Eschaton 01 The Other End of Time Page 12

All the captives were standing in a defensive clump now, even Rosaleen, watching warily. Pat Ad-cock sniffed. Yes, there was a queer odor, not entirely unpleasant-part of it like something from a spice rack, part something sour and distasteful. There was no doubt that it came from the extraterrestrials. She stared at them, realizing for the first time just how unhuman they were. The Dopey was not at all human in form-torso like a Thanksgiving turkey's, but a big one; its prissy little feline face at the level of Pat's chest. It wore clothing-a sort of pastel-mauve muumuu-and it carried a kind of muff made of coppery metal mesh. After it had signed an order to the Doc it put its hands back in the muff before Pat could get a good look at its fingers. There was something odd about them, but she wasn't sure what. Then, as it turned slightly, she saw that the muumuu had an opening in the back from which protruded a scaly, iridescent, spreading tail as colorful as a peacock's.

  Pat felt at least a hint of reassurance from the fact that the Dopey was wearing a garment. Clothing implied civilization; civilization implied some possible, however remote, hope that there could be some sort of meeting of the minds between them. The one they called the "Doc," on the other hand, was almost naked except for a sort of cache-sexe over where she supposed it kept its genitals. It was also very big. More than two meters tall, Pat guessed, at least twice as tall as the Dopey-of course, the snapshots in the message from space had given no indication of scale. And it was not in the least human. The word that crossed Pat's mind was "golem." The thing stood on short, bent legs, like the Greek version of a satyr, but no satyr had ever had six arms, two huge, thick ones at the top, four lesser ones spaced along its torso, and all tipped with sharptaloned paws. Now that she had a better look at the creature she saw that the white beard was not a real beard: the strands feathered out, more like fern fronds than any kind of animal hair. A cluster of the same sort of growth peeped out from the jockstrap garment.

  The Dopey worked its slack little mouth for a moment and spoke. "You stated that you required food. These are food, I think."

  That took Pat by surprise. "You speak English," she said. It sounded like an accusation; the alien didn't reply.

  "Stupid question," Martin reproved her. "He just did speak English. You, then. Will you tell us why we are here?"

  "You are here," the creature said, "so that you may be learned." Its voice was shrill and grating, as much like the cawing of a parrot as any human speech, but the words were clear enough.

  "Learned what?" the general demanded. The Dopey didn't reply. "For whom?" No answer for that, either, and Rosaleen tried her luck:

  "Can you say how we got here?"

  The Dopey considered. "Not at present. Perhaps later," it said at last. Pat thought it seemed to be waiting for something, but didn't pursue the thought; she had other things on her mind. Food, for one thing, and she wasn't the only one. Jimmy Lin was rooting around in the sparse collection: mints, apples, corn chips-she recognized the provenance; it was what they had had on their persons in the Clipper. It wasn't much. It was welcome, though; she selected an apple, carefully excavated a bruised spot with a thumbnail, then bit into it. It was as moist as she had hoped.

  Jimmy was less pleased. He was muttering dissatisfiedly to himself in Chinese, then looked up at the Dopey and snarled, "Wo zen mo nen chi zhe zhong dong xi!"

  The alien didn't miss a beat. "Ni bao li zhi you zhe xie, " it replied. Every human jaw dropped at once, and Pat cried:

  "You speak Chinese, too!"

  "Of course. Also Cuban-Floridian Spanish and Dr. Artzybachova's Galician dialect of Ukrainian, as well as a number of other human languages. This was necessary for my work on your orbiter. One moment."

  It turned to the wall. Almost at once the mirror bulged and admitted a pair of Docs, carrying a large metal object. They set it down and stood waiting. The Dopey said, "You now have all you need. Now you are simply to go about your affairs in the normal way. You may breed if you wish."

  That appeared to be all it had to say. It turned and left through the wall, the Docs silently trooping after. Dannerman sprang to the wall as soon as they were through, but, as before, the wall flowed like mercury around the departing aliens, and re-formed as solid as ever.

  Well," Dannerman said encouragingly, "at least now we have something to eat. Jimmy? What was that you and the BEM were talking about?"

  Lin was looking amused-at least an improvement, Pat thought, over his sullen withdrawal of before. "I was just complaining about the food. I didn't expect an answer, but then he said-in perfectly good Mandarin-that it was all there was among our possessions. But what about the other thing he said, Pat? Are you ready to start doing the breeding bit?"

  She said simply, "Shut up." She was watching Rosaleen Artzybachova, who was examining the metal object the Docs had carried in. It seemed to be a rectangular, fauceted tank, with pipes dangling from it that led nowhere. Rosaleen cupped one hand and held it under the faucet; when she twisted the lever, water came out. She sipped it and nodded.

  "I think it's the portable-water recycler from Starlab," she reported. "It appears there is some water in the tank, and it tastes all right. However, I suggest we use it carefully. There's nothing here to replenish it; in Starlab it had a condenser to collect moisture from the air and a still for wastewater from the toilets but, as you can see, those have been disconnected and left behind."

  "And, of course, we don't even have regular toilets anyway," Jimmy smirked. Pat scowled at him. But that was not all bad, she thought; she was not enthusiastic about drinking water that had come from a toilet, no matter how meticulously it was treated and distilled. But when she said as much, Dannerman laughed.

  "And where do you think that water came from in the first place? Anyway, it looks like they're going to take care of us. Maybe the Seven Ugly Dwarfs aren't so bad after all."

  "But they are still the ones the broadcast warned us against," Rosaleen reminded him, and no one had any answer for that.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Pat

  Of all the things Pat Adcock missed, the ones she would least have expected were clocks. They had none. There wasn't any day or night in their cell; the white glow came always unvarying from the ceiling. She felt time dragging for her, with nothing to do, but the only clues the prisoners had to measure how much of it was passing were their own internal ones-the number of times they (unenthusiastically) ate some of the scraps the Dopey had given them, or slept (uncomfortably stretched on the bare cell floor), or, when the remorseless demands of their metabolisms made it necessary, did their best to come somewhere near the impossible wish to urinate and move their bowels in private.

  It was not a kind of existence Pat Adcock had ever expected for herself. Not Patrice Dannerman Ely Metcalf Adcock, who had never in her life gone hungry, except in the occasional struggle to get rid of a few extra pounds, who had, from tiniest childhood, always lived a life of privileged security-well, reasonable security, if you didn't count the natural hazards everyone faced from street violence or random terrorist acts. Pat was accustomed to being a person of position. She was entitled to give orders to nearly two hundred people, as the operating head of a reasonably prestigious scientific enterprise. She was also used to all the perquisites that went with being more or less rich.

  What Pat Adcock was used to was being an organism efficiently adapted to the ecological niche she occupied. She had all the skills necessary for that life; knew how to juggle budgets even in runaway inflation; how to discourage a date who wanted more intimacy than she cared to give-and how to motivate one who didn't; how to find a clean and comfortable ladies' room at need, wherever she was; how much to tip a headwaiter and when it was best just to give him a smile; how to-

  Well, how to live, in the particular world she was designed to live in.

  But not in this new world, which seemed to call for skills she didn't have and didn't know how to acquire. So nothing in Pat's previous life had prepared her for the present confinement and privation, not to ment
ion the humiliating aspects of their captivity. Naked, weaponless, surrounded by the mirrored walls- wherever she looked six Pats, or sixty times six Pats, looked back at her, dwindling as the reflections became more distant. They were penned like abandoned dogs in an animal shelter, waiting to be adopted-or to be put to death. Nor did they have any more control than a stray dog over their future. They could tell time only by events. Only in their case the events weren't inspections by possible new owners, they were occasions like the time when they got the food from Starlab, and the time when they were at last given back their clothes, and the frightening time when they killed the Dopey.

  No circumstances were ever so bad that a little human effort couldn't make them worse. As their tempers grew short they became quarrelsome. Pat snapped at Martin Delasquez for snoring, Dannerman and Rosie Artzybachova withdrew from the others, each busy at some not discussed thoughts of their own, while Martin and Jimmy Lin argued fiercely over whether the lack of blankets to sleep on was worse than the lacks in their limited larder, and whether mints, apples and corn chips represented a diet they could survive on. For Pat, who was trying to force herself to down one more meal of that sort of trash, it was the last straw. "Oh, shut up, you two, for God's sake. Dan, what's the matter with everybody?"

  It was a rhetorical question, but she could see him making the effort to give her an answer. "It's prisoner neurosis," he said. "You see a lot of it in jails; that's why you have so many murders in prisons. Actually, it's the policeman's best friend, because when people are hiding out from the cops, after a while they just can't stand each other. That's when they do something foolish and get caught."

  Jimmy was listening with a half smile. "You know all about that, don't you, Dannerman?" he said.

  Dan gave him an opaque look. "It's common knowledge. Psych 101, or don't they teach that in Chinese colleges?"

  Lin met him stare for stare, then shrugged. "Actually, I got my bachelor's at the University of Hawaii," he said, and dropped the subject. Pat frowned, chopping a bruised part out of the apple she had just picked up; there was something going on between the two of them, but she couldn't guess what. Jimmy was being his usual irritating self, of course, but Dannerman-well, what was Dannerman up to, exactly? He prowled their cell for hours at a time, then sat silently, seeming to be trying to work something out, though she couldn't imagine what.

  Rosaleen was talking to her. "Do you notice anything about the apples?"

  Pat looked at the fruit, puzzled. "Well, I think that's the second or third I've had with a bruise in the same spot."

  "Really," Rosaleen said thoughtfully. "That I hadn't noticed. What I was talking about was how many are there. I never packed that many."

  "And actually I only had one package of corn chips," Pat said.

  "I don't understand. Are they raiding a supermarket somewhere?"

  "If they are, they could give us a little more variety," Martin said sourly.

  Dannerman speculated, "Maybe they figure that's all we need, since that was all they found on us."

  "Or maybe they have some way of multiplying the food- you know, loaves and fishes," Rosaleen said. "But they could find something better to multiply. There's stored food in Star-lab. If Dopey-" She hesitated before she said it, but they did need a name for the creature. "If Dopey can bring the potable water still from the orbiter he can bring us some of the food, too."

  "Or," Jimmy Lin said, "he could bring us a bed, maybe one of those four-posters with curtains that come down? So we could get on with that breeding he was talking about?"

  Pat gave him a freezing look. It was nice that Jimmy seemed to be coming out of his funk, but she didn't want him starting anything that could not be properly finished. As a matter of fact, the subject had been on her mind from time to time. This enforced intimacy was stimulating glands that she didn't really want stimulated just then. She thought almost wistfully of ex-husband Ferdie Adcock-not of that son of a bitch of another ex-husband, Jerry Metcalf, who had been a disappointment in all areas, including the bed. Ferdie, on the other hand, had been a truly rewarding lover, in almost every way a fine choice for a mate… if only she had been able to overlook his unfortunate habit of keeping his amatory skills current by constant practice-on two of their maids, on the assistant cook, on an occasional picked-up professional and, most troublesome of all, on several of her (formerly) best friends.

  But Ferdie was far in the past and even farther away in space.

  As to the nearer candidates-well, she thought, simply as a speculation; there was no intention to do anything about it, of course-there was General Delasquez. Not counting the flab, he was a powerfully proportioned man, though too bossy in his disposition to be a really first-rate choice. Jimmy Lin himself? Yes, she admitted to herself, under some circumstances the Chinanaut might have been a definite possibility. Even on Earth it had once in a while crossed her mind to wonder just how much of the know-how of Jimmy Lin's great-great he might have inherited. Of course, there were problems with Jimmy, too, one of the most annoying of them being the prospect of becoming just one more scalp on his boastfully long list. That wasn't necessarily a total disqualification. Pat Adcock was not a jealous woman, except with husbands. In the case of a casual lover that sort of thing might have been bearable-under normal conditions. However, under normal conditions they wouldn't be stuck with an audience of three interested onlookers while they got it on.

  Which left only one-still purely theoretical-contender. Dan.

  Actually, she conceded to herself, watching Dannerman move about the enclosure out of the corner of her eye, there wasn't really much wrong with her cousin, if you overlooked his habit of thinking private thoughts he didn't choose to share with anyone. Dan wasn't a bad-looking man. He wasn't a stranger, either. They had been pretty close at one time, and if they hadn't gone off to separate schools the two of them might sooner or later have decided to become a lot closer. Dan was a definite possibility, she thought-still purely theoretically, of course.

  But, under the circumstances, she was determined that it had to be theoretical. Without privacy, making love with him or with anyone at all was simply out of the question-at the moment, anyway, she added to herself… and then noticed Jimmy Lin's knowing grin as he watched her covertly eyeing Danner-man.

  They kept making small, but inexplicable, discoveries about their cell. Rosaleen pointed out a curious thing about the floor. It not only soaked up and removed their biological wastes, it did the same for trash of all kinds- their apple cores, for instance. Throw them on the floor, and an hour or so later they were gone. Yet the floor was selective about what it caused to disappear. Their food supplies were scattered on the floor, for lack of any better place to put them, and they were never touched. "It discriminates," the old lady said, sounding pleased-well, the cell was, after all, an interesting machine. "Also we must have used all the water the tank could hold by now, but if you notice it's not empty. Somehow the water is being replenished."

  "Have you noticed that we don't stink very much, either?" Jimmy Lin put in. That was also true, Pat realized. Add the open "toilet" to the fact that bathing was impossible, and the air of their cell should have been pretty ripe. It wasn't. Their air was constantly being changed. The shadowless light that came from the ceiling was less of a puzzle-even on Earth there were such wall installations that glowed in much the same way-but the greater mystery of the walls resisted all explanation. "Talk about making money from alien technology," Martin said bitterly. "Do you have any idea what that kind of hardware would be worth for prisons? Let the guards walk in and out, but keep the convicts secure?"

  Rosaleen, doing leg lifts with her hands pressed against the wall in lieu of a barre, gave him a look. "It would be worth a great deal for many things far more useful than prisons, actually."

  Jimmy Lin laughed. "You have something against prisons, Rosie?"

  "Yes," she said. "Now more than ever, but always. We had enough experience of prisons in Ukraine. My mother'
s uncle was taken away to one when he was fourteen years old; he didn't come back until he was sixty-two, and dying. Also my mother's father, my grandfather, who died there. We learned much about prisons in my family from my great-uncle, because he had many stories to tell."

  "Did he have any good advice to give?"

  "About escaping? No. About how to survive, yes; my great-uncle said the important thing was to go on doing what you should be doing if you were free-as much as you possibly can, that is. Some things would naturally be impossible."

  Pat made the connection. "That's why you do your exercises every day?"

  Rosaleen hesitated. "That is one reason, yes. The other reason- Well, that is not important. What is important is to keep a sense of purpose. In my great-uncle's case he constantly continued his education; he had been taken right out of school when they arrested him. He organized classes with the other prisoners and at night, instead of sleeping, they taught each other what they knew. Before he died he could speak French, German, Georgian, some English and Japanese and even a little bit of Hebrew. He was pretty nearly in Dopey's class as a linguist, almost, and that wasn't all. He could recite poetry for hours-Mandelstam, Okujawa, Shakespeare, Petrarch-and he knew the names of all the kings of England and France, in order. And much more. But he didn't spend much time thinking about escaping. There would have been no point in running away from the camps, you see, when the whole country was a prison."

  "Much like our own situation," Jimmy Lin said sourly; and no one had anything to say to that.

  When Dopey came again the three men were sleeping restlessly on one side of the cage, and Rosaleen was teaching Pat tai chi. They were trying to be as quiet as possible, but when Pat saw one of the wall panels begin to cloud she called out at once. By the time Dopey was inside the men were getting up, bleary-eyed but curious.

  "You asked for the food from Starlab," Dopey said. "Also blankets so that you may sleep in more comfort." The parade of Docs that followed him began setting down racks and cases of objects.