship for another. The only difference was that this new ship had a name.

The planet Earth.

“Has the doctor come out yet?”

George turned at the sound of his son’s voice. Finiksa, whom the humans had named Buck for some unknown reason, cradled the soft and bundled form of his sleeping baby sister in his arms. The girl child, almost three months old, was named Vessna, in memory of her mother’s mother. Alone among her family, she had no human name, as if her own heritage would be strong enough to serve her and her future born of Earth and Tencton. George bitterly recalled those so-recent days of optimism when the pod he had carried had finally hatched and Vessna had become the first of his children whom he had actually birthed himself. Then there had seemed to be a future for his people in this place. Now he saw those days for what they truly were—days of blindness, denial, degradation. George shook his head at his son—a human gesture they had all picked up almost subliminally, for there was so much that was negative here. “The doctor is still in with them,” he said.

In the isolation room beyond the window a human doctor moved like a ghost through the purple mist, cloaked in a white lab coat, wearing protective UV goggles that made his alien expressions more difficult to interpret than usual.

“They should let us go in,” Buck said. There was no disguising the anger in his voice, or the concern. He had still not realized how important it was to hide how he felt from humans. But George had learned that lesson a long time ago, the lessons of all slaves, no matter what their ship: The less one gave of himself, the less there was to have taken away.

George held his knuckles to his son’s temple in shared grief. As father and son they shared almost the same pattern of red-brown cranial spots, but in Buck’s dark eyes there was so much of his mother. “The doctor is afraid that they might still be contagious. It would be unsafe for us to go in.”

Buck held Vessna to him tightly. His eyes burned into the isolation room with the fire of the stars seen in superluminal space. “Nothing on this
sl’mym
planet is safe,” he said.

“Nothing anywhere is safe,” George said. He touched a gentle finger to Vessna’s tiny perfect fist, curled in fitful sleep. The scent of her, so fresh, so pure, drove away the awful stench of the so-called antiseptics and cleansers and heat-broken lipids that permeated this place. He wondered what he and Susan had been thinking of to bring a child into a world like this. How could he ever keep the promise of Vessna’s birth for her? How could he give her life when there was nothing waiting for her here but—

In the isolation room Susan cried out.

The pigmented borders of George’s spots constricted in sudden alarm, bringing a tingling tightness to the smooth and hairless expanse of his scalp. He pressed his hands against the glass, so close to his love, so powerless to save her. Stars passing by, detached, removed, beyond all hope.

Susan’s voice was muffled, but some words were clear.
“Finiksa! Ee, nteega . . . nteega kat nos eeb!”
She sat up in her bed, her arms reaching out for a memory of her own, her eyes unseeing of the present, trapped only in the past.

And George knew what she saw, knew what she felt, because he had heard her cry those words before.
Don’t take my baby!
In the ship. When they had come for Buck.

“She’s calling for me,” Buck said beside him. “I have to go to her.”

From the room where the doctor was trying to ease Susan back against her pillows:
“Nteega kat nos eeb!”

George took Buck into his arms, turning his son’s eyes from the scene of his mother caught in the delirium of her fever. “No,” George said. “She does not know you are here.”

He felt Buck tremble in his embrace. “She’s calling my name.”

From the room:
“Finiiiksaaa!”

“She cannot see us.”

Buck tried to free himself, and in his struggle George felt a sudden wave of mortality as he sensed his son’s muscles had become almost powerful enough to pull away from his grip. No longer a child. Almost an adult. Soon he would need a future of his own.

But not yet.

Susan called out again, plaintive, heartsbreaking. George tightened his arms around his son and baby daughter, and for now the strength of his arms, and of his love, was invincible.

“Please, Buck, please,” George said. “I do not want to lose you, too.”

With those words George felt his son’s body relax, and he did not know which emotion had more power over him—the relief he felt that his son would still obey him, or the sudden realization that the emptiness he had felt just moments earlier was not yet absolute.

George did not wish to lose his son and infant daughter.

He still had something left to lose. Something worth keeping.

Somewhere within him there must still be hope.

“We should never have come here,” Buck said angrily. “Back on the ship, when we still had a choice, we should never have come here.”

Instantly George looked around to see if any human had been near enough to hear his son’s intemperate words. The matter had been settled long ago in Quarantine by those Elders who knew everything that had transpired to bring the Tenctonese to this world. Their decision had been clear and absolute: There were some things humans were not meant to know.

But there were no humans present other than the doctor in the isolation room beyond the glass window, where Susan once again lay silent and unmoving on her bed. “Shhh,” George whispered to his son. “You know that is not something we should discuss here.”

Buck drew back from his father, and George, sensing that the moment of youthful rebellion had passed, released his hold.

“But you know it’s true, don’t you?” Buck said. “You know it was a mistake to come here. All we did was trade one ship for another.”

George stiffened. It was one thing for him to think such thoughts. But to hear it come from his child . . . that was wrong. Buck was too young to feel that way. He
couldn’t
feel that way. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, it wasn’t—

“No, Buck. Don’t say that.”

Buck’s eyes bore into his father’s. “It’s what I feel,
Apod.
And it’s what you feel, too, isn’t it?”

George blinked. His son had called him
Apod,
not
Pod.
Father, not Dad. A sign of formality that hinted at the growing rift between them. George thought again of the slave’s lesson—the less one has, the less there is to take away—and understood that Buck was attempting to distance himself from his father and his family. Cutting himself off now to prevent someone or something else from doing it for him later.

Did it have to come to this? George thought. Six years free from the ship, and we still act like slaves, not because of this alien world but because the fear the ship created still exists within us?

George looked back into the isolation room. The doctor was palpating Emily’s droonal flanges. It struck George that it was a miracle that a human knew enough to do that. It bespoke of hundreds of hours in classrooms, learning Tenctonese physiology and medicine. Why? he wondered. Humans still had so much to learn about their own medical needs. Why had this one, and hundreds of others, made the effort to learn about the Tenctonese?

“This world isn’t like the ship,” George said. Whether he was speaking for himself or his son, he wasn’t sure.

“You know they’re in there because of
terts!”
Buck said.

George could not argue with his son. He was certain that it was the human Purists who had sent the flowers to his home, doused with the airborne bacterium that had ravaged Susan and Emily when they had inhaled the flowers’ scent.

“Because of
some
humans,” George said, refusing to use the foul term for them his son did. “But because of other humans, like that doctor in there, your mother and sister are still alive.”

Buck turned away from the window. “For how long?” he asked. “This is a nightmare.”

Suddenly George saw it all clearly. With half his family on one side of the glass, half his family on the other, he realized that not everything rested entirely on him alone. There was death in this world. But there was life as well. Hope as well as despair.

Stars as well as the darkness they blazed against.

It was simply a question of where he chose to look.

“No,” George said to his son, at last understanding. “This is not a nightmare. This is our dream a century in the making.”

Buck’s face screwed up in disgust. “What kind of dream puts us in a world where everyone wants us dead?”

“On the ship, Finiksa,” George said, “it was our own people who became the
kleezantsun\
. Why should we expect the humans to be any different?”

“You don’t understand. It’s not just
some
of the
terts,
it’s
all
of them who are the new Overseers.”

But George shook his head again. “Look at Dr. Quinn in there, treating Susan and Emily. On the ship the
kleezantsun\
processed the sick through the recyclers.”

Buck wouldn’t look up to meet George’s gaze.

“Finiksa,” George said quietly, “we do have new enemies here. But we have new friends as well. And if we must die here, like this, then at least we will die free.”

Buck shook his head as he stared down at the floor, Vessna still held close. “We should have gone on. We shouldn’t have come here.”

Again George touched Buck’s temple. “You were so young then. You did so much for us. But there’s still so much you don’t know.”

Buck looked up. “Moodri told me,” he said, saying his great-uncle’s name with a reverence George shared, despite the differences he had had with his uncle. “Moodri told me everything before he died. Everything he did. Everything
I
did and had . . . had forgotten.”

George stared at Buck in silence, wondering if that could be true. Moodri had always been so full of mystery. George was not certain if he himself knew everything there was to know about
Crayg la Kenrudd
—the Day of Descent. The ancient system of
keer’chatlas,
so necessary on the ship, still held true to this day, providing safety and security by dividing knowledge so that no one person could reveal enough under torture to threaten the whole.

“Everything?” George finally asked.

Buck looked into his father’s eyes then, and George could see that the teenager’s anger had subsided. But was it being replaced by understanding? George paused for a moment, then spoke.

“Niss tel su bemry,”
George said, using the formal words of shared reflection.
“Niss tel su bemry otega
. . .” Then let us remember together . . .

“Kak bemry?”
Buck asked.

George held out his hands to touch both of Buck’s temples. “The Day of Descent,” he whispered.
“Bemry,
Finiksa. Remember . . .”

And like the tears of Celine and Andarko, the years fell away, and father and son, together, remembered . . .

ACQUISITION

DESCENT MINUS 7 STANDARD DAYS
AND COUNTING

A
T THIS TIME, IN THIS MEMORY
, he was seven days and half a light-year from the world of the bored civil servants who would dub him Sam Francisco, and from the police officer who would change that name to George. For now, his only name was Stangya Soren’tzahh. Brother to Ruhtra, husband to Oblakah. A hull maintenance worker of no particular skill or importance. Son of slaves. Father of slaves. Another drone of the holy gas, bound for the recyclers at the end of his shifts. Or so he thought.

At this time, in this memory, less than an hour from the stardrive’s final translation, George scanned the ship’s hull. His tool was a narrow metal wand, no longer than his arm. The wand was connected by a triplet of slender wires to the heavy backpack of sealed equipment that he wore.

What he was doing, George wasn’t precisely sure. The Overseers had instructed him in what circular sweeping movements he should make with the wand, how far from the beaded hull welds he should hold the wand’s tip, and how long he must hold the wand tip to the weld when a green light glowed on the wand’s handle. But typically they had not provided him with an explanation of what he was doing or why.

The Elders—an honorific for those among the Tenctonese who had been born on the home world more than a century earlier, before the coming of the ships—had told George that the wand was a molecular probe. Its purpose was to detect the beginning seeds of stress fractures in the hull-plate welds. When the green light glowed it meant a fracture seed had been found. By holding the tip at the fracture’s location the mechanisms of the ship recorded the fracture’s position and its size. The repair of the fracture—by molecular restacking, the Elders had told him, though the term had no meaning for George—was then undertaken by one of the machines that crawled along the outside surfaces of the ship, guided by the probe that George held in place until one had arrived.