Alien archives, p.6
Alien Archives, page 6
Almost at once he heard a familiar snorting sound behind him. He turned and saw the ponderous yellow form of the elephant-camel looming up, with Jill sitting astride it just back of the front hump.
She leaned down and said, “You change your mind yet about wanting that ride?”
“I thought you were sore at me.”
“I am. Was. But it still seems crazy for you to be doing this on foot when I’ve got room up here for you.”
He stared up at her. You don’t often get second chances in this life, he told himself. But he wasn’t sure what to do.
“Oh, Christ,” she said, as he hesitated. “Do you want a ride or don’t you?”
Still he remained silent.
She shot him a quick wicked grin. “Still worried that I’m a Spook? You can check me out if you like.”
“I threw your gadget in the stream. I don’t like to have witch-things around me.”
“Well, that’s all right.” She laughed. “It wasn’t a charm at all, just an old power core, and a worn out one at that. It wouldn’t have told you anything.”
“What’s a power core?”
“Spook stuff. You could have taken it back with you to prove you were over here. Look, do you want a ride or not?”
It seemed ridiculous to turn her down again.
“What the hell,” Demeris said. “Sure.”
Jill spoke to the animal in what he took to be Spook language, a hiccupping wheeze and a long indrawn whistling sound, and it knelt for him. Demeris took her hand and she drew him on top of the beast with surprising ease. An openwork construction made of loosely woven cord, half poncho and half saddle, lay across the creature’s broad back, with the three humps jutting through. Her tent and other possessions were fastened to it at the rear. “Tie your pack to one of those dangling strings,” she said. “You can ride right behind me.”
He fitted himself into the valley between the second and third humps and got a secure hold on the weaving, fingers digging down deep into it. She whistled another command and the animal began to move forward.
Its motion was a rolling, thumping, sliding kind of thing, very hard to take. The sway was both lateral and vertical and with every step the ground seemed to rise and plunge around him in lunatic lunges. Demeris had never seen the ocean or any other large body of water, but he had heard about seasickness, and this was what it was like. He gulped, clamped his mouth shut, gripped the saddle even more tightly.
Jill called back to him, “How are you doing?”
“Fine. Fine.”
“Takes some getting used to, huh?”
“Some,” he said.
His buttocks didn’t have much padding on them. He could feel the vast bones of the elephant-camel grinding beneath him like the pistons of some giant machine. He held on tight and dug his heels in as hard as he could.
“You see those delta-winged things go by a little while ago?” she asked, after a while.
“The big dragons that were giving off the green smoke?”
“Right. Herders. On their way to Spook City for the hunt. They’ll be used to drive the game toward the killing grounds. Every year this time they get brought in to help in the round-up.”
“And the flying snakes?”
“They herd the herders. Herders aren’t very smart. About like dogs, maybe. The snake guys are a lot brighter. The snakes tell the herders where to go and the herders make the game animals go there too.”
Demeris thought about that. Level upon level of intelligence among these creatures that the Spooks had transported to the planet they had partly conquered. If the herders were as smart as dogs, he wondered how smart the snakes were. Dogs were pretty smart. He wondered how smart the Spooks were, for that matter.
“What’s the hunt all about? Why do they do it?”
“For fun,” Jill said. “Spook fun.”
“Herding thousands of exotic wild animals together and butchering them all at once, so the blood runs deep enough to swim through? That’s their idea of fun?”
“Wait and see,” she said.
***
THEY SAW MORE AND MORE transformation of the landscape: whorls and loops of dazzling fire, great opaque spheres floating just above ground level, silvery blades revolving in the air. Demeris glared and glowered. All that strangeness made him feel vulnerable and out of place, and he spat and murmured bitterly at each intrusive wonder.
“Why are you so angry?” she asked.
“I hate this weird shit that they’ve strewn all over the place. I hate what they did to our country.”
“It was a long time ago. And it wasn’t your country they did it to, it was your great-great-grandfather’s.”
“Even so.”
“Your country is over there. It wasn’t touched at all.”
“Even so,” he said again, and spat.
When it was still well before dark they came to a place where bright yellow outcroppings of sulphur, like foamy stone pillows, marked the site of a spring. Jill gave the command to make her beast kneel and hopped deftly to the ground. Demeris got off more warily, feeling the pain in his thighs and butt from his ride.
“Give me a hand with the tent,” she said.
It wasn’t like any tent he had ever seen. The center-post was nothing more than a little rod that seemed to be made of white wax, but at the touch of a hand it tripled in height and an elaborate strutwork sprang out from it in five directions to provide support for the tent fabric. A Spook tent, he supposed. The tent pegs were made of the same waxy material, and all you had to do was position them where you wanted them around the perimeter of the tent and they burrowed into the ground on their own. Faint pinging sounds came from them as they dug themselves in.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Security check. The pegs are setting up a defensive zone for a hundred yards around us. Don’t try to go through it in the night.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Demeris said.
The tent was just about big enough for two. He wondered whether she was going to invite him to sleep inside it.
Together they gathered mesquite brush and built a fire, and she produced some packets of powdered vegetables and a slab of dried meat for their dinner. While they waited for things to cook Jill went to the spring, which despite the sulfurous outcroppings gave fresh, pure water, and crouched by it, stripping to the waist to wash herself. Seeing her like that was unsettling. His gaze flicked a quick glance at her as she bathed, but she didn’t seem to care, or even to notice. That was unsettling too. Was she being deliberately provocative? Or did she just not give a damn?
He washed himself also, splashing handfuls of the cold water into his face and over his sweaty shoulders. “Dinner’s ready,” she said a few minutes later.
Darkness descended swiftly. The sky went from deep blue to utter black in minutes. In the clear desert air the stars began quickly to emerge, sharp and bright and unflickering. He looked up at them, trying to guess which of them might be the home star of the Spooks. They had never troubled to reveal that. They had never revealed very much of anything about themselves.
As they ate he asked her whether she made this trip often.
“Often enough,” she said. “I do a lot of courier work for my father, out to Texas, Louisiana, sometimes Oklahoma.” She paused a moment. “I’m Ben Gorton’s daughter,” she said, as though she expected him to recognize the name.
“Sorry. Who?”
“Ben Gorton. The mayor of Spook City, actually.”
“Spook City’s got a human mayor?”
“The human part of it does. The Spooks have their administration and we have ours.”
“Ah,” Demeris said. “I’m honored, then. The boss’s daughter. You should have told me before.”
“It didn’t seem important,” she said.
They were done with their meal. She moved efficiently around the campsite, gathering utensils, burying trash. Demeris was sure now that the village boy had simply been playing with his head. He told himself that if Jill was really a Spook he’d have sensed it somehow by this time.
When the cleanup work was done she lifted the tent flap and stepped halfway inside. He held back, unsure of the right move.
“Well?” she asked. “It’s okay to come in. Or would you rather sleep out there?”
Demeris went in. Though the temperature outside was plunging steeply with the onset of night, it was pleasantly warm inside. There was a single bedroll, just barely big enough for two if they didn’t mind sleeping very close together. He heard the sounds she made as she undressed, and tried in the absolute darkness to guess how much she was taking off. It wasn’t easy to tell. He removed his own shirt and hesitated with his jeans; but then she opened the flap again to call something out to the elephant-camel, which she had tethered just outside, and by starlight he caught a flashing glimpse of bare thigh, bare buttock. He pulled off his trousers and slipped into the bedroll. She joined him a moment later. He lay awkwardly, trying to avoid rubbing up against her. For a time there was a tense expectant silence. Then her hand reached out in the darkness and grazed his shoulder, lightly but clearly not accidentally. Demeris didn’t need a second hint. He had never taken any vows of chastity. He reached for her, found the hollow of her clavicle, trailed his hand downward until he was cupping a small, cool breast, resilient and firm. When he ran his thumb lightly across the nipples she made a little purring sound, and he felt the flesh quickly hardening. As was his. She turned to him. Demeris had some difficulty locating her mouth in the darkness, and she had to guide him, chuckling a little, but when his lips met hers he felt the immediate flicker of her tongue coming forth to greet him.
And then almost as though he was willing his own downfall he found himself perversely wondering if he might be embracing a Spook after all; and a wave of nausea swept through him, making him wobble and soften. But she was pressing tight against him, rubbing her breasts from side to side on him, uttering small eager murmuring sounds, and he got himself quickly back on track, losing himself in her fragrance and warmth and banishing completely from his thoughts anything but the sensations of the moment. After that one attack of doubt everything was easy. He located her long smooth thighs with no problem whatever, and when he glided into her he needed no guidance there either, and though their movements together had the usual first-time clumsiness her hot gusts of breath against his shoulder and her soft sharp outcries told him that all was going well.
He lay awake for a time when it was over, listening to the reassuring pinging of the tent pegs and the occasional far-off cry of some desert creature. He imagined he could hear the heavy snuffling breathing of the elephant-camel too, like a huge recirculating device just outside the tent. Jill had curled up against him as if they were old friends and was lost in sleep.
***
SHE SAID OUT OF THE blue, after they had been riding a long while in silence the following morning, “You ever been married, Nick?”
The incongruity of the question startled him. Until a moment ago she had seemed to be a million miles away. His attempt to make love to her a second time at dawn had been met with indifference and she had been pure business, remote and cool, all during the job of breaking camp and getting on the road.
“No,” he said. “You?”
“Hasn’t been on my program,” she said. “But I thought everybody in Free Country got married. Nice normal people who settle down early and raise big families.” The elephant-camel swayed and bumped beneath them. They were following a wide dirt track festooned on both sides with glittering strands of what looked like clear jelly, hundreds of feet long, mounted on spiny black poles that seemed to be sprouting like saplings from the ground.
“I raised a big family,” he said. “My brothers and sisters. Dad got killed in a hunting accident when I was ten. Possibly got mixed up with a Spook animal that was on the wrong side of the line: nobody could quite figure it out. Then my mother came down with Blue Fever. I was fifteen then and five brothers and sisters to look after. Didn’t leave me a lot of time to think about finding a wife.”
“Blue Fever?”
“Don’t you know what that is? Infectious disease. Kills you in three days, no hope at all. Supposed to be something the Spooks brought.”
“We don’t have it over here,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”
“Spooks brought it, I guess they must know how to cure it. We aren’t that lucky. Anyway, there were all these little kids to look after. Of course, they’re grown by now.”
“But you still look after them. Coming over here to try to track down your brother.”
“Somebody has to.”
“What if he doesn’t want to be tracked down, though?”
Demeris felt a tremor of alarm. He knew Tom was restless and troubled, but he didn’t think he was actually disturbed. “Have you any reason to think Tom would want to stay over here for good?”
“I didn’t say I did. But he might just prefer not to be found. A lot of boys come across and stay across, you know.”
“I didn’t know. Nobody I ever heard of did that. Why would someone from Free Country want to live on the Spook side?”
“For the excitement?” she suggested. “To run with the Spooks? To play their games? To hunt their animals? There’s all sorts of minglings going on these days.”
“Is that so,” he said uneasily. He stared at the back of her head. She was so damned odd, he thought, such a fucking mystery.
She said, sounding very far away, “I wonder about marrying.” Back to that again. “What it’s like, waking up next to the same person every day, day after day. Sharing your life, year after year. It sounds very beautiful. But also kind of strange. It isn’t easy for me to imagine what it might be like.”
“Don’t they have marriage in Spook City?”
“Not really. Not the way you people do.”
“Well, why don’t you try it and see? You don’t like it, there are ways to get out of it. Nobody I know thinks that being married is strange. Christ, I bet whatever the Spooks do is five hundred times as strange, and you probably think that it’s the most normal thing in the world.”
“Spooks don’t marry. They don’t even have sex, really. What I hear, it’s more like the way fishes do it, no direct contact at all.”
“That sounds terrifically appealing. I’d really love to try something like that. All I need is a cute Spook to try it with.”
He attempted to keep it light. But she glanced around at him.
“Still suspicious, Nick”
He let that go by. “Listen, you could always take a fling at getting married for a while, couldn’t you?” he said. “If you’re all that curious about finding out what it’s like.”
“Is that an offer, Nick?”
“No,” he said. “Hardly. Just a suggestion.”
***
AN HOUR AFTER THEY SET out that morning they passed a site where there was a peculiar purple depression about a hundred yards across at its thickest point. It was vaguely turtle-shaped, a long oval with four stubby projections at the corners and one at each end.
“What the devil is that?” Demeris asked. “A Spook graveyard?”
“It’s new,” she said. “I’ve never seen it before.”
Some vagrant curiosity impelled him. “Can we look?”
Jill halted the elephant-camel and they jumped down. The site might almost have been a lake, deep-hued and dense against the sandy earth, but there was nothing liquid about it: it was like a stain that ran several yards deep into the ground. Together they walked to the edge. Demeris saw something moving beneath the surface out near the middle, a kind of corkscrew effect, and was about to call it to her attention when abruptly the margin of the site started to quiver and a narrow rubbery arm rose up out of the purpleness and wrapped itself around her left leg. It started to pull her forward. She shrieked and made an odd hissing sound.
Demeris yanked his knife from the scabbard at his belt and sliced through the thing that had seized her. There was a momentary twanging sound and he felt a hot zing go up his arm to the shoulder. The energy of it ricocheted around inside his shirt collar; then it ceased and he staggered back. The part of the ropy arm that had been wrapped around Jill fell away; the rest writhed convulsively before them. He caught her by one wrist and pulled her back.
“It’s got to be some kind of trap for game,” he said. “Or for passing travelers stupid enough to go close. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
She was pale and shaky. “Thanks,” she said simply, as they ran toward the elephant-camel.
Not much of a show of gratitude, he thought.
But at least the incident told him something about her that he needed to know. A Spook trap wouldn’t have gone after one of their own, would it?
Would it?
***
AT MIDDAY THEY STOPPED FOR lunch in a cottonwood grove that the Spooks had redecorated with huge crystalline mushroom-shaped things. The elephant-camel munched on one and seemed to enjoy it, but Demeris and Jill left them alone. There was a brackish little stream running through the trees, and once again she stripped and cleaned herself. Bathing seemed very important to her and she had no self-consciousness about her nudity. He watched her with cool pleasure from the bank.
Once in a while, during the long hours of the ride, she would break the silence with a quirky sort of question: “What do people like to do at night in Free Country?” or “Are men closer friends with men than women are with women?” or “Have you ever wished you were someone else?” He gave the best answers he could. She was a strange, unpredictable kind of woman, but he was fascinated by the quick darting movements of her mind, so different from that of anyone he knew in Albuquerque. Of course he dealt mainly with ranchers and farmers, and she was a mayor’s daughter. And a native of the Occupied Zone besides: no reason why she should be remotely like the kind of people he knew.
They came to places that had been almost incomprehensibly transformed by the aliens. There was an abandoned one-street town that looked as though it had been turned to glass, everything eerily translucent—buildings, furniture, plumbing fixtures. If there had been any people still living there you most likely could see right through them too, Demeris supposed. Then came a sandy tract where a row of decayed rusting automobiles had been arranged in an overlapping series, the front of each humped up on the rear end of the one in front of it, like a string of mating horses. Demeris stared at the automobiles as though they were ghosts ready to return to life. He had never actually seen one in use. The whole technology of internal combustion devices had dropped away before he was born, at least in his part of Free Country, though he had heard they still had cars of some sort in certain privileged enclaves of California.
