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The morning of the raid I sat in a stolen minivan at the intersection of Game Farm Road and Ellis Hollow Road, listening to a professional killer talk about compost. The killer’s name was Ed. He was a skinny old guy with a big puff of hair and beard covering his whole head. Rumor had it that he had killed at least eleven men -- loggers and timber executives out in Oregon and northern California. He certainly did know a lot about organic farming.
“Corncobs are a pain. They take forever to break down on their own. You can leave a corncob in the bin for two or three years and it won’t do anything but turn brown.”
“My uncle puts them through his wood chipper,” I said.
“A wood chipper! That’s, what, half a liter of gasoline to break up maybe a bushel of corncobs? Screw that,” said the killer. “You’re putting something like two liters of CO2 into the atmosphere just for a little convenience. No, you’ve got to think laterally about the corncobs. Read history. What did people do with corncobs before wood chippers?”
“I dunno.”
“They wiped their asses with them! No cutting down trees, no bleach, no scented quilted downy-soft crap -- they used corncobs. And when they were done they threw them down the latrine. Back to the Earth. Total self-sufficiency!”
I winced a bit at that -- he was lying on the back seat and couldn’t see me. The alarm on my pad chimed. “It’s ten. You’d better get in position.”
He rose to a sitting position and stretched. “Yeah. Help me get the bike out.”
The two of us wrestled Ed’s bicycle out of the cargo compartment, then I fidgeted and kept looking at the time while the hardened professional killer put his bike back together. It was a great bike, to be sure -- a high-tech recumbent touring cycle, with an energy-storing flywheel and about forty gears. But we weren’t here for the Tour de Tompkins County, we had a mission.
After what seemed like forever, Ed was satisfied with the state of his bike, and turned his attention to his gun. I’d been trying to get a good look at it ever since Ed had joined our little team. A big gun does that to people. Even hard-core pacifists with ban war toys stickers on their cars can’t help being fascinated by a very expensive, well-built machine that’s designed to kill people.
Ed’s killing machine was a great beast of a Russian-made sniper rifle, and it stood in the same relationship to my uncle’s old deer rifle as a helium-cooled supercomputer does to an adding machine. It used liquid propellant to shoot a slug as big as a man’s thumb at six times the speed of sound, packing about as much kinetic energy as a bowling ball dropped off the CN Tower. The brute power of the Russian gun was wrapped in a high-tech envelope of Japanese and American lethality-enhancement -- stabilizers and shock absorbers and a computerized gunsight as big as a Sapporo can perched on top.
How a scruffy old Deep Green forest gnome like Ed had ever gotten his gnarled hands on such a triumph of technological killing power was a mystery to everyone. However voluble he might be about compost, the old man was remarkably tight-lipped about any details the FBI or BATF might someday be interested in learning -- like his real name, for example.
My phone peeped. I clicked it on. “ET phone home,” said a voice, followed by another click and silence.
“The Brazilians are at the airport,” I told Ed. “I’d better get going.”
“Nice knowing you,” said Ed, and without another word turned and headed for a tall maple growing about ten yards off the road. He had to waddle a bit because of the climbing spurs on his boots. With his gun slung over his shoulder, Ed started up the tree.
I hustled back to the minivan and peeled off down Game Farm Road to a stand of trees about a hundred yards from the intersection with Route 366. I pulled off into the ditch, took out my brand-new chainsaw, and got into position among the trees.
Ten minutes later my phone peeped again. “Saludo, amigo,” said Pete Sutherland’s voice. “I am now Brazilian and it feels muy good!” Click.
For just a second I felt all queasy and scared. Up to now we’d all just been fooling around. We could have called the whole thing off and be guilty of nothing worse than car theft. But not any more. The call meant that Pete, Jerry and the Huffberg twins had just overpowered and tied up three Brazilian diplomats from the UN. This was now officially Heavy Shit. I started the chainsaw.
Five minutes later the Cayuga Livery Service van went past. Jerry was in the driver’s seat, inscrutable behind his sunglasses. The van slowed and turned at the entrance to the Carl Sagan Institute for Xenology. I held my breath as the van stopped at the security kiosk in front of the gate. It all depended on whether Pete and Inga and Dolph could convince one paunchy middle-aged Kampus Kop that they were in fact the Brazilian diplomats from the UN whose names were written down on his visitor log sheet. Ed was watching through his sniperscope, and if things turned nasty he was to lay down supporting fire while our faux Brazilians made their escape.
The van was between me and the kiosk, and it seemed to sit there far too long. But then the high chainlink gate rolled open and the van rolled sedately up the drive toward the building and I could exhale.
I pulled out my phone and called Ira. “They’re in!” I shouted over the noise of the idling chainsaw.
Ira was the diversion. To keep Cornell security and the Ithaca PD busy, Ira’s job was to feed five dollars into a pay phone in front of the Johnson Museum and call in bomb scares at a bunch of local schools, the hospital, the airport and the Cornell air-conditioning plant. That accomplished, he was to stroll casually to a point in the middle of the suspension bridge across Fall Creek gorge, take a small radio transmitter out of his coat pocket, and detonate the bomb he had planted in the basement of the Fiji fraternity house the night before.
The sound of the chainsaw was too loud for me to hear the bomb two miles away, but my faith in Ira was absolute. My job at this stage of the plan was to drop a cedar across Game Farm Road to block access from the north, then drive south to the junction with Ellis Hollow Road and put up a pair of white sawhorses with a do not enter sign I’d stolen some weeks before from a sewer construction site.
Driving south I looked up at the big maple, where Ed the gunman was carefully sighting his giant rifle in on the emergency generator at the Institute, a quarter-mile away. He put five rounds into the generator, then swung his rifle around to bear on the electrical transformer on a utility pole half a mile up the road. Three rounds were enough to set it on fire. His mission accomplished, the old man climbed down the tree, wrapped up his rifle in a canvas tarp and slung it under his bike, then pedaled off in the direction of Oregon.
I set up the barricade, then drove off to the rendezvous point on a dirt road off Turkey Hill Road. So far everything seemed to be going according to the plan. Pete’s car and the meat truck were still where we’d parked them before dawn. I got my stuff out of the minivan and put it all in Pete’s car, then pulled the minivan in among some trees where it was invisible from the road. Finally I sprayed the inside with four cans of oven cleaner to take care of any stray bits of DNA which Ed or I might have left behind.
The sky looked good. It was still overcast -- pretty much a given in Ithaca between September and April -- which meant we wouldn’t have to worry about satellite spying. I couldn’t see any spy drones overhead. The ground was perfect for our purposes, bare of snow (it had been a dry November), but already frozen hard enough not to pick up tracks. I started to believe we just might pull this off.
The van pulled up just as I finished with the oven cleaner. No bullet-holes in the panels, no pursuing squadron of police cars. Jerry gave me a thumbs-up as he eased between the meat truck and Pete’s car. Pete hopped out to open the doors at the back of the meat truck, Inga and Dolph came piling out of the back of the van, and I got my first look at the alien.
Pretty much everyone on Earth has seen Sushi the Alien in videos and interactives, but let me tell you it really isn’t the same as a meeting in the flesh. For just a second he looked right at me with those funny star-shaped pupils and I’m not ashamed to say I was a little afraid. That beak is nothing to sneer at -- it’s nothing like the cute parrot-beak they give him in cartoons. Sushi’s beak is saw-edged with a wicked point, obviously nothing but a weapon. The lack of a lower jaw made it look all the more sinister. Steam puffed from the nostrils along his long neck in the chilly air.
Jerry gave him an encouraging shove from behind, and Sushi stepped out of the van. He was big -- his hips were level with Dolph’s shoulders as he stepped down to the ground, and his armless horizontal torso was bigger than any man’s. The tail extended a good two meters behind. One of his clawed feet was twisted and shrunken, and he limped as he moved away from the van.
Pete had laid a couple of boards as a kind of crude ramp up into the meat truck, but the alien disdained them and stepped easily up onto the back bumper in a single motion.
Pete and Dolph were busy moving some computers and a bunch of disks into the back of Pete’s car. I hadn’t recalled robbery as being part of the plan. “What’s all that stuff?” I asked.
“Translator software. We’ll need it to communicate,” said Pete. “Don’t wait for us -- get going!”
Inga rode in the back of the truck with the alien, Jerry took the wheel and I climbed into the passenger seat. Jerry released the parking brake and the truck moved out onto the road. No cops in sight.
The Plan, as worked out by Pete and his nameless friends who were paying for the whole thing, was to drive south on back roads and then get on the interstate at Elmira. We would then take a long wide detour down through Pennsylvania to Maryland. Our backers had arranged a safe house there in a county where the DA was sympathetic. Once in Maryland we could get in touch with the Washington media and get our story out. We’d have a big press conference and expose everything -- how the astronauts had kidnapped Sushi, how the scientists had kept him a prisoner, and how he’d been abused in captivity. The world would demand that NASA send him back to 36 Ophiuchi II and close down the interstellar program.
That was the plan, and when Pete had contacted me through some mutual friends and asked if I wanted to be part of such a big-deal piece of political theater, naturally I’d jumped at the opportunity. As the Local Guy, my job had been to devise a route that would get us out of Tompkins County quickly and unobtrusively. The simplest route would be to go southeast on Route 79 to pick up I-81 at Whitney Point. Of course, the state police and the Feds could look at a road map and see the same thing, so I’d worked out a route which would take us on back roads through Brooktondale and Danby to Chemung County, and onto the highway at Elmira. Jerry and I had made the run a couple of times and I thought he had it down cold. But instead of turning south on Turkey Hill Road, Jerry turned north.
“Maryland is out,” he explained. “Pete and I decided to go with plan B instead.”
“How come?”
“Had a little trouble back at CSIX.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“While Pete and I were getting the alien into the van, Inga and Dolph decided to, ah, tidy up loose ends. We had all the vivisectors locked in a closet upstairs, so those two went back up and emptied a clip from Dolph’s Uzi through the door.”
“Jesus! How many?”
“Eight. At least, that’s how many people were up there. I don’t know if they got them all.”
“What the fuck did they do that for? That wasn’t part of the plan! This whole thing was supposed to be clean!”
“When we came busting in they had the alien all wired up with electrodes and were making it run on some kind of treadmill. That kind of thing really bugs Inga.”
“Jesus Christ. So now they’ll call us a bunch of fucking murderers.”
“Pete didn’t feel that our friends in Maryland would be too happy about that. So we’re going to lie low at the house in Lansing until we can get our side of the story to the media.”
“Jerry, that house belongs to one of my grandmother’s friends! If anyone finds out we’ve been there it’ll be a big neon sign pointing right at me.”
“Then I guess you’d better make sure nobody finds out, yes?”
“Jesus.” When Pete had asked me to find a backup hideout near Ithaca, I hadn’t really given it much thought. We had the Plan, after all. Mrs. Venetucci’s house had seemed ideal for a backup. Mrs. Venetucci lived in a nursing home in Florida, and her son was in the Navy. The only time anybody went near the place was during the summer, when my Uncle Ray came by once a month to cut back the brush along the driveway and mow the grass.
“I thought we had everything planned so nobody would get hurt!”
“Don’t worry. This is just a setback. Once people learn the truth, killing those vivisectors will be justifiable homicide.”
We rumbled through Varna at a perfectly legal 40 and crossed Route 13. I kept checking the rear view for police cars, and tried desperately to remember if there was anyone who I’d told, anyone who might guess that I was involved in this. The others had been big on “operational security,” but as long as we were just freeing the alien it hadn’t seemed like such a big deal to me. My Students for Ethical Science friends at Cornell would never report me for pulling off the biggest, showiest lab raid ever -- but murder might get them talking.
A sudden awful thought struck me. “You didn’t do anything to those Brazilians, did you?”
“Other than taking their clothes, tying them up and locking them in a shed, no. I’m sure they’ll be fine.” I looked at him for a moment, trying to decide if he was telling the truth.
The Venetucci place was about two miles northeast of the airport, surrounded by farmland waiting to turn into suburbs. Branches scraped against the side of the truck as Jerry eased up the drive. The house was small, boxy and not very attractive, but the roof was sound and there was propane in the tank for heat. I went to the front door to get the house unlocked while Jerry opened up the back of the truck. Inga was singing some kind of Celtic lullaby to the alien. Pete and Dolph arrived in time to help get him out of the truck and into the house.
*****
When the strange humans, stealthy and treacherous, entered the teaching-shelter, I gave them little attention. Many strangers, curious and ignorant, come to look at me, to ask me questions, to make speeches. I am polite when I must be, and ignore them when I can.
Scott Father Scientist, wise and quick-moving, and his followers were doing another of their experiments. They asked me to run on a strip of moving floor so that they might learn about the qualities of my body. To run without moving, with hoses taped to my nostrils and wires taped to my hips and chest -- not many males would consent to behave in such a manner. But I am old and a cripple, and learned to swallow my pride when I was still a virgin. So as always when Scott or Ali Father Scientist, small and far-traveling, asked me politely if I would consent to help them, I agreed.
The task was hard. My cursed foot keeps me from running any distance, and I prefer to hunt by stealth and ambush -- or better still, to tell stories and let others catch the meat. So I ran and puffed into the hoses and thought of my children and tried to ignore the pain in my foot. I barely noticed when the door opened and Elena Virgin Student, curious and long-haired, came in with three guests, silent and watchful.
Then the trouble started. The lights went dark and the strip of floor stopped moving. I tripped and fell. The strangers began shouting and waving objects. I did not have the translation box on so I could only understand a little of what they were saying. But I could see that Scott and Elena and all the others were frightened.
I was also frightened. I admit it readily; only new fathers trying to impress one another pretend otherwise. But my fear was not that of a warrior before battle or a hunter making a difficult kill. It is hard to explain. Among the humans I was like a newborn just learning to walk at its mother’s side. From the moment I agreed to accompany Marina Mother Pathfinder, slender and polite, on the voyage through the sky in the flying shelter, I had depended upon the humans for everything. All the things that I learned during my stay on Earth only served to show me how much I did not understand. I did not know what to do, so I did nothing.
The three of them made Scott and Elena and the others go out into the hall, and herded them into a chamber, small and cramped. One invader who looked like a mother human hurried to my side and tore off the wires and hoses. She gestured for me to follow her. I obeyed.
They acted with remarkable swiftness for humans. Normally going on a journey requires four or five vehicles and a retinue of interpreters, scientists, guards and others. It takes a whole morning just to set out. My captors had a single vehicle, and two of them helped me into it while the other two remained inside the shelter. The back of the vehicle was cramped and had no padding, but I was able to get in. As soon as all the humans were in the vehicle, it left at great speed.
I saw little during the journey. They covered me with a skin and kept my head down. We rode only a little time before changing to a larger vehicle which was enclosed. It smelled very interesting inside, of blood and meat. The mother rode with me and kept stroking me and making a chanting sound. Despite the noise I relaxed a little. It was obvious that the humans had me at their mercy, yet they had not harmed me. Evidently they wanted to keep me alive. That was good. But what was their purpose? They could hardly intend to rape me. Were they just young and poor, seeking status and wives by a bold act?
Eventually the vehicle stopped, and the humans helped me out and brought me into a small shelter. They showed me a chamber, and moved their upper limbs around until I realized they were trying to tell me to rest there. The mother remained with me for a time, stroking me and chanting until I wished for silence. She went away and soon returned with two of the fathers. One had a translation box.
“Hello,” they made it say. “We are your friends. We will not hurt you.”
That seemed promising. “I am glad. I will not hurt you either.”
“You are free now. You are safe. We will help you.”
“That’s good. What are we going to do here?”
The humans conferred among themselves. “This is a safe place. The others will not find you here. We will wait until it is safe to leave. It may be many days.”
I wondered if there was something wrong with the translation box. The humans at the teaching-shelter freely admitted that their creations sometimes did not work properly. It almost sounded as if these humans were protecting me from Scott Father Scientist and the others.
“Is there food here?” I had eaten the day before, but if they were going to keep me many days it would be wise to keep my belly full.
More consultation. “We can get food for you. What do you want?”
“I like beef and lamb if you have it.”
“We will bring you food.”
That didn’t sound very promising. It would probably be tuna. I much preferred beef even though Chau Mother Scientist, clever and long-haired, kept insisting that tuna was more like the food I was used to. We had argued about it more than once. I maintained that beef looked, smelled and tasted like the flesh of a browser, and even came from a creature that lived by eating plants. Whereas tuna was different in every respect, and moreover came from a swimming animal. Chau had gone on about some occult quality which made tuna more like browser meat than beef, but I didn’t believe it for an instant. From her breath I could tell that Chau often ate beef, and like many hosts she was serving the second-best meat to her guest.
“Is there anything else you need?” they asked.
I knew what that meant. They were asking if I wanted to shit. Humans are laughably delicate about that, and never do it where others can see. “Not now. After I’ve eaten. Will you want to keep it?”
That caused no end of discussion among these strange humans. Finally two of them went out and the other three sat down on the floor with the box. “We want to ask you some questions.”
If I had a piece of meat for every time someone asked me that on Earth, it would make a feast for an entire tribe. But this time I was their captive. “Ask.”
*****
Once we were snug in Mrs. Venetucci’s house, Pete and Dolph and Inga changed out of their Brazilian diplomat suits and went in to talk with the alien. My job was to get the place habitable again. The Casa Venetucci hadn’t exactly been luxurious back when people lived in it, and the empty years had not been kind. We had power and heat, but I had to go take the pump apart and put it back together before we could get any water. I got cold, wet and covered with mud and oil, but being part of a Cause made it all seem glamorous and important.
Jerry went out for food and came back with a bag of Indian food for the human contingent and a couple of pounds of raw tuna for our guest. Sushi for Sushi, if you will (I probably owe a royalty to the Post for that phrase). “The town is really hyper,” he said. “I passed a National Guard convoy on Route 13, and there are helicopters everywhere.”
“Did you have any trouble?”
“Not really. There’s a roadblock on Route 13; they’re searching every car coming out of town. The cop told me there’s going to be a curfew in town beginning at eight.”
“Did you get hold of Ira?”
“Yeah. He’s going to come out here later. I was listening to the radio in the car -- somebody found the letter Pete left behind, so at least they know why we did it.”
“And? How are the media handling it?”
“Oh, the typical corporate media pretense at being objective. They had a sound bite from one of Pete’s friends in Maryland, buried in a whole bunch of propaganda from NASA and Cornell about how Sushi came here willingly and all that crap. How’s our guest?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been out here doing housework.”
The smell of lentil curry finally brought the Inner Circle out of Sushi’s room. They emerged looking gleefully horrified -- like teenagers coming out of the summer’s coolest slasher movie.
“So what’s the score?” I asked them, trying not to seem like somebody’s little brother tagging along with the hip high-school kids.
“They’ve been brainwashing her,” said Pete. “Filling her head with all kinds of propaganda. Trying to turn her into a good little Western consumer. It’s the imperial cycle all over again.”
“And all the while they’ve been using her, doing experiments on her, invading her body, raping her body with probes and metal tools,” said Inga. “We should have destroyed the whole place.”
“Anything really juicy? Something for the headlines?”
“Isn’t it bad enough they were raping her with wires?” Inga was so angry she was trembling.
I shut up, but privately I was a little disappointed. I mean, I didn’t doubt breaking Sushi out of the lab was a good thing, but if the Huffberg twins really had blown away a bunch of scientists we would need something pretty Nazi-like to justify their little outburst. A rectal probe or whatever doesn’t really cut it -- every man over forty gets some doctor’s thumb up his butt once a year, but you don’t see any grass-roots support for shooting proctologists.
Pete must have seen my concern. “Don’t worry. We’ve only started. I’m sure once we get the full story there will be plenty of details for the media. It’s all in the spin, anyway.”
“The important thing is that we spoke out,” said Dolph. “We made our voices heard. All action is communication.”
At six we watched the news. The news was bad. Four of the scientists Inga and Dolph had shot were dead, and another one was in critical condition. All the talking heads referred to us as “the terrorists.” The Feds were raiding every organic grocery and vegan deli in central New York looking for us. The story had its own theme music and a snazzy little graphic of Sushi in a blindfold. Dolph was visibly pleased by that.
When the newsbeings started to repeat themselves I tried to get a word alone with Pete. “How long are we going to stay here?” I asked him.
“I’m not sure. A couple of days, at least. You’re going to have to figure out some way to get out of here without going through any roadblocks.”
“That’s no problem. But I’d be happier if we had a definite time set up for departure.”
Just then there was a pounding on the door.
Dolph and Pete went for the guns. Inga killed the lights and Jerry went to peer out the window. I forced myself to walk to the door, with my mouth suddenly dry and my heartbeat sounding loudly in my ears.
“Will you guys open up already? It’s me!” I was never so relieved in my life as when I heard Ira’s muffled voice through the door.
I opened up the door with a big grin that faded when I saw that he wasn’t alone. He was holding another man in a headlock with a gun pressed to his temple. The man’s ski hat was pulled down over his face, but I recognized the cruddy old safety-orange parka and the neon green ski cap covered with little Dr. Suess fish. It was my brother George.
“George!”
“You know him?” asked Pete.
“Brian?” said George, a little muffled by the ski cap. “Is that you?”
Pete shot me an angry glance. “Bring him in and tie him up,” he said.
“Tie him up? He’s my brother, for Chrissake!”
“And what’s he doing here, then? Maybe he put two and two together and was planning to tell the Feds on us like Ted Kaczinski’s family did. Until we know more he stays here, and if he does anything he’s dead, understand?”
I helped Ira get George into the kitchen, and we tied him to a chair with a couple of extension cords I found in the closet. Ira sat on the counter behind George, out of his line of sight, and then I pulled off George’s hat.
He looked bad. Not that George ever looks good, of course, but in addition to his uncombed hair and permanent three-day beard he was pale and shaky. “Brian, what the fuck is going on? Who are those guys?”
“They’re, um, people I know. They won’t do anything, really. You’ll be fine.”
That didn’t reassure him -- or me either, to be honest.
“What are you doing here, anyway?” I asked him.
“I thought I’d get out my big binoculars and bike up here to watch the Marco Polo dock at the station.”
“Jesus. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What’s to tell? I come up here sometimes when it’s good and clear. It’s easier than getting up Mount Pleasant on my bike and the trees block out most of the sky glow.”
“Jesus,” I said again. George and his fucking hobbies. He’s five years older than I am and never finished college because he was in too many clubs to bother going to class. He’s completely uninterested in any kind of activism and the only thing that saves him from being a cog in the consumer machine is his monumental laziness. For the past seven years he’s lived in my grandmother’s basement, going through a series of six-month stints at different entry-level jobs and spending all his free time reading manga, watching movies at Cornell, looking at the stars, biking, building model spaceships and playing computer games. About once a year he gets up enough courage to talk to a woman, and spends a couple of months in a torrid relationship which collapses as soon as she realizes that he doesn’t plan to quit being a geek just because he’s getting laid.
Now his stupid hobbies had just put the whole operation in danger. “Does anyone know you’re here? Anyone at all?”
“I don’t think so. The sky was so overcast this morning that I didn’t think I’d be going out at all. Larry and I were going to go see The Day the Earth Stood Still at Cornell, but the whole campus is closed off and the movies are canceled.” He stopped, blinked, and then looked at me with round eyes. “Brian, tell me this isn’t about the alien. Please tell me your friends are just dope growers or pedophiles or something.”
“It’s all right, really. We just freed him from the lab where they were torturing him.” Ira frowned but said nothing.
George tried to get up but the extension cords stopped him. “Jesus Christ, Brian! Busting into the Vet School to free the bunnies was stupid, but this is fucking insane!”
“Calm down. It’s all right. If you keep quiet everything will be fine.”
He struggled a little and then sat there glaring at me. “So what are your friends going to do with me?”
“I’ll go see. But you have to keep quiet, understand?”
I left him sulking in the kitchen and found Pete, Inga and Jerry in consultation in the living room.
“What are we going to do with him?” I asked.
Before they answered, Inga and Jerry each had to go through a little song and dance about what a fuckup this was, and how it was all my fault. Pete let them go on for a few minutes before jumping in.
“All right, people. I believe Brian understands. I’m sure he’s as upset about this as all of us.”
“I really will be upset if you’re planning to do anything to George. He is my brother, after all.”
“You have to understand our position, Brian. He’s a tremendous security hazard. We can’t let him go.”
“Our work is too important to risk,” Inga put in.
Pete silenced her with a look and turned back to me. “So we’ve come up with a workable compromise. We’ll hold your brother here until we relocate; then he can go free.”
“He won’t talk to the cops -- I promise he won’t.”
“But can you really be sure?” asked Pete. “There’s too much at stake to depend on his good will. After we’re gone it won’t matter.”
It struck me that I was the only one George could identify anyway. Once we were gone, all he’d accomplish by talking would be to put me in jail. I didn’t believe George would do that to me. So maybe this would work out after all.
“I’ll tell him,” I said. “I feel sure he’ll go along after I explain it to him.”
“He will have to stay tied up, though. We can’t afford to have him wandering around. The less he sees, the better it is for him.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll make sure he doesn’t see anything.” After Inga and Dolph’s little episode at CSIX I didn’t want to give them any reason for doing anything to George. Especially since they might want to eliminate me, too, just to be sure.
George didn’t like it, but when I explained the alternative would quite likely be the two of us getting shot by Inga, he grudgingly agreed. So George lived tied to a chair in the master bedroom, and I got to feed him his meals and help him use the bathroom. I’ll spare the details. Mrs. Venetucci’s television still worked, and her programming bill was paid automatically out of her pension, so George had a hundred channels to watch. Not a vacation in Bali, but at least he wasn’t buried in the basement with a bullet in his head.
Meanwhile the Inner Circle spent lots of time with Sushi the alien, leaving Jerry and me to keep house and watch out for Feds. And on the third day Pete came out of Sushi’s room with a look of triumph. “We’ve got them,” he said. “Those bastards.”
“What is it?” asked Jerry.
“Hands,” said Pete. “Those twisted Frankensteins want to give it hands.”
*****
I ate five meals in the shelter with the strange humans. They insisted on eating with me, but I am used to human ways and did not mind. The meat was skinned and cut in pieces, and when they first brought it to me on a flat stone I couldn’t eat it. Finally one of the humans put the meat into a stone that was hollow like a skull, and then I could dine more comfortably. When I spat bile on my food, they looked alarmed, and asked if I was ill.
“No, this is usual for my people,” I said, slurping up the liquefying meat with my feeding tube. “You need not worry.” Their concern made me braver, for it was clear they meant to keep me well and healthy. Perhaps they wanted me as a hostage, then.
The first two meals were tuna, and then they gave me something called catfish, pale and insipid. When I asked for some lamb, warm and bloody, they said it was impossible. They themselves ate plants at every meal. I soon realized that the tuna and catfish must have been all the meat they could find. It was very generous of them to save it all for me. I was touched, but also careful -- those who are poor and hungry often commit desperate acts.
And each day they asked me questions. Many, many questions. The curious thing was that they did not ask about my world and its creatures, or my people and their ways, or even about my body. They seemed to be most interested in what the other humans at the teaching-shelter did. Why they did not simply ask them instead of capturing me I could not understand.
It was not easy. Many of the experiments Scott Father Scientist and Ali Father Scientist did were mysterious to me, and so were very hard for me to explain to these others. But I am a Singer, learned and clear-voiced, so I did my best to inform and entertain them.
“On several occasions they have asked me to give samples of my spit, so that they might understand how I eat. Once they even slid a long, thin stick down my throat to discover the workings of my gut.”
“Did they force you to do that?” asked the mother. She kept asking me that whenever I described an experiment.
“No. It was uncomfortable, but I am the head of a family so I did not complain.”
The father who seemed to be the leader shook his head from side to side. “What’s the most painful thing they’ve done to you?”
“The pricking with needles to draw my blood hurts a little. Once when they were trying to learn how I breathe they took blood several times a day. I told Scott Father Scientist he should wait until after I died to devour me.” They did not laugh. The box did not translate jokes well.
“But why do you let them?” The mother spoke loudly. “They’re just using you!”
“I am a guest in their shelter. And they seek to help me and my people.”
“You can’t really believe that, can you?” asked the leader father. “They only care about getting grants. You’re just a source of data. They don’t want to help you at all.”
“Perhaps you have heard untrue things,” I said.
“Or maybe they’ve been lying to you. Have you thought of that?”
I considered what he said for a moment, then dismissed it. “No. If they were not trying to help they would not be making the hands.”
“What hands?” they all asked at once.
“Once I asked Ali Father Scientist, small and far-traveling, if I could have hands like you humans. He laughed and said it was impossible. But Satoshi Virgin Student, plump and helpful, heard me and suggested it might be possible to make hands for me to wear. So now he is making me a hand, and when I return to Seishaef all my people can have them.”
“What kind of hands are we talking about here?” asked the leader.
“Are they going to attach something to you?” added the mother.
“Satoshi said he thought of that, but then decided to create something simple, so that my people could make others themselves. It will hang from the base of my neck on a strap, thick and snug-fitting, and a cord tied to my tail will make the hand open and close. I have tried it once, but Satoshi needed to change the way the cord attached to my tail.”
“But why?” asked the father. “Aren’t you happy the way you are?”
I lifted my foot, twisted and shrunken. “I was cursed in the womb. I have never been happy as I am.”
“Well, okay, but aren’t your people happy?”
“Most of them are, I suppose. They hunt, they bear children, then they father children, then they grow old and die. But you humans -- you do so much more! You live in a world of wonders! Meat, fresh and tasty whenever you wish! Shelters, warm and brightly-lit, and water, cool and abundant! You can do things not even the gods, shining and nameless, can accomplish. I want my people to have the things you humans have, and when I bring them such gifts they will honor me above chiefs and prophets.”
Humans show many of their emotions by moving parts of their faces around. I am still learning to tell what all the face movements mean, but it did seem to me that these humans were not happy.
*****
When Pete and Inga came out of Sushi’s room, I was sitting on the floor with my USGS map printouts spread out around me (forget those wimpy commercial road maps -- they only show the roads you’re allowed to use), trying to find a way to get past the roadblocks with a truck full of vegans and one Ophiuchian. Jerry was helping by phoning people around the county to ask which roads were open. It was tedious and annoying work, so when Pete started going on about how the scientists were a bunch of Frankensteins and all, I found myself arguing with him for once.
“What’s the problem, huh? Sushi’s people don’t have any hands -- shit, they don’t even have jaws. Maybe this isn’t such a bad idea.”
Pete looked at me with a more-in-sorrow expression, and shook his head pityingly. “Brian, you’re still thinking like a Second Millennium person. Changing the world instead of adapting to it.”
That kind of got my back up. He hadn’t spent a whole day getting the water pump working. “Yeah, but you said it yourself -- Sushi wants to have hands. Why not give him what he wants?”
“Her,” snapped Inga. She’d been doing that ever since we first started planning the raid. “She has carried life in her womb and we should respect that.”
“Yeah, and she has a dick the size of a zucchini, in case you hadn’t noticed, so I’m respecting that.”
That little exchange gave Pete time to think of a response, and he started in at full power. “Think about all the things we’ve been fighting, Brian. Deforestation. Pollution. Exploiting animals. Technology. Humans have done all those things with their hands. Siusheas and his world have been spared that. They live in a perfectly natural balance with their environment. It’s like Eden, Brian. No technology at all. And now those bastards at CSIX want to give them hands so they can start raping and defiling their own world just like we’ve done to Gaia. They’ve shown him all their fun technological toys and dazzled him with material things, but they haven’t shown him how technology has destroyed the planet and is destroying our souls. We’ve got to stop this madness before they can infect another world. We’ll show Siusheas why it’s a bad idea, and then go public. It’ll be perfect.”
“You really think that will convince people?”
“Absolutely! We’re talking about deep-rooted archetypes here. Eden. Innocence. Rousseau’s Noble Savage. Now NASA wants to corrupt all that. This might be the lever that we use to bring down the whole Western paradigm.”
I couldn’t very well argue with that. I could see Inga was waiting to jump in again, so I just got up and left the room. “I’d better check on George,” I said over my shoulder.
George was watching the Cop Channel when I came in. Some Canadian Mounties were busting a pirate software operation; as usual the bad guys weren’t wearing shirts. That was reassuring -- as long as I kept the house chilly enough, we’d be safe.
“I heard shouting just now. Is everything all right?”
“Okay, I guess. Pete was just going on about making sure Sushi’s people don’t fuck up their planet the way we’ve done. Don’t worry; everything’s still cool.”
George sat quietly for a moment watching the Mounties chasing hackers through some suburban streets in Calgary. Then he lowered his voice. “You know who these people are, don’t you? They’re the dedicated members.”
For a second I thought he meant the guys on the TV. “The what?”
“The dedicated members. Every club and organization has them. They’re the ones with no outside interests, no friends, nobody to sleep with and no life. They come to every goddamned meeting even if there’s four feet of snow on the ground, because they don’t have anything else to do. If you have one or two you can put them in charge of finances or the Web site or something, but a bunch of them can mean trouble. They start trying to show each other how dedicated they are, and the normal people eventually quit and leave the group controlled by fanatics. It happened to the model railroad club at SUNY while I was there.”
“George, what the hell are you babbling about?”
“Dedicated members are dangerous, Brian! All real evil in the world is created by dedicated people. Hitler was a dedicated member of the Nazi party and they put him in charge. Stalin was a dedicated member of the Communists. Mussolini started as a dedicated Fascist, but then he got a cute mistress and a sports car. Most normal people would rather watch TV or have sex or something instead of committing atrocities, but dedicated people will happily go start hacking up people with machetes or building germ bombs because they don’t have a life. These people you call your friends are dedicated, and if you aren’t as dedicated as they are they’ll kill you.” He looked desperately sincere, almost pleading.
“Even if that’s true, we’re still doing the right thing.”
“Locking an alien in Mrs. Venetucci’s bedroom and shooting a bunch of scientists is the right thing? How do you define the wrong thing?”
“The wrong thing is despoiling the planet! The wrong thing is wiping out whole species! The wrong thing is polluting and overpopulating and exploiting our environment!”
“And this is going to stop any of that? Get real. Nobody listens to a bunch of armed nutcases.”
“Pete’s got a plan. We’re going to go public and show everyone the truth about how NASA kidnapped Sushi and what they’re doing to him.”
“Brian, maybe if you read Scientific American instead of getting all your news from some hemp paper newsletter you’d know the alien came here willingly, and the scientists have been doing everything they can think of to take good care of him.”
“That’s all just propaganda.”
George looked like he was about to say something, then stopped himself and sighed. “Never mind, Brian. Forget I said anything. Turn off the TV, will you? I want to sleep now.”
*****
The next day was an exhausting one. Three of the fathers and the mother came to me as soon as it grew light and began to argue with me. They did not wish me to have hands, and they tried to talk and debate in order to change my mind.
It was entertaining at first. It had been long since I and another Singer, cunning and song-wise, faced one another in a duel of wits. Even with no audience it was good to debate with logic and poetry.
But after a few exchanges the argument grew dull. These humans could not appreciate a clever logical trap or a well-turned phrase. When they could not prove a point they simply repeated it. It was like a practice debate with my children when they were still virgins.
After the midday meal they resumed, and I found my patience dripping away.
“We’re trying to spare you and your world what humans have done to this planet,” said the father leader, loud-voiced and persistent, starting yet another round of the argument.
“Why? Your world is a very pleasant place. The woods have been cut back, fodder for beasts grows everywhere, and the rivers and streams flow abundantly. You have wide roads and great cities. I wish Seishaef was just like your Earth.”
“But don’t you see? All the wild places are gone! The whole environment is human-made now! We’re completely out of balance with our ecosphere. We’re cutting down forests and polluting rivers and overfishing the seas. Surely you don’t want that. Your people still live in harmony with your world. Giving that up is a huge mistake.”
“Before Marina Mother Pathfinder, slender and polite, invited me to come to your world, I lived in the valley of Fiashues, lush and well-watered. It is a good place, for the valley floor is rich in fodder. My own tribe has seven thousand browsers, fat and docile, and our clients have half that number. But the open lands below the valley are dry and windswept, with scanty fodder and many empty gullies. In places I have seen dunes of sand herded by the wind. There are many old riverbeds, and the middens of old settlements on the plains, and the oldest stories tell that once that land was home to a million browsers. But where browsers graze too long, the sands come. We did not need hands to turn the plains to desert.”
They spoke among themselves in whispers with the translator switched off, and then the father turned to me again. “Exactly! You’ve already managed to harm your environment by overgrazing. Imagine the damage you could do if there were more of you and you had tools.”
“Would it not be better for us to find out for ourselves if having hands will harm our world or help it?”
“But you won’t give them up, ever. You’ll get sucked into the cycle of consumption. You won’t be able to stop. You and your people will get too attached to your conveniences and luxuries to give them up, even if it means poisoning your world.”
“What you are saying is that you do not wish my people to choose for themselves because you are afraid we will not make the choice you wish us to make.”
There was a long pause. The other humans looked at the leader. He looked at me, and breathed two or three times before speaking. “We want you to make the right choice, that’s all.”
“I understand,” I said. After a moment I added, “I will tell Satoshi I no longer wish for hands.”
*****
Pete and the others came into the kitchen where I was eating some leftover seitan barbecue.
“It’s lying,” said Pete as soon as the door was closed.
“What is?” I asked.
Pete didn’t even look at me, but Jerry said, “Siusheas. He told us he’s willing to give up the whole hands project when we return him.”
“How do you know he’s lying?”
“Because I know!” said Pete. “They’ve already gotten to it. We’re too late. It wants hands just like ours so it and the rest of its species can start cutting down trees and polluting rivers and slaughtering animals. It’s lying to us.”
“Maybe if we talk to her some more,” said Inga. “Make her understand.”
“We’ll try again in the morning. But if we can’t change its mind, we’ll have to try something else.”
Jerry raised his eyebrows at that. “What else?”
“We -- one of us will have to shoot it.” Normally when Pete spoke he would stare you right in the eye, but this time he was staring off into the middle distance, like he was talking to himself and we weren’t there. We were all too stunned to say anything, and Pete went on quietly, almost thoughtfully. “It’s the only way. With the alien dead, the whole hands idea falls apart. It will be years before NASA brings back another Ophiuchian. Maybe by then enough people will be mobilized to stop the whole thing.”
“Pete, we didn’t break Siusheas out of the lab to kill him,” said Jerry. “That’s a really bad idea and I don’t want any part of it, understand?”
“Me neither,” I added. The whole thing was getting more and more messed up.
“We have a responsibility,” said Pete. “The Ophiuchians will destroy their world if we don’t stop this now.”
Jerry just looked at him. “I said what I feel.” He left the room.
“Um -- I think I’ve figured out a route we can use around the roadblocks,” I said. “We have to do a little off-road driving, but the ground’s pretty hard and I think the truck can make it.”
“Pete? Did you hear that?” asked Inga.
“Good. We’ll leave tomorrow, then. I’m going to get a good night’s sleep and then in the morning I’ll try to talk some sense into Siusheas.”
I shoved the box of seitan over to him and went to see George. He was dozing in the chair with the news on. One of the researchers Inga had shot was conscious again, and had issued a statement begging us not to harm Sushi. I shut off the screen and woke George.
“Good news -- we’re leaving tomorrow. I’ll make sure to cut you loose right before we go.” I untied him from the chair and helped him hobble into the bathroom. He turned on the faucet and shut the door.
“Stay behind, Brian,” he whispered. “Those friends of yours are just going to wind up getting gunned down by snipers after a nine-hour siege in some cheap motel. We can claim they took us both hostage.”
“They need my help to get past the roadblocks.”
“Screw the roadblocks! Draw a goddamned map. But don’t go with them. Please. I don’t want to wind up telling some reporter how you were a good boy and never got into trouble.”
“For one thing, you’d be lying.”
He smiled for the first time in days. “That’s true. So are you staying behind?”
“I guess so. It may take a little finesse, though. I’m not going to mention it until everyone’s ready to go.”
“Good idea. See you in the morning.” I tied him to his chair again and turned off the lights.
*****
I decided to escape that very night. The humans were acting like a group of mothers getting ready to pull down an old father and steal his wives.
Getting out was easy. The door of my chamber was flimsy, and I simply kicked it down with one blow from my good foot.
The large father, light-colored and silent, was in the hall outside. He reached for a weapon, but like all humans he moved slowly. I lunged forward in a killing strike, plunging my beak into his chest where humans keep their hearts. Two strides got me to the large room, where the mother pointed her weapon at me and cried out. I gave her a blow with my tail, knocking her across the room.
It took me two kicks to get the door to the outside open, and then I was free, loping through the darkness to the cover of the trees.
*****
When I heard the crashes and shouts my first thought was that the FBI had found us. I was almost relieved. But there were no gunshots, no cries of “Freeze!” and so I kicked off my sleeping bag and hurried out.
Dolph lay on the floor in the hall, a big triangular hole right in the center of his chest. There was blood everywhere. The door to Sushi’s room was broken into pieces.
Pete was in the living room with Inga and Jerry, pulling on his boots. “Brian, you stay here and get rid of anything they might use to trace us. We’re going to have to burn down the house. Pour gasoline everywhere but don’t light it until we get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“We have to kill Siusheas,” he said.
“I’m leaving,” said Jerry. “This is totally fucked. We’ve got to get out now.”
Pete’s answer was to jam the hard plastic muzzle of his gun into Jerry’s forehead. “I’m not going to argue. Either come with me or I’ll blow your fucking brains out.”
“Okay, okay! Keep cool. You made your point.”
“Good. Now let’s move.” They hurried out into the night.
As soon as they were out of the house I went to George’s room.
“What’s going on?” he asked sleepily.
“Sushi busted loose and killed Dolph. Pete and the others are going after him. We’ve got to get ready to burn down the house.”
“Like hell we are. Call the cops, right now.”
Outside I heard one shot, and then two more. For a second I thought of grabbing Dolph’s gun and going after them, pulling a Chow Yun Fat out in the woods. But the sound of another shot startled me out of that little daydream, and I pulled out my phone and hit the red 911 button.
“Please state your location and the nature of the emergency,” said the soothing computer voice.
I swallowed, and then said in a loud voice. “The alien is at the Venetucci residence on Bone Plain Road in Lansing. Hurry -- they’re trying to kill him.”
*****
Outside it was cold, but light enough for me to see. The sky on Earth glows faintly at night, and there is a bright white disk like a pale sun which shines on some nights. I made for the shadows of the trees and waited, standing very still. They had weapons, but even a human cannot kill what he cannot see, and they are almost blind at night. Being cursed in the foot has made me very good at hunting by waiting in ambush.
Three came out -- the lead father, the mother and the father who operated the vehicle. The leader looked around for a moment, then started in my direction. Either he was wise in battle-craft or just lucky, for the hard ground did not take prints and humans cannot track by scent.
They spread out as they came, with the leader and the mother on either side of the vehicle operator. The mother was coming almost directly for me. I waited, measuring the distance and tensing my neck and legs. When she was two strides away I struck, but she tried to duck aside and instead of splitting open her chest my beak only slashed her shoulder to the bone. She cried out and dropped her weapon. I finished her with a quick cut across the neck.
The leader fired his weapon twice, but did not harm me. The other father turned and ran away. The leader fired once at him but he kept on running and got among the bushes.
I left the mother bleeding to death and bounded back into shadow. The leader was approaching warily, his weapon at the ready. I moved behind a tree and folded my legs to lie upon the ground. He fired at something off to my right.
He stopped at the body of the mother, and nudged her with his foot, but she was dead already. He shouted something back toward the house, but when there was no reply he turned again with his weapon raised, and stood there listening. It was wise of him to stay out in the open where his weapon would let him kill me if I charged. We were stalemated, in a way -- he did not dare come among the trees where I might strike at him from hiding, and I was not about to leave my cover and charge his weapon.
We might have stayed there all night, but then came a sound like distant thunder, only instead of dying away it grew steadily louder until it was a great rhythmic pounding noise from the sky accompanied by winds and a chorus of keening. A shaft of light as bright as day shone down upon the human, and great voices spoke from the skies, and he put down his weapon and raised his hands in awe.
*****
I got off pretty easily -- the only crime they could really pin on me was accessory to kidnapping, because my lawyer helpfully pointed out that once I knew about the murders at CSIX I had good reason to fear for my own safety. The Feds were more interested in nailing Pete and his friends down in Maryland anyway. I wound up pleading guilty to conspiracy, and spent two years in a minimum-security McJail with a bunch of tax dodgers, cigarette smugglers and gun nuts before getting out on parole.
Because of the old “Son of Sam” law, I couldn’t profit from telling my story, but George turned into a media monster. He was everywhere -- talk shows, chats, zines, the works. He wrote a book about the whole business, which took a while because he wouldn’t hire a ghostwriter. The movie fell through because George started thinking he was Orson Welles and wanted to do the screenplay and direct and play himself and maybe even sing the theme song.
Pete’s family hired a Dream Team to defend him, but he insisted on taking the stand and blew the whole thing. He went on and on about how the human race was a blight on the Universe, and how we six had been right to kidnap Sushi to protect his people. At one point he tried to convince the jury that if he was guilty, that proved the rightness of his cause, and so he should be let off. They didn’t buy it.
Though I was involved in my own problems, what with the trial and all, I did keep up with the news about Sushi. It was interesting to see how the coverage of him changed. Before the raid he’d been kind of a comic character -- big, sweet and harmless, like a Sumo wrestler. During his captivity in Mrs. Venetucci’s house he was a victim icon. But afterwards, the tone was a bit more respectful. Even the tabloids quit calling him Sushi. I guess being able to kill a man with one blow of your beak is a good way to build a rep. There was actually a little public discussion about the whole hands project, which ended when Sushi made a little public statement to the effect that it was none of our goddamned business.
*****
Today I finished making a hand entirely on my own, using the one Satoshi gave me. The task was not easy, and took many days. The belt and cords are animal hide, and the gripper is made from wood and bone. It is not as good as the one Satoshi made me, but it works. When I return to Seishaef I will be able to make others, and show others how to make them.
As I tried the new hand, Ali Father Scientist asked me a question. “What will you do now that you have hands?”
“I do not know,” I told him. “Perhaps great things, perhaps terrible things, perhaps nothing at all. We shall see.”
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