Trang (52 page)

So despite the fact that it was
considered extremely rude for even an outsider to criticize someone's roster
status, Philippe had dashed out of the mess hall, found Shanti in her office,
and expressed his sincere disapproval of the entire situation. As luck would
have it, he had arrived in Shanti's office just after she had discovered that
he had agreed to undergo a patch-and-probe, a decision that she had considered
remarkably ill-advised. The result had been an epic shouting match, followed by
a silent and sullen ride to the Titan station.

And now they were riding back.

"You won't see Five when you
get back, not for a couple of days, anyway," Shanti said.

Philippe blinked. The space the
humans lived in on the Host station was not very large, so it was hard to avoid
seeing anyone for any length of time. "Is he on leave?"

Shanti shook her head forcefully.
"I fucking wish! You know they haven't given us back our leave. No, he got
real sleepy after that display, and he went to take a nap in his cubicle."

She stared at Philippe for a
moment, an eyebrow cocked.

"You know how unreliable his
sleep cubby can be," she said. "It gets stuck shut all the
time."

Philippe put his hand to his mouth.
He had been told that you could fit two SFers into one sleep cubicle, but he
wasn't sure how. "How long are you going to keep him in there?"

"It so happens that he's not
on any kind of essential duty for the next couple of days," said Shanti.
"So, I guess no one's going to miss him or figure out he's trapped in
there for a while. It's a real shame, but accidents happen."

"Especially—" Philippe
began.

"Especially when you fuck with
me, yeah. Accidents happen a lot then." She smiled.

Philippe took a deep breath. He
tried, hard, not to criticize the SF's ways, but sometimes. . . .

"Does he have water?" he
asked.

"Oh, yes!" Shanti
exclaimed. "He has lots and lots of water—he packed his cubicle full of
water before he shut it up to nap. And he has lots and lots of ration bars. Unfortunately,
he chose to pick up those ration bars from the infirmary and not the mess hall,
so they're the kind you eat if you're constipated."

Philippe buried his face in his
hands.

"His lonjons are going to get
quite the workout," Shanti said, still smiling jovially. "George is
really excited to see what's going to happen."

Philippe looked up. "And after
all this is done, you're going to clean him up, and then you're going to have
sex with him," he said in what he hoped was a lighthearted tone.

"That's our way!" she
said, fortunately amused. "But quit changing the topic. You've got to tell
me about that patch-and-probe."

Damn it,
thought Philippe.

"Oh, yes," he said.
"Well, as I told Kelly, there was an observer there, a retired civilian
judge."

"Good."

"And the whole thing was
really not that big a deal. The drugs are delivered by patch, and they made me
feel a little slow, but it wasn't unpleasant in the least. There's no actual
probe, of course—they use a normal brain scanner, you know, a headrest with a
hood over the face. You lie down; it's very comfortable. Between the hood and
the drugs, it's a wonder I didn't fall asleep. They should really just call it
a 'patch-and-scan.' Patch-and-probe sounds so intrusive."

Shanti gave him a dirty look.

"What?" Philippe asked.

She shook her head.
"Nothing."

"Of course, they just asked me
the same questions as always."

"See, that's what I don't
understand," Shanti said. "They keep asking you what happened—George
and I gave them good surveillance, they know what happened. Do they not believe
it? Is it because you tried to go to the Host planet without getting permission
first? Because I went with you, and they quit asking me about it a while
back."

Philippe sighed. "Well, I
think for them the issue is that I didn't tell anyone about my nightmares and
visions of the Host messiah."

Shanti snorted dismissively.
"They're upset that you didn't tell them you were hallucinating Creepy?
You thought you were insane—they have to realize that you wouldn't want to tell
anybody
that
."

Philippe suppressed a smile. Shanti
had been considerably less understanding about that decision when she had first
found out about it.

"What bothers them was
that—OK, you know that at first, I was on the Host station, and I was seeing
Kre-Pi-Twa-Ki-Tik-Nao in my dreams and then when I was awake. And that's when I
thought I was losing my mind," he explained. "But when I took my
vacation on Earth, I stopped seeing him. And then when I got back to the
station, I started to see him again, but by then, I knew that your second in
command had seen him, too."

"Yeah, so?"

"Well, when I started seeing
Kre-Pi-Twa-Ki-Tik-Nao again, I knew I wasn't insane. I wasn't stressed out, I
was sleeping, and Patch had seen him. At that point, I knew he was something
real. And I didn't tell anyone
then
—and that's what bothers the Union. I
knew that I and at least one SFer—an SFer with command responsibilities, no
less—were being influenced by an alien in some telepathic sort of way, and I
didn't say anything about it. And you know, upon reflection, I probably should
have."

Shanti thought for a moment.
"Why didn't you?"

"Well, that's what this
interrogation was about. And you know, apparently the reason I didn't tell
anyone was the mission."

"The mission?"

"I didn't want anything to
interfere with the mission—establishing good relations with the aliens. I
didn't want anything to be wrong with me, because then I couldn't do my
part."

She nodded.

"It was interesting to find
that out. Really, you know, the patch-and-probe is more like a therapy session
than anything else—it gives you a lot of insight. I think it really could be
good for people."

Shanti snorted. "Good for
people? Trang, if you were SF, they couldn't do a patch-and-probe on you. Not
under these circumstances. Same if you were in any Union country. And most of
the non-Union countries."

"I know," Philippe said.

"And I hope that Kelly
explained to you why her group thinks no one should ever undergo a
patch-and-probe. Never ever."

"She did," he said,
"rather at length. And you know, I, of all people, appreciate that
technology can be abused."

"Especially the
patch-and-probe," said Shanti. "You basically get ass-raped in the
brain."

She looked perfectly serious, so
Philippe tried not to laugh.
She just needs reassurance.

"That's not what it was
like," he said. "I wasn't emotionally brutalized by some sadist, and
no one was placing false memories to incriminate me—it just wasn't that big a
deal."

"How would you fucking
know?" Shanti exclaimed. "If they planted false memories, how would
you know?"

Philippe sighed. She could be so
dramatic. "What memories would they plant? It's not like I got a
patch-and-probe and now I'm suddenly confessing to molesting children or
something horrible like that. And if that happened, you and the other SFers
would say something, right? Plus they'd have to get around all the
surveillance, including whatever alien surveillance there is on the station
that we don't even know about. They can't get too creative. I'm safe."

Shanti shook her head.
"Promise me you'll never agree to one again," she said.

"Don't worry," Philippe
replied, sincerely hoping that she wouldn't.

He smiled at her for a moment,
wondering when he could change the topic again.

He looked away, out the front
window. The mines were gone; Saturn was gone. Instead they faced true darkness,
the empty space between the Milky Way and the Small Magellanic Cloud. With his
unaugmented vision, Philippe could barely make out the lights that marked the
many Earth and alien reconnaissance satellites surrounding the Host station, as
well as the occasional ring of lights surrounding the almost two dozen other
portals that led here. The station itself was looming out there, somewhere,
like a gigantic bicycle wheel with no rim, but it wasn't well-lit on the
outside, and at the moment Philippe couldn't distinguish it.

"Oh, hey, we're through,"
he said. At this point, the lack of drama involved in traveling through the
portals no longer unnerved him. You just went from
here
—a point near Saturn's
moon Titan—to
there
—a point outside your own galaxy. It only took an
instant, it didn't feel weird, and you didn't see a thing—you were just
here,
and then you were
there.

But an instant contained an
opportunity.

"So what did you do on
Titan?" he asked Shanti. "They didn't bring you there just to
dismantle their furniture, did they?"

She laughed, once again
unthinkingly accepting his change of topic. "Well, it felt that way. But I
had some business with the SF that you should know about: We're getting
reinforcements."

Philippe blinked.

"Really?" he asked.

Shanti nodded. "We'll get
about a dozen new SFers, probably in just a few hours."

Philippe felt an odd sensation,
like he was slipping.

"How many?" he asked.

"Um." She thought for a
moment. "Fourteen, exactly, including the new second."

Philippe felt the slipping
sensation again. "Is that—did you feel something? Like turbulence?"

Shanti shook her head. "We're
in space, Trang."

"What does—is the ship
OK?"

"We no have problem
here," said Pinky.

Philippe shook his head and blinked
his eyes several times.

"Did you say that we were, um,
getting a new second?" he asked.

"Yeah, her name's
Princess," said Shanti. "This is her first time being a second, but
I've known her a long time, and she's good."

Philippe stared at her for a
moment, trying to follow the implications of what she was saying. With effort,
he latched on to one.

"Patch isn't going to be your
second anymore?"

"He will be," said
Shanti. "I'll have two seconds. With a bigger unit, you need more
supervisors to, you know, supervise."

"Patch and Princess—sounds
like the names of a couple of cats," said Philippe.

"I guess."

"I'm glad Patch is
staying," Philippe said. "I like Patch. He's good at heart."

"He's a nice guy," agreed
Shanti.

"I like Patch. It's too bad
that he named the aliens, though."

Shanti smiled. "Yeah, the
Cyclopes. . . . "

"Cyclopes!" Philippe
exclaimed, throwing his hands to his forehead.

"What is that, Cyclopes?"
asked Pinky. "I have wondered."

"Like, magic creatures,"
Cheep replied.

Philippe stared at the back of
Pinky's head for a moment. Pinky was that rare thing—rarest among those who
worked for the Union: He had not grown up speaking Union English.

"
Die Zyklopen
,"
Philippe said. "
Tsiklopy.
"

"
Kiklopi?
" Pinky
asked, disbelieving. "Their eyes are four!"

"I know!" Philippe
exclaimed.

"Patch is an—" Cheep's
eye wandered back to Shanti, which interested Philippe. As casual as the
Special Forces seemed, there were, as he had discovered to his chagrin, some
lines that were not to be crossed.

And this appeared to be one of
them. "—not very well-educated person," Cheep finished.

"Patch meant to call them
centaurs," said Philippe. "
Kentavry.
He got confused."

Pinky nodded. "They look like
that. Why you no fix?"

Philippe sighed. "The Hosts
won't let us. They say it makes too much work for the Swimmers."

"It doesn't matter," said
Shanti, a touch defensively. "With the translators, they don't know what
the hell we're calling them."

"That good," said Pinky.

Philippe smiled. "It is
good."

Shanti shrugged. "Patch did
his best. He isn't a diplomat."

"No," Philippe cheerfully
agreed. "I don't think he'd have much success in the DiploCorps."

They jostled against something
firm.

"OK, that wasn't me,"
Philippe said.

"We here!" exclaimed
Pinky.

Philippe sat for a moment,
uncomprehending. Shanti unfastened her safety harness and stood up.

"Oh," said Philippe,
"we're here."
Here,
he thought. The alien station, built by
the Hosts centuries before in the hopes that other aliens would someday find
it. His newest home.

He quickly released himself from
his seat and stood up. The ship reeled around him for a moment.
Did that too
quickly,
he thought.

He grabbed the seat back to steady himself,
which turned him toward Shanti. "Did you say fourteen new SFers will be
coming onto the station?" he asked her.

"Yeah, fourteen." She
gestured. He turned in the direction she was pointing and realized that the
door of the ship was open to a white corridor.

Another clean, white, featureless
corridor. The Union's Space Authority was not blessed with an overabundance of
creative interior designers.

Philippe turned back to Shanti.
"And one of them's a new second."

She raised an eyebrow at him.

He turned and walked to the
corridor.

He stopped again. "When are
all these new people coming?" he asked.

"Like I said, as soon as
possible," Shanti replied from behind him. "Probably later
today."

Philippe tripped over the threshold
to the corridor, but he caught his hand on the wall and didn't fall this time.
"A new second," he said.

"It's not a demotion for
Patch," said Shanti.

"I like Patch," said
Philippe.

"Trang, are you feeling
OK?" she asked.