Time Past (20 page)

Good question.

Levin was almost bearable. He bought Murdoch a pair of secondhand trousers, cracked a lame joke about not pushing any buttons on alien machinery, and gave Will a cap. The badge on it was an old army one, he said, and would bring Will luck.

“Have fun,” he said to me.

I nodded in a friendly way, but only because he’d gotten the IDs for us. The night after he offered we’d gone with him to a photographer’s studio about half an hour’s drive west. There, a small, scared man called Wes had taken our photographs, scanned our fingerprints, and taken blood samples. Murdoch had been dismayed by the whole exercise. We got a bonus out of it; the studio had an advanced sensor array such as official buildings used, and as I didn’t set off any alarms, we proved that my Seouras implant was not going to stop us getting through the checkpoint into the airport.

Vince arrived at Levin’s just before we left and asked Will to get an Invidi autograph for him. He offered Will forty percent of the selling price in return. When Grace cuffed him, he merely growled back.

The whole street turned out to see us go, or so it seemed. People I’d never spoken to waved and called me by name, and a contingent of Will’s friends trailed us to the station, chattering and cavorting.

“Nothing like keeping a low profile.” Murdoch grinned.

Sunlight bounced off the harbor like applause as we flew over the airport road Murdoch and I had traveled a long week ago. The hovercar touched down closer to the runway than we’d stood then. At the bump and faint lurch of landing Will looked at me and laughed aloud. I grinned back, infected with his excitement. In the seat behind us Murdoch craned his neck in an attempt to see ahead.

The car purred toward the first set of gates. Will bounced up and down until we got out.

“Hello, I’m George DeLucca.” The U.N. official at the gate was a tall, light-haired young man who shook our hands in a distracted way.

The three of us were subjected to a polite security question-and-answer; do you have any weapons on your person, any drugs, have you been in a different country in the past few days, do you carry any gifts, did you pack your own bag, and so on. A handheld sensor was passed over us, IDs and all. Nothing registered, and I breathed again.

Then we were directed to a line of ten, no, twelve ground vehicles, each containing room for four passengers. Some of the vehicles carried only children, others had an adult with them. Brown heads, black heads, blond heads—UNESCO had gathered children from all over the globe, their corporate sponsors having agreed to anything for the chance to be part of this.

We clambered into our vehicle. Faces peered at us from the others.

DeLucca smiled broadly, seemingly as much relieved to get going as we were.

“Welcome to the tour.” He indicated two men in gray suits who stood waiting, one middle-aged, the other young, with long hair pulled back.

“These gentlemen will interpret for you if you need to talk to each other. You’ll find we don’t need interpreters to talk to the aliens. First we’ll go to the Welcome Hall and meet two of our new friends. Then we’ll have a short tour of the Invidi embassy on the east-west runway.”

A small voice piped something from another vehicle. It was not in a language I understood, but the word “Invidi” was recognizable.

“Can we see the ships?” translated the younger man.

“You certainly may see the ships,” replied DeLucca, and this was duly relayed by the interpreter to the child who’d asked the original question.

I shifted my feet impatiently. Thank goodness we had voiceboxes and efficient translators on the station—imagine negotiating with aliens like this.

The whole cavalcade trundled toward the buildings at the edge of the water. These groundcars were older than the hovercar and slower, fossil fuel burners from a more profligate age. Jeeps, Murdoch called them. But easy to repair and maintain and, he whispered, not subject to electronic interference, intentional or otherwise. The air tingled on our cheeks. The hot spell had broken at last and autumn was here.

“There they are!” called one of the children.

Two silver oblongs towered over the human figures beside them. My heart thudded in ridiculous anticipation as we drove closer. How many times have you spoken to an Invidi? I chided myself. You’re one of only two people on the planet who know what they look like under those suits. Relax.

We got out of the jeep and walked the last twenty meters or so. Once again I mentally bemoaned the Invidi’s lack of diplomatic skills. They could at least roll a few meters forward to greet us.

One of them surprised me by finally doing that. He crept in our direction with an almost imperceptible motion, silvery folds of the suit swaying. Will grabbed my hand and held on tightly. I squeezed back and smiled reassuringly. Another child whimpered. Murdoch reached out to pat a shoulder.

The Invidi spoke from its concealed voicebox.

“We greet you. Please join us. We will talk.”

For a second I didn’t understand the words. They seemed to be a jumble of Spanish, English, Earth Standard, childhood German. Then they became clear, but there was still a strange echo in my ears.

“What language did you hear?” I whispered to Murdoch.

He blinked. “English. Eventually.”

The translation matrices for these Invidi voiceboxes were not as complete as the ones we were used to. No wonder, they’d only been listening to human languages for a few days.

One of the younger children stepped forward. She carried a spray of white flowers. Flimsy things, but big enough for her small hands. The man with her started to lift her up, but one of the human attendants waved him away. They didn’t know where the Invidi kept their faces.

The child held out the flowers and recited her message in a clear, singsong voice.

“The children of Earth welcome you. Please be our friends.”

The newsnet commentators will love this.

In a slow, slow response, the first Invidi lowered a small upper tentacle like a silver cord and touched the flowers, then the girl’s hand. She stared at it, fascinated and unafraid. I remembered seeing a naked Invidi tentacle in a room on Jocasta once. Soft, it had been, and covered with tiny hairlike cilia.

The silver cord hovered.

The child looked over her shoulder at the adults, uncertain. She raised her eyes up the vast bulk, then back down to the flowers, considering. Then she reached up and pressed the stems firmly against the cord.

“You can have these. It’s a present.”

We waited.

The tentacle closed around the stems. “Thank you,” said the Invidi.

The child smiled in delight and one of the media people clapped. A collective sigh of relief rose from the other adults.

The courage of these ancestors of mine amazed me. That they should be able to stand before the unknown and not falter. That they could accept the existence of vastly superior beings with dignity. Did the Invidi realize what it meant for humans to allow their children to come here? As far as we know, each Invidi individual is created by genetic manipulation, with the consensus of their whole society. I wondered if they could comprehend that presenting our children was the greatest gesture of trust the human world could make.

Maybe the parents of these children all believed what they were told by the authorities about the Invidi being safe; maybe some of them had been paid well. But whoever had pulled the little girl’s hair tight in tiny plaits this morning must surely have wondered, even if for a moment, whether they were doing the right thing. It took courage to send a child here today.

I looked at Murdoch. He was scanning the area with his eyes, looking away from the group and back again, alert and absorbed.

“Let’s go inside,” suggested one of the attendants. The Invidi changed direction by simply rolling backward.

“It’s An Serat,” I whispered to Murdoch as we all followed the two silver figures. Four or five media people skipped around the outside of the group.

“Are you sure?” He tried to see over the heads between us. “They all look the same to me.”

“The voice is the same.”

He still looked doubtful.

The building was a hangar, with aircraft maintenance equipment secured on the walls and high ceiling. Rows of chairs were arranged in a half circle around a wooden dais flat on the ground. We all maneuvered for the best positions in the front seats. To Will’s disgust, we ended up in the second row.

The media people arranged themselves around the walls. The meeting was to be broadcast live by satellite all over the world, although the tour afterward was restricted.

One of the senior attendants, a thin, stooped man in his fifties, stood on the dais with the two Invidi.

He smiled brightly and spoke slowly, his voice echoing in the space. “The Invidi ambassador will give us a short talk, and then you can all ask your questions.”

Murdoch shifted beside me and rolled his eyes. “You’d think they could get someone who at least looks like he enjoys the job.”

“Shh.” Will prodded me.

The attendant stepped back off the dais, and one of the Invidi followed him. It rolled back out the door, leaving its companion to field all questions.

“We come from far star systems,” began the Invidi I thought was An Serat. “We use a travel technology which is beyond the present capability of your science to understand. We do not come to your planet with any intention other than to become your peaceful allies.”

He wasn’t good at this. The words were spoken flatly, with no pause to indicate he knew an audience was listening. Had the Invidi ever contacted a noninterstellar-spaceflight-capable species before? All of the other Nine Worlds species entered the Confederacy after they’d achieved a high standard of spaceflight within their home systems. Maybe the Invidi experience with humans showed them it was too much trouble to coddle a species into maturity. But there would be no Confederacy until 2065. Come to think of it, nobody seemed to know or care how the Four decided whom to contact and admit to the Confederacy after they’d formed their core group.

“Does anybody have a question for our friends?” said the senior attendant with an insincere smile. The interpreters translated. A forest of small arms shot up.

“What do you eat?”

The Invidi answered immediately. “We absorb a prepared combination of the appropriate amino acids and trace elements that our metabolisms require.”

“How do you move?”

He demonstrated by rolling back, then sideways and forward. “We manipulate a tractive device on the bottom of these suits with a neural interface.”

“Do you have children?”

“We do not breed using sexual reproduction.” A few sniggers followed that one, mainly from boys about Will’s age.

“How can you talk to us?” This question I could only follow through the interpreter.

“We build a device which deciphers the principles and structures of your languages and adapts our input to make it comprehensible to you. Therefore you will hear our reply in the language most familiar to you.”

“What’s your name?”

“Serat,” was the eventual answer. I winked at Murdoch.

“Do you have music?”

“We have structures which fulfill some functions of your music.”

“Do you sleep?”

“We experience periods of altered consciousness, but not as regularly as you do.”

That was news to me. Maybe it explained why, on Jo-casta, An Barik had sometimes been unavailable for weeks at a time.

“Why do you wear those suits?”

“We cannot survive without them in your atmosphere.” Serat began to rock slightly as he neared the end of the questions. Impatient?

Will had thought hard about his question, refusing offers and suggestions from the rest of us. He had kept it a secret until now. It was his turn.

He stood up, face tense, one hand picking nervously at his trouser leg. “Are you going to help all of us, not just the rich people?”

The question echoed out of proportion to his thready voice. Every whisper, every scrape of feet and sniff in the hall, ceased. I put my hand on Will’s back.

“We help all of you,” said An Serat, and the hangar erupted in applause. They did help all of us. From my own time of 2122 I could look back upon nearly a century of post-Contact history and say with conviction that they kept their promise. Their medical and agricultural technology was given freely to whoever asked for it. They stood back then and allowed us to work out how to structure a world where nearly every child born could live to old age. Whatever quarrel I might have with the Invidi over the way they abandoned Jocasta, whatever doubts I might have about equality for humans within the Confederacy, I could not deny that we couldn’t have repaired the Earth so quickly without them. We might not have done it at all.

“Now we will drive over to the landing area and take a brief look at the ships and the Invidi embassy.” The senior attendant wiped his forehead with a folded handkerchief and eased his collar.

The children began to file out, flanked and headed by the media people, who were rearranging their cameras to get a good view of the children as they went off to see the ships.

I stood up and shoved chairs aside to get to the front beside An Serat. He towered over me.

“I have a question,” I said.

DeLucca turned from where he was shepherding children out the door. “Question time’s over,” he said.

“It’s only a short one,” I said. “An Serat, can the Invidi make jumps off the Central network?”

DeLucca looked expectantly at the Invidi, and when no reply came, he touched his ear and nodded. “I think that’s a little outside the scope of this meeting, Ms.... Valdon. Shall we go on with the tour?”

I ignored him and continued to speak to An Serat. “I think you want to talk to me about this as much as I want to talk to you. You know who we are.”

DeLucca nodded to one of the attendants, who reached for my arm, but Murdoch stepped between us.

“She’s not dangerous,” he said quietly.

Still no reaction from the Invidi.

“Don’t you want to know how we got here?” I said.