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Arne nodded. “All right,” he
croaked.

“All right!” said Philippe. “I’m
going to head back to finish those messages—when you feel up to it, just ask
the doctor or one of the medics to get you a scroll, and you can start lodging
protests yourself.”

He raised his fist in the air, and
they smiled at each other—Arne only weakly, but it was the first smile Philippe
had seen on the sick man’s face.

Philippe went back to the office
and worked on his call to arms. He dug up some addresses of those who might be
responsible for Arne’s treatment, so that his friends would know who to pester.
He did some brainstorming and came up with some additional people to whom he
could send either pleas for help or messages of protest.

Finally he decided to stop and take
a little break. He ate his breakfast ration bar, and then he walked into his
bedroom. He pulled out a mat he had been permitted to bring to the station
because it was classified as “necessary medical equipment for the treatment of
chronic migraine.” He unrolled it onto the floor, and then he rummaged through
his bag for the other piece of “necessary medical equipment”—an electric
candle. His parents had found the very notion of an electric candle hilarious,
but open flame was prohibited on space stations.

He lit it and sat, comfortably
cross-legged, on the floor, facing the candle.

One.
Inhale.
One.
Exhale.

It was hard to focus—for the first
couple of rounds of ten, Philippe’s brain kept coming up with new people for
him to contact about Arne. Finally he was able to settle his mind down, to
focus on the numbers and the breathing.

Six.
Inhale.
Six.
Exhale.

He started to get more relaxed,
attaining the slightly zoned-out feeling that would last for a few minutes. He
couldn’t stay in it much longer than that at this stage, but it seemed
enough—he could just really relax for a spell, and then come out of it and get
on with his day.

Three.
Inhale.
Three.
Exhale.

Since he was so relaxed, it didn’t
alarm him when the light from the candle began to blur—his eyes often went a
little out-of-focus when he meditated, so he kept his mind focused on the
breathing and the counting.

He breathed and counted as the
light blurred and expanded. He breathed and counted as it grew, and he breathed
and counted as it coalesced into the shape of a golden, glowing Host.

“Hello, Philippe,” said the Host.
“It’s good to see you again.”

Chapter 16

Five
.
Inhale.
Five.
Exhale.

“This is different,” said the Host.
“This is much better. How long can we talk like this?”

Six.
Inhale.

“As long as I don’t get anxious,”
said Philippe during the exhalation.

“OK. Try to stay calm, then” said
the Host. “So, how did you get me out?”

Out?
thought Philippe as he
inhaled.

“In their minds, you know. It was
nice, but obviously it’s important that I be here with you, so I came back as
soon as I could. Were you going through the portals?” he asked.

“Yes,” exhaled Philippe.

“That must have been what forced me
out, I think,” said the Host, pensively. “I don’t know a thing about this
process, but I can’t think of anything else that would have done it. Can you?”

“No,” said Philippe. He inhaled
again and tried not to think about what an understatement that was. “Who are
you?”

“My name is Kre-Pi-Twa-Ki-Tik-Nao,”
said the Host. “I’m a physical scientist—or I
was
a physical scientist.
I also used to be what I believe your people call a Host. I hope I still am.”

“What do you want?” exhaled
Philippe.

“Wow, so many things. To go back
home, mainly. But I don’t think that’s going to happen, not if you’ve already
met my kind and the other aliens.” The Host looked dismayed. “It was bad seeing
those guys, let me tell you.”

“Why?” Inhale. “Are they bad?”

“For me, yeah,” said the Host,
resignedly. “They’re not harmful or anything, it’s just that, if you know them,
that means that a
lot
of time has passed.”

It was too much. Philippe could
feel the tension rising in his body. The Host seemed to recognize what was
happening and tried to say something else, but it was no use. In a blink of the
eye, he was gone.

And Philippe was far too freaked
out to get him back.

Philippe tried again and again, but of course you couldn’t
get into a relaxed state if you were damned nervous about what you’d find
there. He decided to just leave off the meditation for a little while.

That night, he worried that the
nightmares would return. Of course, the anxiety made it hard for him to fall
asleep, but when he did, his only dream was about eating slice after slice of
fresh, hot, delicious apple pie—the type of dream he always had when going back
onto the all-ration-bar diet.

The next day, he went to see Max.
The weeks he had been on vacation had apparently marked a relaxation in the
SFers’ security policies, especially where the Hosts were concerned, because
when Philippe asked his entourage if he and Max could meet privately in Max’s
office, they just shrugged and said, “Sure.”

Philippe asked Max for more information
about the Host messiah and the chosen one. Not surprisingly, Max was eager to
help, but there was very little in the way of actual historical facts known
about the messiah himself, and the only information about the chosen one was
contained in the verses that Max and Moritz had chanted to him earlier.

Philippe did learn that the Host
messiah lived about a century-and-a-half before the Hosts began to build the
station. According to Max, the messiah “studied the world” before “attaining
his destiny,” which might mean he had been a scientist, but it might mean
something else entirely. Intriguingly, the messiah made himself known as such
by appearing in a vision to every single Host simultaneously and singing his
prophecy. When people who knew him before tried to track him down after the
vision, he had disappeared.

It was all quite interesting in the
light of recent events—not that Philippe was necessarily buying into the whole
messiah/chosen one thing, but there could be some truth behind the myth. In any
case, there was not much more he could do to investigate until he could see the
Host again.

As Philippe spoke with Max, he
realized that he really wasn’t bothered by the return of the glowing Host. He’d
certainly been surprised when it happened and somewhat anxious immediately
afterward, but now he viewed it as a puzzle to be solved.

It’s because I know I’m not
crazy,
he thought, although in the back of his mind, he remembered Shanti
saying something ominous about the way mental illness worked.

There were more pressing things to
deal with, however. Philippe asked Max for as much information as possible on
the parasite that had sickened Arne, telling him that the medical personnel on
Earth wanted to be prepared for any eventuality.

There might be some truth in that,
Philippe didn’t know, but his real agenda was to keep Arne out of orbital
solitary. Pressure from Arne’s friends had already gotten the Union to set an
outside date on his imprisonment—no longer than six months, assuming there were
no complications.

Six months in zero-gravity solitary
confinement was hardly ideal, however, so Philippe was hoping to prove to the
Union that the parasite was a simple, unintelligent organism unlikely to plot
the everlasting conquest of Earth. George had wanted to make the inquiries, but
Philippe didn’t dare let him: The doctor was so angry about Arne’s imprisonment
that Philippe was sure he would let the news slip to the alien population. The
last thing Philippe wanted was for the aliens to know the extent of the Union’s
paranoia.

Max, naturally, was happy to help.
They couldn’t simply share information—the Union would not allow the humans to
link their data system directly to the aliens’. But Max and Philippe arranged
for Vip to come over and access the Hosts’ data; the SFer had some way of doing
it that avoided any potential contamination.

It occurred to Philippe on the way
back to his living area that that the parasite-taking-over-Earth scenario
should not, perhaps, sound so far-fetched to someone who was seriously
considering the possibility that an alien messiah had recently taken up
residence inside his head.

A few days later, Arne had
recovered enough of his health that it was safe to ship him off to his orbiting
prison. Philippe came in for a last chat, and casually asked if he had ever
dreamed about the Hosts.

“Oh, all the time,” said Arne. “I’d
dream about not being able to talk to them, when everyone else could.”

“I used to have this repeating
dream about this one particular Host who would glow,” said Philippe. “Instead
of being red, he was this gold color.”

“In my dreams I could never tell
any of them apart,” replied Arne. “They were always making that grinding noise.
And everyone else was best friends with them, and I was always out in the
cold.”

After Philippe saw Arne off—the
sick man was being transported in a mobile isolation unit that looked
inauspiciously like a coffin—he dropped by Shanti’s office to find her sitting
behind her desk.

“I’ve been talking to Arne,” he
began, “and I was wondering about something. You were saying that he couldn’t
tell Max and Moritz apart, and he was saying that everyone else seemed to be
able to tell just by looking at the Hosts what they were feeling.”

“Think about it—we can’t, or at
least
I
can’t—read the body language of any of the other aliens like
that, and it’s the devil to tell them apart,” Philippe said. “I mean, I’ve
learned from experience with some of them, but I remember coming into the
common area of the station the very first day we were here and
knowing
that
the Hosts were happy to see us, just by looking at them. I didn’t have to study
them at all. And once I saw them in the flesh, I could always tell Max and
Moritz apart, from each other and from any other Host.”

Shanti smiled. “You know how we do
those fighting simulations?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah, well, after we got here,
everyone’s reaction time slowed down, and when I checked, it was because they’d
started to hesitate before they’d shoot the Hosts,” she said.

“See? See what I mean? Why is
that?” Philippe was getting excited. “You know, maybe the Hosts didn’t just
build the station. Maybe they built the portals, too.”

“The Hosts built the portals,”
Shanti said. “And then they didn’t take credit for it. Does that sound like
them?”

“Say, for the sake of argument,
that
they built the portals,” Philippe continued, undeterred. “And the portals are
somehow, I don’t know, imbued with their energy, so that when you go through
them, you become a little bit like the Hosts.”

Shanti rested her elbow on her desk
and put her fist on her cheek. “And Arne?” she asked.

“Maybe the energy . . . ran out or
something,” Philippe said, knowing how lame it sounded.
Maybe the energy’s
living in my head,
he thought.

“You know there’s another
possibility,” Shanti said. “Other species? On Earth? You know—dogs, cats,
horses? We read their body language all the time. Maybe the Hosts just happen
to move like those animals do.”

“Yeah, but—” said Philippe.

“Obviously some of the species are
easier to talk to than others, even with the translators,” Shanti continued.
“You know that alarm the Swimmer drones use, the really awful shrieking? That’s
a recording of the Hosts’ distress call. So if their spoken language is easier
to understand, why shouldn’t that be true of body language as well? They’re
just easier to understand, that’s all.”

“I like my theory better,” said
Philippe.

Shanti shrugged her shoulders.
“OK,” she said, returning her attention to the scroll she was reading. “But I
don’t buy it.”

Philippe retreated to his office.
The room was still cluttered with gold get-well gifts, and he stared at them
blankly. Obviously they couldn’t ship all these alien artifacts to Arne. So
what to do with them?

There was no answer: According to
the Union, alien goods weren’t even supposed to be in the human living area,
except maybe in the isolation unit. But that obviously wasn’t a realistic
policy.